Here I am for the millionth time, on HN, reminding everyone of an amazing gift: 2016 report by Nadia Asparouhova - "Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure"[1] - Please do take the time to read and share it, it's been almost 10 years since Nadia published this work with the hope of inspiring some change outside of the OSS world, I'd suggest we need her words now more than ever. Thank you!
https://www.fordfoundation.org/work/learning/research-report...
This is super important, and critical reading for anyone commenting on OSS financing.
I've been a product management lead for 2 commercial open-core companies and people drastically overestimate:
- How much code the community contributes (in both cases, >95% of all code was written by employees hired by the commercial company) - How few commercial resources are needed to support the community (running forums, answering GitHub tickets, etc) - How much financial support is actually forthcoming when there's not some "locked commercial features"
As the paper points out, many of these widely used commercial projects receive a few hundred thousand dollars at most in donations (often much less) but need to employ more developers than that financing can support to maintain a baseline capability to address basic bug fixes (including security fixes) once they become "popular enough" to be known by the masses.
I suspect this is because open-core companies are often just 1 rugpull away from being not open at all. Open-core just means if I have some small bug, I might PR to fix it if it's not too hard for me. I am absolutely not doing free work for that company.
Meanwhile, I would consider doing actual work for software projects that were just a couple people and a mission.
With "overestimate how few resources are needed" do you mean underestimate the amount of needed resources?
>> overestimate how few resources are needed
Immediately think of Arrested Development: "It’s one banana, Michael. What could it cost, $10?"
Thanks for sharing.
For those that are pressed for time, there is a good Executive Summary on page 8 of the linked PDF report:
https://www.fordfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/ro...
Thanks for sharing this! Do you have an idea where I can get the .epub version? The button on the page doesn't seem to do anything?