When people wonder why I wrote https://www.softwaremaxims.com/blog/open-source-hobbyists-turf and why I am angry...

I just received the OpenSource Summit schedule from a LF newsletter.

And it is fascinating how much it can be all stuff from Alpha Centauri that have nothing to do with the realities of FOSS.

Like, I know for who it is. I get it. But also, why do you happily pay to be misinformed if you are in a decision making position?

I mean, I know why. I get it. But still, this is such a waste of money and time that is precious for everyone.

@Di4na I just read the linked blog post, and while it's generally spot on, I disagree with some of the logical reasoning it contains. I am genuinely interested in having the answer to the question "How much of FOSS from proprietary code bases is maintained by unpaid developers?" but as far as I am aware, we still have no idea. This is not something that we can derive from data on how many FOSS maintainers are unpaid and how much FOSS there is in proprietary code bases, because most of the *critical* subset of FOSS could still be maintained by paid maintainers (although we at least know from anecdotal evidence that this is not always the case). So if anyone has references that could help answer this question more accurately, I'd be really eager to read them.

@Zimm_i48 I mean, we know foss is one person, thanks to @joshbressers , which doesn't support the hypothesis you point.

We know a lot of library have no maintainer active or known from @andrewnez .

And we know popularity is not correlaged in any way with these 2 data point. Sooo all the evidence point toward no link between paid maintainership and use in codebases.

I have argued we could probably do the analysis from some SBOM and lockfiles of proprietary codebases, but idk who want to do that.

People could pay me to do it, I have offered.