"Who pays the toolmakers?" by Nadia Eghbal https://medium.com/@nayafia/who-pays-the-toolmakers-70f13d16c17c
Food for thought on open-source sustainability and app dev sustainability.
Also if you haven't read Nadia Eghbal's "Roads and Bridges," it's a masterpiece on analyzing open-source communities and economics: https://www.fordfoundation.org/library/reports-and-studies/roads-and-bridges-the-unseen-labor-behind-our-digital-infrastructure/
I'm particularly struck by this quote:
'Successful open source developers get "acquihired" by a company who values their reputation and skills, which has the perverse effect of making them less noisy about how to make a living off of open source. Oftentimes, they slow or stop working on the projects that made them popular in the first place.'
As someone who recently burned out a bit on open-source and stopped contributing so much, I have to ask myself how much this describes me. 😕
Also I will say I've met some exceptions to the rule. One OSS contributor on my team (don't want to name names, but they're well-known) truly seems to do OSS for the love of it. They don't really take breaks from GitHub AFAICT. And yet they also seem to have a healthy work-life balance, with a family, a home, a dog, hobbies, etc. Then again OSS is also a big part of their actual 9-to-5, which probably helps.
@nolan The flipside is just as gross, where an opensource contributor does good work relevant to someone's company and they would pay someone to do that work but they don't hire that person because they're already doing it wherever they are at no cost. I've seen it happen before, I do not know what came of the strategy, but I hope it wasn't good.
@c25l I've overheard at least one OSS team here say, "Hey, so-and-so has been really contributing a lot. Maybe we should put out an offer to them?" So it does happen both ways. 😊 But yeah, lots of "why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free" attitudes out there.
@nolan I have many feels on this, as you might imagine. I expect to talk about this at ApacheCon 2018 in September during my diversity and inclusiveness talk.
BTW if you'd like to be interviewed as prep for my talk on that I'd love to bend your ear for an hour this summer :)
@wohali Sure thing, happy to. :) Really loved your "Evolve or Perish" talk BTW; wish I could make the 2018 ApacheCon to see your next talk!
@nolan Montreal is LOVELY in September. And my talk is in the last slot on the last day...I need people to come! :)
<insert grump about how much the ASF clearly values diversity, inclusivity and communities>
I don't believe I was contributing to open source purely for resume-padding, but I have to admit there was some amount of "chasing social-media points." I often looked forward to the first tweet after publishing a new project more than the project itself.
After taking a year "off" though, I really have to look back and ask how many of my projects made a lasting contribution. Plenty are still useful, but some were more interesting as temporary experiments. Maybe I chased too many of the latter.