Honestly the person who wrote this post is absolutely out of touch with reality.
FOSS , except for a few technology, will never be sustainable .
Why ?
- Because entreprises prefer to pay Billions to proprietary products and have someone that can be held accountable for failure.
- Because entreprises executives consider that Open Source = You don’t have to pay anything.
- Because Oracle , IBM , Microsoft have spent the last decades telling entreprises executives that FOSS « does not scale » and is « very insecure » while they are actually just copying stuff from open source and rebranding it as their own.
FOSS will never ever be sustainable because the industry has been shaped around proprietary ecosystems by companies who are now worth hundreds of Billions of dollars.
Outside of few startups very few companies make donations to FOSS projects to keep them running.
Maybe it’s juste me but I’m fairly confident that a blog post and a Google Form won’t fix anything in the industry.
On the other hand , Microsoft , IBM advocating their customers to fund open sources instead of buying proprietary products while they are selling consulting services would fix the entire problem.
Will this ever happen ? It won’t. Licencing bring billions in revenue to these companies it would be absolute suicide.
When you say sustainable, do you mean, is it possible to train another generation of engineers to take over the maintenance and development of the software?
I wonder about software that has a secondary or supporting role in the ecosystem. Working on them does not provide the level of career opportunities that seem to be available from working on core distributed computing or machine learning platforms. Apparently the default is that they will be abandoned in place.
FOSS , except for a few technology, will never be sustainable .
Why ?
- Because entreprises prefer to pay Billions to proprietary products and have someone that can be held accountable for failure.
- Because entreprises executives consider that Open Source = You don’t have to pay anything.
- Because Oracle , IBM , Microsoft have spent the last decades telling entreprises executives that FOSS « does not scale » and is « very insecure » while they are actually just copying stuff from open source and rebranding it as their own.
FOSS will never ever be sustainable because the industry has been shaped around proprietary ecosystems by companies who are now worth hundreds of Billions of dollars.
Outside of few startups very few companies make donations to FOSS projects to keep them running.
Maybe it’s juste me but I’m fairly confident that a blog post and a Google Form won’t fix anything in the industry.
On the other hand , Microsoft , IBM advocating their customers to fund open sources instead of buying proprietary products while they are selling consulting services would fix the entire problem.
Will this ever happen ? It won’t. Licencing bring billions in revenue to these companies it would be absolute suicide.