Problems with the "restaurant-style" sustainability

Posted Mar 21, 2019 14:50 UTC (Thu) by dunlapg (guest, #57764)
Parent article: Defining "sustainable" for an open-source project

"Restaurant-style" sustainability is great when it works, but there are a couple of issues I see at the moment with "restaurant-style" sustainability.

First, there's sometimes a fairness issue. Imagine you and your small band of people were the ones who wrote docker / kubernetes / mongodb, and $BIGCORP came along, sold it in a cloud offering, made billions of dollars and didn't pay you a penny. I mean, sure, at some level you're making the world a better place; but someone else is getting quite rich from your effort.

Secondly, there's the on-ramp: How do we get developers onto a "restaurant-style" payroll? At the moment it seems like someone either starts a project in their free time and slowly starts accepting more donations, or makes a "leap" to code full-time for a period, hoping that eventually it will be profitable. They're probably not in a position to do market research to determine whether it will or won't be; and they may not be in a position to invest money and time and career in the risk that it won't be. Working for someone else externalizes those risks. If we really want to see a world full of individuals / small organizations doing their little bit of sustainable open-source, we need a way to make that on-ramp easier and less risky.

Finally, there's factionalization (<- wrong word; can't think of the right one). I'd be happy to pay $50/month to someone to make sure that all the FOSS software I used kept running, and invest in new projects and new development. But I've got 3000 Debian packages installed on my dev box at work; there's no way I'm going to try to figure out how to donate money individually to all of the people or projects that maintain that software. Inkscape or phpMyAdmin are the kinds of projects that stand out enough to their users to attract a critical mass of monetary contributions; but what about all the tiny libraries or tools in there?

Problems with the "restaurant-style" sustainability

Posted Mar 21, 2019 18:28 UTC (Thu) by gfernandes (subscriber, #119910) [Link]

A docker, or a Kubernetes with the right license (GPLv2+) will always attract improvements back into it. These components need to be distributed (for various reasons, including prototyping on-prem) and therefore, can't escape the GPL terms.

So you'll inevitably also be able to roll your own, and $BIGCORP would necessarily have to sell a service (not a product).

With regards to the on-ramp, it's very project dependent, I guess. And FLOSS always starts with "scratching an itch". So market research is irrelevant. And time usually tells whether the itch has wider appeal or not.

Finally, factionalisation is simply the same as "standing on the shoulders of giants".

No project does everything from scratch. Almost all software projects require intensive work up front, with the intensity and frequency going down quite rapidly after a certain level of function is reached.

Funding therefore may not be able to follow that pattern anyway. Who will fund $MYFANTASTICNEWVIDEOEDITOR before it exists?
I will have to show a functional *and reasonably superior* Video Editor _before_ I can expect any funding at all. We're back to scratching itches!

Bottom line: sustainability is certainly achievable (as others have pointed out). We wouldn't be here if not.