Note: I deleted >1000 words and decided to post a summary instead.
Jacob Kaplan Moss slacked me his article today because he knew I’d like it, and we have both had ongoing conversations for years about open-source Funding. It’s worth reading.
I mistakenly submitted the article to the orange website because I assumed someone else already had it. Oops.
I support funding open-source projects. We are trillions of dollars away from providing enough Funding for open-source software before I have the patience to set through any debates about the right or wrong way to fund them. Let’s make a few decades of overfunding mistakes first and then write about how to fix them after there’s enough money flowing to make up for three decades of nothing.
No one owns the term open source despite the good intentions of organizations that were formed to market open source to businesses. While the foundations focused their energies on infighting, shaming companies founded on open source projects, fundraising to big tech companies, and refusing to address developer’s real needs, developers kept writing and releasing open source projects, and we all moved on.
I started releasing and licensing projects as GPL in the 90s, MIT in the 00s, BSD in the 10s, and now I lean more towards PolyForm and the licenses that push back against Cloud companies. As an open-source developer, I have rights and never asked for anything outside of attribution. The organizations that claim to understand what open source is lost their way and lost their right to assert that they know and understand what open source software is and means.
To wrap this up, because it was a long week, we need less shaming and more funding for open source projects and their maintainers.
