cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/24404539
If we combine these two sets of data^1 we obtain a fascinating result^2.
- 46% of all code out there, in every app, is maintained by hobbyists
- 13,8% is maintained by “I sometimes get a bit of pocket money for my code”
- 40% of all code out there is maintained by an industry-paid person
So, nearly 60% of all code being actively shipped in an app or product in the wild is hobbyist-maintained open-source.
See also this discussion on lobste.rs on the economics of the average (as in median) open source project:
https://lobste.rs/s/ftwkvo/hobbyist_maintainer_economic_gravity
To sum up, apparently most open source projects are small, and aren’t funded as paid work. And they matter because of their number, which has the effect that they make up a large part of all software in use.
I think the OP’s analysis might have made a bit of a jump from overall levels of hobbyist maintainers to what percentage of shipping code is maintained by people in their spare time.
While the experiences of OpenSSL and xz should certainly drive us find better ways of funding underlying infrastructure you do see a higher participation rates of paid maintainers where the returns are more obvious. The silicon vendors get involved in the kernel because it’s in their underlying interests to do so - and the kernel benefits as a result.
I maintain a couple of hobbyist packages on my spare time but it will never be a funded gig because comparatively fewer people use them compared to DAYJOB’s project which can make a difference to companies bottom lines.
Well, hobbyist projects are surely not the only pillar of the open source systems, and big projects like the Linux kernel matter immensely, too. But the article author does not deny that. He makes a point that the hobbyist projects are very important, too. Without them, there would be very little desktop software. I’d guess that much of KDE is hobbyist-powered.
And apart from that, financial support for projects important for infrastructure is a popular talking point. But I don’t see that happen much. Where are the SW engineering jobs for maintainers and contributors of real time Linux, messaging middleware, things like Ceph and file systems, FLOSS browsers, conference software, and so on? And now there are calls that the FLOSS community should care for security in infrastructure and industrial applications. If this were serious, one could simply pay the people who already do that (and massively hire more of them).
Your hunch is correct, they are, because the differentiator between open source and walled garden projects is freedom, and freedom will spontaneously generate projects based on an unfulfilled need. A paid market by itself will not.
In my early days of programming (late 80s), I was copying code from books and magazines. Then came windows and mac, and these were far less friendly to devs, and became more and more so.
Most of these tools were born of need and want, not because any infrastructure existed to pay them. Look at the list of apps in frdroid; most are very obviously solving a problem unique to the dev.
And there is one more thing to account for: for all the apps and scripts you see in a public code repo, there are many times more than that living on someone’s HDD that will never see the public eye.
The point you’ve ignored in your article is that this is simply the split free market creates. We’ve had this issue since the invention of transmissible ideas.