A few links about the “open-source surplus”

2024-08-29

First is a post from Baldur Bjarnason:

which contains links to these posts from Tara Tarakiyee and Ben Werdmuller:

Baldur's worry is that there was a perfect storm of surpluses that led to the deep investment in and use of open-source software over the last couple of decades—and that we're entering a period where all of these surpluses are decreasing. In his mind, the _best_ outcome is that there is just less investment in OSS moving forward; whereas the _worst_ outcome would be that reduction investment combined with a decrease in trust causing the entire system to collapse.

Like many have recently, Tara touches on monetary investment and sustainability for open-source developers and maintainers. Ben expands on that and delivers what I think is the key line:

People won't pay for software that they don't need to pay for.

This echoes the Adam Jacob thread from earlier this week, which includes the line:

Under no circumstances give your product away for $0.

Ben surmises that open core might be the only feasible solution.