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   Jenniferplusplus (jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 05-Apr-2024 23:13:55 JST Jenniferplusplus

   Are we still talking about supporting open source maintainers? I hope so, because I wrote about a more holistic solution than giving everyone a patreon or whatever.

   https://jenniferplusplus.com/the-free-software-commons/

   • Matthew Lyon and Joe Ortiz repeated this.
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     Jenniferplusplus (jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io)'s status on Saturday, 06-Apr-2024 00:41:53 JST Jenniferplusplus

     in reply to

     The toot length version goes like this

     🌸 Open source is a public, common resource. Anyone can contribute, and everyone benefits
     🌸 That makes it a "commons", or perhaps many commons
     🌸 Commons need long term organized care to sustain them. That's called governance
     🌸 The governance of the open source commons has been neglected for a long time, and that burden falls on maintainers
     🌸 What if we didn't do that?

     https://jenniferplusplus.com/the-free-software-commons/

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     Luis Villa (luis_in_brief@social.coop)'s status on Monday, 08-Apr-2024 14:06:48 JST Luis Villa

     in reply to

     @jenniferplusplus I have a lot of thoughts I can’t get out this morning, because time, but the tldr is that Ostromian commons are communally maintained, but the median FOSS project is maintained by one person. So, yes, I’m all for working more on commons governance[1], but it is only tangentially relevant for most open source.

     [1] For large projects you can’t pay anyone until the commons governance problems are solved, which is part of why we don’t do big projects very much at Tidelift.

     DCent likes this.
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     Luis Villa (luis_in_brief@social.coop)'s status on Monday, 08-Apr-2024 14:07:07 JST Luis Villa

     in reply to

     @jenniferplusplus (loooooots of non-toot length nuance here, to be clear; eg you can conceptualize all of open as several layers of nested/polycentric commons, and we should think a lot harder about treating eg language ecosystems as commons both for governance and economic purposes, especially in the face of AI harvesting of code. But fundamentally individual packages with solo maintainers are difficult to shoehorn into the commons framework.)

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     Jenniferplusplus (jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io)'s status on Monday, 08-Apr-2024 14:08:57 JST Jenniferplusplus

     in reply to

     • Luis Villa

     @luis_in_brief Probably. My view is not that this is something that overburdened solo maintainer owes to everyone else. It's that this is something everyone else* owes** to them, and that service has been lacking. Which is an important part of why they're so overburdened in the first place.

     *for some definition of everyone
     **not owes exactly, but toot's are only so long

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     Luis Villa (luis_in_brief@social.coop)'s status on Monday, 08-Apr-2024 14:08:58 JST Luis Villa

     in reply to

     @jenniferplusplus But I am about to jump into four hours of meetings and then two weeks of travel, so want to stress that we’re probably about 95% agreed here.

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     Luis Villa (luis_in_brief@social.coop)'s status on Monday, 08-Apr-2024 14:08:59 JST Luis Villa

     in reply to

     @jenniferplusplus I’m saying that one person, on their own, is a really ill fit for the entire notion of governance and commons, especially when they’re already struggling for time. The richness of the Ostromian commons model comes in part from the interhuman interactions; having those commitments to a void, or to hypothetical future participants, is a lot to ask in practice.

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     Jenniferplusplus (jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io)'s status on Monday, 08-Apr-2024 14:09:00 JST Jenniferplusplus

     in reply to

     • Luis Villa

     @luis_in_brief That is interesting, yes. And you're right that a solo project may not constitute it's own commons. But it very well could be part of one or more of those myriad layered commons.

     You seem to be saying that the lack of existing governance excludes these things from a commons framework. I'm saying that makes them a nascent and vulnerable commons that needs to figure out some governance.

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     Luis Villa (luis_in_brief@social.coop)'s status on Monday, 08-Apr-2024 14:09:01 JST Luis Villa

     in reply to

     @jenniferplusplus doesn’t directly touch on your post but you might find this interesting https://blog.tidelift.com/resilient-open-commons

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     Marco 🌳 Zocca (ocramz@sigmoid.social)'s status on Monday, 08-Apr-2024 14:15:37 JST Marco 🌳 Zocca

     in reply to

     • Luis Villa

     @jenniferplusplus @luis_in_brief I think that as soon as a "solo" OSS project is depended upon by at least another project, that's a commons. And this can be measured and socialized in turn.

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     DCent (dcent@gnusocial.net)'s status on Monday, 08-Apr-2024 14:18:03 JST DCent

     in reply to

     • Alexandre Oliva
     • Co-op Cloud
     • jon ⚝
     • Marco 🌳 Zocca
     @coopcloud @yala @jenniferplusplus @lxo
     
     > as soon as a "solo" OSS project is depended upon by at least another project, that's a commons
     
     I would say its commons when its licensed GPLv3 for example.
     
     The extent to which it is an asset to the commons is another story and I think this is part of what Jennifer was alluding to wrt management and governance.
     
     Thanks Jennifer for writing that. Hopefully this message reaches you all well as I've not been online for a while and forgot the tricks to use gnusocial. Agree with what you wrote, just throwing money at a problem like this is a short term fix and in the long-term is likely very detrimental.
     
     I have more to write about this but too busy right now, I'll try to check back later.