Notices by Luis Villa (luis_in_brief@social.coop), page 7

@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.

@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.

@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.)

@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.

@ehashman @geofft @glyph @eb which isn’t to diminish the very, very real and wide-spread problems in C-land, especially (as you pointed out somewhere) in build tools. That’s a problem we’ve always wanted to tackle but have needed more growth first :/

@ehashman @geofft @glyph @eb that's... not our experience. Plenty of very trackable and nevertheless completely financially unsupported and problematically maintained packages in all the modern stacks.

@eb @benwis @brainwane @glyph @geofft @diazona @djc Thanks! admittedly on a day like today, mostly I'm focused on how many projects we can't yet cover.

So, yeah, send people our way!

@eb @benwis @brainwane @glyph @geofft @diazona @djc you’re thinking of Back Your Stack, probably.

On a more sustainable (read: commercial) basis, I co-founded https://tidelift.com to do exactly this.

@benwis @brainwane we do, though sadly not a ton of customer demand yet so not a ton of money going into that ecosystem yet.

I feel like a spammer for showing up so many places in the past 24 hours and saying “yo, the thing you say no one has built: we’ve built it, it’s right here, we’re paying maintainers every month”.

Tidelift isn’t perfect but it is real and targeting exactly these kinds of problems.

https://social.coop/@luis_in_brief/112185736347503476

This text is not something we wrote in a rush this morning to meet the moment. We've had variations on this on our site from day 1. I believed it then and I believe it now.

@geofft @glyph @eb (sobs in Tidelift)

@glyph @geofft @diazona @eb “Famous maintainers get hired more than critical maintainers.” Owwwwwwww.

@geofft @diazona @glyph @eb yup. Or they get hired with the promise that they’ll get 20% time to work on it, and that goes away for reasons (sometimes good, sometimes bad), or…. Etc etc

@diazona @geofft @glyph @eb I increasingly wonder if we aren’t due for some “defragging” of a lot of core infra, with many projects pooled together, maintained, and funded more collectively, like Ruby Together.

@diazona @geofft @glyph @eb there’s a lot of precedent for hiring maintainers of top-level programs whose brand (for lack of a better term) has reached the level of awareness of a C-level with a hiring budget. Collectively pooling money to help the projects C-levels have never heard of… has a much weaker track record. We’ve been trying to tackle it at Tidelift for a while and suffice to say I’ve definitely had a lot of “but it can’t happen to me” conversations.

I have been trying to tell CTOs for years that the time to give money to the projects in the middle of their stack that they’ve never heard of is *before* a crisis happens. But human nature being what it is, that’s a very hard sell.
https://mastodon.social/@glyph/112180922900094371

@neil I have bad news for you about buying a taxi and making it an office

@ldodds @edsu @adamgreenfield @cfiesler (I don’t think you’re completely wrong, to be clear; to the extent OSM does invitationality well, that is part of why it has survived at all despite often having very high barriers to entry. But I haven’t burned through all my remaining store of snark from the other place yet…)

@ldodds @edsu @adamgreenfield @cfiesler other than it being completely undiscoverable and technically undecipherable, yes ;)