An incredible piece about OSS sustainability

[Fernando Perez]

Hi all,

a few days ago, Nadia Eghbal published an incredible study about the challenges in open source sustainability.  It's a detailed, comprehensive and long report on the topic:

http://www.fordfoundation.org/library/reports-and-studies/roads-and-bridges-the-unseen-labor-behind-our-digital-infrastructure

While I strongly recommend reading it in full (I'm not done yet), if you only have a few minutes, you can start by this very good summary of the highlights made by Cory Banfield (requests maintainer, Python dev at HP Enterprise):

https://storify.com/Lukasaoz/open-source-infrastructure-white-paper

We as a project are right now in the fortunate position of having resources for full-time contributors from our grant funders, and a robust partnership with companies like Bloomberg, Continuum, IBM or Microsoft that are pitching in with major contributions.  But that doesn't mean we're immune to the problems described here, or that many other projects that are very close to us (numpy, pandas, scipy, matplotlib, scikit*, etc) don't face these challenges as well. 

Contributing solutions to this question was part of what motivated a few of us to create Numfocus, and I think the foundation has already been a positive force in this regard.  But there's a lot of ground yet to be covered, and this study is probably the most authoritative summary of the problem to date.  I figured I'd share it, as I think everyone on this list ultimately should care about these questions...

Cheers

--

Fernando Perez (@fperez_org; http://fperez.org)
fperez.net-at-gmail: mailing lists only (I ignore this when swamped!)
fernando.perez-at-berkeley: contact me here for any direct mail

[Lawrence D’Oliveiro]

On Sunday, July 17, 2016 at 1:48:47 PM UTC+12, Fernando Perez wrote:

https://storify.com/Lukasaoz/open-source-infrastructure-white-paper

Companies wanting something for nothing are not a new phenomenon. That is a key reason why the GPL was created. Look at outfits like the Apache Software Foundation, who deliberately avoid using the GPL for their projects, and how they ended up being used as a football in the maneouvrings between Oracle, Sun and IBM over Java. And how Oracle used them as a dumping ground for open-source projects that Sun had nurtured, which it killed--like OpenOffice.