Open Source as a concept is kinda similar to fanfiction. They are both technically just statements of fact, either they are or aren’t, but both of them are very much intertwined with political “The big man can’t control me” kind of zealotry. Which, at least for the anti-corporation parts of it all, I can respect.

But… OSS has a problem that fanfiction doesn’t have: maintenance. With a fanfiction, it either gets finished, standing on it’s own as a self-contained cake to be consumed and praised over, or the writer gets bored and the cake is unfinished. Either way, no person or business ever relies on that cake for their own goals, other than small personal satisfaction. It sucks when a writer leaves it hanging, but that’s just how the cookie crumbles, and the consumer moves on to another work.

Open Source has to constantly update and expand to keep up with the technologies that it’s connected to. And guess what, most all of the major OSS success stories rely on paid workers to keep things up with the times, and make those crucial integrations that keep the software usable.

Linux has many developers paid by their Big Tech employers to make stuff that they can use for their products without hassle somewhere down the line. Same with OpenStreetMap. Even worse with Android.

Does anyone here really think there would be enough maintainment on these projects to keep it at the stability and feature-improvement they are now if all paid work vanished tomorrow? I certainly don’t. And unlike fanfiction, you can’t truly just say “well, we’re not updating it anymore”, at least, unless you don’t care about your whole use case and functional existence being replaced within a year, likely with a more-supported corporate alternative.

There are two and only two ways to keep Open Source supported well enough:

1. The governments of the world forcibly support them much the same way China invests in their companies, as a social good, replacing the corporate workers and funds with government ones.
2. Luxury gay space communism somehow comes to fruition and these developers get all the free time in the world free from any other worry, ever, and the whole community forms so well that they all pick up each other’s slack with their newfound infinite free time.

The first option violates the spirit of true open source much the same way as now, and the second one, actually, that’ll happen… the day after the perpetual motion machine is invented, that is.

Reality hurts.