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September 14, 2019 11:44 pm

Was Advertising in Open Source Software a Useful Experiment?

"Given how dependent we've become upon open source software, one would think that we would have a bevy of options for supporting the developers who write the code, but we don't..." writes InfoWorld's Matt Asay, in an essay defending Feross Aboukhadijeh for experimenting with ads in his open source JavaScript style guide library. "We have some inchoate business and funding models that serve open source companies and open source developers more or less well, and too often less. What we need is more people like Aboukhadijeh earnestly experimenting with ways to make things better, more companies like Tidelift introducing novel ways to fund developers, and more organizations recognizing their own self-interest in employing or otherwise paying the developers who build the software they rely on... [U]ltimately, we need more experimentation, and less criticism."What about donations? As Aboukhadijeh has noted, "Lots of maintainers struggle to reach a barely livable wage via donations...." Linux Foundation Chris Aniszczyk has derisively described the approach [and] goes on to put the onus for paying developers on those companies that most benefit from their work: "[A] big part of innovation comes from developers working at organizations adopting open source software at scale and using it in interesting ways. It's these organizations that should be tasked to sustain open source software versus individuals, especially since they depend on open source software to survive as a business." Aniszczyk isn't talking about mega-corps throwing money at mega-tip jars. Rather, he's talking about the big beneficiaries employing the developers who build the projects upon which they depend. It's a great idea, and one that has borne fruit in the Linux community and currently in the Kubernetes world. However it's done, there's an underlying principle that is critical to all of this: We need more experimentation. The first requirement for ensuring open source sustainability is to allow and encourage experimentation. Concerned at his (and other open source developers') inability to make a comfortable living writing popular open source software, Standard co-founder Aboukhadijeh decided to experiment with an ad-supported model...

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