On 16 April 2015 at 17:42, Wes Turner <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Apr 14, 2015 7:15 PM, "Nick Coghlan" <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> [...] >> >> The perception that open source software is provided by magic internet >> pixies that don't need to eat (or at the very least to be thanked for the >> time their generosity has saved us) > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_models_for_open-source_software > > https://gist.github.com/ndarville/4295324
Right, there *are* for-profit business models and non-profit fundraising models that can support sustainable development and maintenance of open source software. However, it can also be hard to tell the difference between supported and unsupported software until low level infrastructure shifts like Python 3 or Linux containerisation come along - in those cases, the software without a good sustaining development story runs a high risk of getting trapped in the old model. Unfortunately, "Do you know and understand the sustaining engineering model for all of your dependencies?" is a question most of us will be forced to say "No" to, even those of us that really should know better. It's very easy to assume that a popular open source project has a well-funded sustainable development process backing it without actually checking that that assumption is accurate. When I first started working there, I used to think Boeing's risk management folks were overly paranoid for demanding to know the answer to that question before agreeing to depend on a new supplier, but I eventually came to understand that it's mostly a matter of being able to quantify risk - if you have 10 key dependencies, each with a 10% chance of going away in a given time period, then you end up facing a 2/3rds chance of having to replace at least one of those components with an alternative. As a result, these days *I* tend to be the one wanting to know the long term sustaining engineering plans for new services and dependencies (and sometimes a service or dependency will be valuable enough to be worth taking a chance on). Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | [email protected] | Brisbane, Australia _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - [email protected] https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
