Requiem for the Volunteer Open Source Contributor
Jim Jagielskijimjag’s blog.
Open Source has forever altered technology. What was once seen as a sketchy, alternative method of software licensing and development, has now become the de-facto standard. And as it caused the software industry to evolve and grow, the IT landscape itself was modified due to the inexorable movement of open source, just as the geology of the Earth itself was refaced by the passage of glaciers.
There are numerous reasons for the success of Open Source, and in pretty much all situations, those reasons have strengthened and become entrenched. But one of the vital forces of Open Source, and arguable one of the most important, has seen a decline, an almost chilling waning of its place in the pantheon. Where once it almost seemed to define Open Source, it’s now a rarity, on its way to extinction. And the impacts of this decline on the long term vitality of Open Source has the potential to be that 1st tipping domino, threatening to take down the whole structure. I speak of the importance of the volunteer Open Source contributor.
When Open Source first started growing, the volunteer contributor was its mitochondria. People worked on those projects because they had a personal interest in them; on their own free time, they worked relentlessly to improve and advance the project. They weren’t paid to do so, for the most part, but they enjoyed and thrived in an environment where they could be the masters of their own destinies, and collaborate with other like minded people on a project that they could truly say was “theirs”. Such an environment pulled in the best and the brightest, eager for the freedom to work together to collectively scratch their own itch, as the saying goes. The result was that these Open Source projects soon outperformed commercial contenders, because of the tight feedback loop between user and contributor that Open Source enabled. In fact, that was one of the unspoken goals: to encourage Users to become Contributors and to make it as easy as possible for that to happen.
In other words: the barriers to entry were low, easily managed by such volunteers who helped and contributed in their free time.
But as Open Source started becoming more successful, this dynamic started to shift, almost unperceptively at first. The first phase was when such volunteers were hired by companies to continue to work on those open source projects they were already part of. These companies depended on those open source codebases, and so hiring those people was simply Good Business. For those contributors, getting paid for what they considered doing their hobby was a dream come true. But the age of the Paid Open Source Contributor had started.
The second big change was when those Open Source projects started to become more and more “important.” There was a slow but steady raising of that bar, because, after all, breaking such an important piece of software couldn’t be risked but allowing “just anybody” to contribute. And as corporate interests started getting more and more influence, they started dictating the conditions on how these open source projects were run and governed.
At this point, it became harder and harder for the volunteer contributor to compete. She was competing against people who were paid full time to work on the project, and against a governance structure that required excessive amounts of knowledge and expertise and time for their contributions to even be considered much less rewarded. Whereas before, such a volunteer had a clear and viable path to become a trusted committer, someone who actually was a core part of the project, this path was closed. You were limited and restricted to the ability to provide Pull Requests. But the bulk of the contributions were from salaried employees whose sole loyalty was to the dollar.
This continued to the point that we are now at the stage when most open source contributors are in it for the money, and nothing else. Whereas before, you saw people move from company to company, and still continue their efforts within a project, now if someone leaves a company, their activities on those projects drop down to zero. Instead of Open Source freeing companies to choose the right software for their needs, and being able to potentially help influence the direction in a collaborative way, only deep pocket companies have that ability now, supported by Foundations that are little more than facades for corporate control. Yes, there may still be a handful of “unaligned” contributors, but it is clear that some pigs are more equal than others.
The change in dynamic is amazing. Nowadays, companies are simply sponsoring Open Source projects and Foundations so that these projects and foundations can create solutions that they now have to buy. They are basically paying for the privilege of having to buy software and solutions. Instead of Open Source allowing companies to manage their own destiny, it is being usurped to make those companies more beholden to vendors and suppliers.
And all of this is because we forgot how important true community was, as exemplified by the volunteer contributor.