The Register post about the Slopocalypse to me feels tongue in cheek while this post seemingly takes it at face value. What's happening on GitHub is a mixed bag. I love what AI is doing to Ghostty.
is it unrealistic to think the companies that benefit from orgs such as this could donate a fraction of a percent of their wealth to keep them going? the responsibility always seems to fall most on those with the least resources.
We really need to stop this misconception about FOSS. Free software is provided as is, with no obligations on either party (minus the viral clause of copyleft). The user is not obligated to "contribute" in any way, and the provider is not obligated to support in any way. It is a single one off donation of work from the author to the public.
Jazzband maintained some incredible Django packages and tools that made it possible for me to build a system at my $JOB that would have been impossible to do on my own. It is a true tragedy of the commons situation where I was expected do more with less, and I didn't have the ability to contribute back/donate anywhere near the value that these projects provided to $JOB or myself. I did contribute personally, but it's very clear how all of this value has been extracted and used by large companies to build higher and higher walls for themselves, and none of the people that actually make any of this work get more than crumbs.
By this point, this take is old to the point of being tiresome.
People should get what the deal is with open-source maintainership at this point. They should’ve gotten it back when Jazzband started. Nothing has changed since then. If you don’t want big companies using your stuff and not pay for it, don’t publish OSS. If you have some expectation that Google is going to write you a fat check, put it in the license—even if it’s practically unenforceable, it’s loads more than what 99% of OSS projects do right now.
If people go into OSS maintainer positions expecting anything other than what has time and time again happened…it’s like that little comic of the guy poking a stick into his bike wheel spokes and falling over.
The implication that OSS maintainers get nothing for their time is also laughable. If you were doing it for the money you wouldn’t be doing it in the first place. If they actually cared about making the world a better place and wanted to volunteer their time toward it they should go donate down at the soup kitchen. The reality is not everyone is so financially focused, but that shouldn’t be mistaken for altruism. It’s more that some people get their rocks off through other means. The reality is that OSS maintainers often find that they’re more financially focused than they thought they were—the novelty of their code running at Google wears off, the novelty of microcelebrity wears off, etc—and they get tired of it.
I don't know how many maintainers that are impacted by this, or what they are getting from Jazzband (I was not previously familiar), but the Apache foundation may be something to look into.
Jazzband's model was interesting precisely because it tried to solve the bus factor problem by distributing maintainership across a community. The fact that it's sunsetting suggests the problem runs deeper than just individual maintainer burnout.
The real gap is that there's no natural mechanism for projects that are critical infrastructure for many companies to capture even a tiny fraction of the value they create. pip, Django, and the whole ecosystem that Jazzband helped steward are worth billions in aggregate business value. Their maintenance costs a few thousand dollars a year in volunteer time.
I don't think licensing changes alone fix this. Companies have legal teams that can route around them. What might actually work: large package registries (PyPI, npm) implementing a voluntary but strongly encouraged funding mechanism where companies self-report their usage and contribute to a foundation pool. It would need to be opt-in and friction-free, but even 10% adoption from mid-sized companies would transform the economics.
> Jazzband's model was interesting precisely because it tried to solve the bus factor problem by distributing maintainership across a community. The fact that it's sunsetting suggests the problem runs deeper than just individual maintainer burnout.
Indeed, but it also failed due to the same reason: a bus factor of 1 in terms of who administrates the whole thing.
Each project could have multiple maintainers, but Jazzband itself (e.g.: the infrastructure, org, etc) had a single person responsible, and this didn't scale.
I don't mean to bash on the person who took charge on this BTW, I'm merely describing the situation. I greatly appreciate the enormous effort taken during so many years!
> Jazzband was always a one-roadie operation. People asked for more roadies and offered to help over the years, and I tried a number of times to make it work – but it never stuck.
Not sure what exactly prevented him from accepting more people into the role of "roadies"...
Bad smells were coming from Jazzband from well before people started churning out vibe-coded PRs. Jannis should’ve let this blog post sit for a few days before publishing it. The post basically says “why is Jazzband shutting down? AI! It’s AI’s fault! Also here’s my little rant about it being trained on open-source code!”, but he then proceeds to walk things back a little bit, “well actually it started a whole lot earlier”. Jazzband’s mismanagement wasn”t the butterfly flapping its wings that AI turned into something unsustainable. It was broken regardless, beyond the usual “oh the maintainers are burnt out”. It’s obvious that he’s got a more philosophical bee in his bonnet about AI, and is attributing more of Jazzband’s demise to it than can really be justified.
All I’ll say is, there’s a reason that Django Commons now exists.
17 comments
[ 0.28 ms ] story [ 40.8 ms ] thread> 60% of maintainers are still unpaid.
That's actually not as bad as I would have guessed.
Companies optimize for profit, all else be damned, no matter the damage they cause to the world around them.
In that sense, I fully expect companies to extract all value they can from Open Source without paying not contributing nothing in return.
The world would be saner if more people understood that.
https://apache.org/
The real gap is that there's no natural mechanism for projects that are critical infrastructure for many companies to capture even a tiny fraction of the value they create. pip, Django, and the whole ecosystem that Jazzband helped steward are worth billions in aggregate business value. Their maintenance costs a few thousand dollars a year in volunteer time.
I don't think licensing changes alone fix this. Companies have legal teams that can route around them. What might actually work: large package registries (PyPI, npm) implementing a voluntary but strongly encouraged funding mechanism where companies self-report their usage and contribute to a foundation pool. It would need to be opt-in and friction-free, but even 10% adoption from mid-sized companies would transform the economics.
Indeed, but it also failed due to the same reason: a bus factor of 1 in terms of who administrates the whole thing.
Each project could have multiple maintainers, but Jazzband itself (e.g.: the infrastructure, org, etc) had a single person responsible, and this didn't scale.
I don't mean to bash on the person who took charge on this BTW, I'm merely describing the situation. I greatly appreciate the enormous effort taken during so many years!
Not sure what exactly prevented him from accepting more people into the role of "roadies"...
https://freeasinweekend.org/