Alternative definitions of and concerns adjacent to "Open Source sustainability"

[chadwhitacre]

Notes from a TODO Slack thread about #9.

Josh Simmons

Good read. Something that is brushed up against in this, maintainer burnout, could take us a little deeper into the problem space. Funding alone isn't a solution -- a maintainer may know how to put it to work to buy themselves time and meet their personal needs, but a maintainer practically needs to be a mini Executive Director in order to figure out how to use those funds to make sure the project will outlast their own involvement.

I'd argue that unless we also address governance, and provide supportive services to maintainers to shore up all the skills they can't or don't want to bring to the table, on top of providing funding, we are not going to make a meaningful dent in this systemic problem.

To put a finer point on it, it's not just the lack of funding that is between us and a future in which the open source projects we all depend on are sustainable. It's also questions of succession planning, leadership development, governance, and stewardship. (And chances are FOSS foundations are a critical puzzle piece...)

Matt Wilson

Because sustainability has taken on a “pay the maintainers” sheen IMHO, I’ve been using resilience to encompass a broader space. Sustain and maintain are keeping the lights on in the steady state, but it takes resilience to adapt to changing circumstances. Succession planning is a good example of building up resilience.

Alice Sowers

I came across an interesting concept in agriculture recently, which is “regenerative” farming,

• Sustainable: something that can be sustained over time, doing little harm to future generations. Think stability.
• Regenerative: something that aims to do no harm and lead to benefits / reversal of harm. Think renewal.

source

Vicky Brasseur

I've been writing/presenting about this for a while now. Here's a transcript of my "Real Costs of FOSS Sustainability" talk.

Ruth Ikegah

I see sustainability from three lenses, sustainability of people (maintainer, contributors and users), its resources and the software/project.

Me

It seems like there are different definitions of "Open Source sustainability" at play.

Vicky, you call this out in the talk you shared above:

The Brundtland Report starts with something that none of these open source sustainability things have done, including SustainOSS, an entire conference all about open source sustainability. They never bother to define, “what do you mean by sustainability?

Touché! 😅

Here is the definition I find later in your talk:

And, just like with corporate sustainabilty, it’s not about the money. Here are three elements of open source sustainabilty:

1. Contributing back
2. Human and environmental diversity
3. Community safety

For me, sustainability is very much about the money, and other concerns are adjacent and I use different names for them. Here is the definition I am working with:

Open Source sustainability is when any smart, motivated person can produce widely adopted Open Source software and get paid fairly without jumping through hoops.

There are certainly adjacent concerns. In the post I mention two, security and diversity. I am seeing corporate sustainability (TIL) and project governance (as Josh highlights above) as also being adjacent concerns.

Ruth—It sounds like you're looking at broader concerns as well, I'm curious to hear you expand more on the three lenses.

I like Matt ’s "resilience" as a catch-all, because I think the thing I want to call "Open Source sustainability"—smart, motivated individuals producing widely adopted Open Source software and getting paid fairly without jumping through hoops—is important enough to elevate and specifically focus on, distinct from adjacent concerns.

Matt

Unfortunately there are many different interested parties who want to hoist the "sustainability" flag to rally their efforts. And many of them are fairly uninterested in the "getting paid fairly" narrative.

Like the ASF blog post titled "The Apache Way to Sustainable Open Source Success". I do not think that they would co-sign your definition of "sustainability".

[chadwhitacre]

Matt

I like using resiliency because it feels like a more encompassing term, and because sustainability is used in so many different ways. I want something that can be more immediately recognized as all of this (waving arms wildly).

I don't think it is a good strategy to advance a "a software developer can get paid fairly" definition like the one you proposed above. That is very, vary narrow. And "me" centered. Just thinking about "me" isn't a path to building up resilience capacity. We need "we" for resiliency.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/0960085X.2022.2046516 explores the space of "sustainability" through a literature review and proposes a typology of sustainabilities (resource-based, infrastructural, and interactional). I think it's a helpful framing to broaden our understanding of a very complex space.

[chadwhitacre]

@gordonbrander at #20 (comment):

One more thought: the graph of active maintainers #20 (comment). This is no surprise! Approximate power laws are intevitable in all evolving networks. So, there will be a very few startups that make exponentially more money, a very few maintainers that make exponentially more open source impact, etc.

However, the exponent matters a lot! Even small changes in exponent make enormous differences in qualitative behaviour.

Another way we might frame the problem is to "fatten the curve". Change the exponent so that the number of high-performing open source contributors is not 5k but 50k, 500k...

This is what expanding the carring capacity of the open source ecosystem could do. Change the exponent.

[chadwhitacre]

Letting go of this as a full blog post. Notes are here if ever it makes sense to revive.