I’m not sure if he’s completely serious about the roads analogy. IMO roads are funded like OSS, but in OSS we just skip the whole elected officials part and go straight to oligarchy.<p>In other terms the oligarchs (Google, the auto industry) put money into projects that they directly benefit them (k8s, roads) while sidelining popular projects that don’t (public transit, $your_favorite_OSS).<p>I don’t really see the advantage of moving the gatekeepers from a set of corporate engineers to an “elected” group of people who will likely be completely made up of people who work at those same corporate jobs who have the time to do OSS politics.<p>Maybe there is another way, but this post is really critical of the “roads” analogy.
They said that back in the 90's. Repeatedly. I don't bother reading articles with these kinds of headlines anymore. Nobody's throwing anything to the wind.
On the other hand, I think it's kinda nice that open source exists outside of our capitalist economy. I don't think you can really argue that it <i>isn't working</i> - lots of people are fine with contributing to open source because they enjoy writing code that helps more than just them, just that maybe it would be nice if more of this labor was paid for.<p>We have to be very careful trying to extract <i>money</i> out of working on open source, I wouldn't want to see the same kind of perversion of incentives that causes large enterprise companies to produce absolutely godawful software come to open source projects too. (See Linus' many famous rants against commercial contributors trying to push crap into Linux for examples of this).