> The value is in the long term sustainability of a project, that can outlive a company acquisition or bankruptcy (such as Oracle and the Jenkins project). Today, the successful open source model is more an epitome of user adoption, healthy community cooperation, and long-term sustainability, along the free as in free speech source code.<p>I'm not sure if you actually meant to do this, but you're really only talking about open source as it relates to business. Linux didn't start out of a business need and most open source projects weren't started or even long term maintained by businesses. It was only when we discovered that businesses were using and making/saving money off open source that we figured out that splitting your day job and your hobby while someone makes a killing off your software is antithetical to ones life.<p>While I agree with much of your article, I'd add another point: businesses need to stop trying to run open source and using it for PR and recruiting. This practice has put a huge tax on the open source community because it makes people think that their rules, largely from corporate <i>America</i>, apply here. Open Source was, and always will be, a global effort that doesn't need American exceptionalism rearing it's ugly head. Rather, businesses need to take a step back, understand the culture and priorities of open source and then try to fit in. After all, the cultures, priorities, and attitudes of open source are what made it useful to corporations in the first place.
The author writes:<p>> When I go to Github, the things I notice about a project are the number of stars and forks. These are easily gameable metrics that are supposed to indicate community engagement. The second thing I notice[...]<p>This is a habit that you have to train yourself into picking up. For that reason, I find it odd that the author acknowledges that these are poor proxies for the things the author is really interested in.<p>Maybe it's because I don't play video games, but it's easy for me to forget that GitHub even displays the number of stars and forks on a repo--it's part of the UI cruft that I ignore. In fact, it's jarring when people mention them in comments, or people tout the high number of stars and forks on project pages. It's like we're living in different worlds, each with a completely different set of values.
One aspect I wished the author of this post touched on are the challenges that open source governance will have between copyleft and permissive open source licensing models (the former designed for long-term viability and the latter designed to get project traction in the short term).
The big question is how automatic and streamlined can you make this governance, because I know for sure most devs doing open source today want nothing to do with it. However, if it meant a path to being actually paid to do open source, maybe they would.