On Tue, 11 May 2021 09:25:33 +1200, Peter Reutemann quoted:
'Even developers of surprisingly large and successful projects (if measured by number of users) can be lucky to earn enough to buy coffee for the week.'
This is why I think a better measure of the health of an open-source project is not the number of passive users, but the number of active contributors. Contribution can happen at a range of levels, from something as basic as participating in a support forum offering helpful hints, up to writing some documentation or code (whether a little or a lot), and yes, even monetary contributions. Coincidentally (or not?), here <https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/10/untangling_open_sources_sustainability_problem/> is another report on the sustainability (or lack of it) in the open-source world. OpenSSL was a bit of an eye-opener, when the Heartbleed vulnerability led to the revelation that the main developers were basically operating on a shoestring. Well, a partial eye-opener; things have not really improved that much, whether for that project or others: ... maintainers ... suddenly find themselves fixing bugs they don't care about, handling community politics, running QA on sloppy contributions, and dealing with toxic comments from people using their software for free. Things are so bad that Linux Conf AU, held in Huntley's native Australia, has taken to making a psychologist available for OSS devs on site. The article ends with some ideas on how open-source developers can improve things for themselves -- become more business-savvy, basically.