Interesting article: who pays to maintain open source software?

I thought it was interesting:

https://onezero.medium.com/the-internet-relies-on-people-working-for-free-a79104a68bcc

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I find this perspective insightful (the second part is about collaborative projects): https://wikipedia20.pubpub.org/pub/lifecycles/release/2 They basically claim that now a self-governed collaborative project has no chances to survive.

Thanks for sharing @ymblanter, that’s indeed an interesting perspective. The broader conclusions hardly seem compelling though. Say the authors make an example of most emblematic peer production communities being old—all from before 2010. While it may be true, many of the commercial projects don’t even survive that long.

I think their point is that whereas, indeed, most of the communities fail anyway, that after 2010 big corporations like Apple figured out how to own these communities and to commercialize their product. It was too late to do anything about existing ones, but they managed to make sure that everything which could be monetized has been taken care of.

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