@bagder

Projects dying due to lack of people available to maintain it.

Personal q. Have you thought about your own project(s) longevity? The Github contributors page shows there are 4ish people who have been contributing consistently in the recent past.

Can we collect some samples for future cloning purposes? 😜

@bagder

Projects die:
I have seen some "frankenapps" with older releases or old versions of multiple software. Meh.

Some apps/tools/utilities work fine without updates, others had vulnerabilities and was risky business.

Better to search for alternatives to unmaintained and use compatible @latest versions.

When someone picks up an unmaintained project - or tool, that culture may not be as welcoming as the previous.

+ demands of support and features - the struggle is real! Burnout happens.

@bagder I don't want to say world war three, so instead I'm going to say that the world may be divided into a few large groups of countries and that any collaboration between those groups will be viewed with intense suspicion. As part of that, the Internet may be split into per-group networks. All of this will kill off the international collaboration that's underpinning large, successful open source projects, and many small ones, too.

I hope I'm just being pessimistic.

@bagder: connecting with financing and customers.

At @bebop, an insane about of effort is spent understanding how to unlock financing, feature research and customer outreach.

Our solution targeted at non-technical users. Terms "open source" and "self-hosted" are often unknown to our target audience.

A significant effort is spent educating potential users on the value of self-sovereign solutions in a world of opaque PaaS subscriptions and expensive bespoken software.

@bagder maintainer burnout is imho the biggest one at the moment. it lead to the xz situation amongst many others this year after all.

Finding young developers can be very difficult as well i bet - frontend frameworks and other javascript projects probably have it easier finding young people, but projects written in C probably have a harder time. My apprenticeship didn't teach me anything about computers or any non-OOP language, let alone anything without a garbage collector. Anything I learned about how computers actually work, and C, was either a little bit in my A-levels, or completely self-taught. Knowing how computers work, what memory management is, etc, is exceedingly rare to find in younger developers, which is sad to see. I bet plenty of these would love to learn about these topics in their apprenticeship as a software dev.

AI-slop will probably be an increasing issue in the future i bet; you have to sift through more garbage and try to distinguish from ai-generated crap from real issues/contributions, without accidentally throwing something out because a non-native speaker used an llm to translate his text.

One positive thing's for sure, foss devs ain't gonna run out of things to do!

@bagder

Licensing.

The MIT/BSD based licenses seems to get a lot of traction. And while that extreme freedom those licenses has advantages, it has a darker side-effect which can end up with more fragmentation.

For example, take the uutils project, aiming to replace coreutils. If commercial projects pulls in this as a replacement, they can add changes to uutils and never needing to share back the changes they did.

If those changes results in behavioral changes, going from one distro to another one may have quite some compatibility implications. Writing scripts using coreutils/uutils binaries suddenly need to account for various behaviors.

uutils is just a simple example. But GPL licenses can help reduce the fragmentation aspects. Sure, a GPL project can be forked - but it will be with a new name, so it is much clearer that "this is different".

@bagder Depend what we call OpenSource.

I think there are not really any challenge. People will keep putting code online for other people to use.

So what I would say is that the challenge, now that opensource won as a way to write code, is to realise it. And make it known.

And then have a hard look on how we deal with the consequences.

So I would say, mostly, "getting the story of who we are and what we do out" as the challenge.

@bagder overall, it’s all about maintenance:
- who does it/pick up the mantle when needed? People profit off of it mostly without giving back, no one wants/is incentivized to train on “old stuff” that needs maintaining rather than the new hot thing
- what are the incentives? State or bad or both actors can pollute the well, the thing has to work because it’s used somewhere critical for someone, but are all the users’ incentives roughly aligned or is there a wasteful tug of war?
- dependency hell: with the trust issues, are we sure what we depend on is good and/or not too bloated? Are WE too bloated, trying to do too many things?

My 2c, from someone who’s not a Big Name in OSS 🤷‍♂️

@bagder watering down of the open-source ethos.

I'm worried that people are taking open-source for granted, forgetting what it's all about, bending (and allowing others to bend) the open-source definition, or just slapping on an open-source license while acting against the spirit of open-source in every other aspect.

@bagder I would think of misguided regulation. States become increasingly aware of the importance and ubiquitousness of OS software. That's not bad. But they often don't understand the model, and somehow try to fit OSS and its authors into the same frameworks as commercial providers.

So we need better models. Some of this is discussed in the https://genevadialogue.ch/geneva-manual/

@bagder corporate capture.

we already have it, but we don't doubt it's gonna get worse.

@bagder I can't rank the issues for all of FOSS projects but to add one missing in your suggestions:

The increasing fragmentation of development platforms after a phase of >10 years of concentration on #GitHub.com. I think its decline started with the acquisition by #Microsoft. That wasn't good either but fragmentation makes it harder to get contributions by newcomers who are not yet part of your platform.