| https://www.linkedin.com/in/serkanholat | |
| Bluesky | https://bsky.app/profile/coni2k.bsky.social |
| GitHub | https://github.com/coni2k |
"Just as society doesn’t rely on voluntary contributions to maintain roads or power grids, it cannot leave the digital infrastructure underpinning a significant proportion of the economy to the goodwill of a handful of maintainers."
"Open source is a civic resource and a public good. Let's make sure it's treated like one."
5/5
"The policy imperative is clear: treating open source as a public good means establishing sustainable funding mechanisms, creating liability frameworks that don’t burden volunteers, supporting security audits for critical projects, and ensuring that the $8.8 trillion in annual value creation doesn’t collapse due to market failure."
4/
This creates what economists call a “tragedy of the commons” scenario: everyone benefits from open source, but without coordinated protection, the resource faces depletion through maintainer burnout, security vulnerabilities, and project abandonment. The free-rider problem inherent to public goods means that rational economic actors will continue consuming open source value without contributing to its sustainability, necessitating policy intervention."
3/
(Fixing the thread 🤷🏻‍♀️)
"This vulnerability [in Log4j] existed in software maintained by a handful of volunteers, highlighting the dangerous asymmetry between open source’s economic importance and its resource allocation. In fact, the Harvard study found that just 5% of developers create 95% of open source’s economic value, yet most work without compensation or institutional support.
2/
Open Source as Critical Infrastructure - A White Paper by Block, Inc., with input from the Open Source Initiative đź’Ż
https://opensource.block.xyz/blog/open-source-critical-infra-whitepaper/
1/
eBPF: Unlocking the Kernel (2023) 🍿
"Most important risk of AI is that in the near future our entire digital diet will be mediated by AI systems. If those AI systems come from a handful of proprietary companies on the West Coast of the US or China, we're in big trouble for the health of democracy, cultural diversity, linguistic diversity, and value systems. So we need a highly diverse population of AI assistance for the same reason we need diversity in the press, and that can only happen with open source."
"Python's PyPI registry bandwidth needs for shipping copies of its 700,000+ packages (amounting to 747PB annually at a sustained rate of 189 Gbps) are underwritten by Fastly, for instance. Otherwise, the project would have to pony up about $1.8 million a month."
4/4
"Winser estimated it could cost $5 million to $8 million a year to run a major registry the size of Crates.io, which gets about 125 billion downloads a year. And this number wouldn't include any substantial bandwidth and infrastructure donations (Like Fastly's for Crates.io)."
3/
