@zkatkat thanks for hosting this discussion, it helped clarify some things that were previously quite vague for me

especially that the structure of a project matters much more than its licence

it strikes me that the projects that have been successful under capitalism (in that they serve their users well and their contributors are able to make a living) have a good diversity of orgs that are active users of the software, so that the people involved have a decent choice of places to work

the asf fairly deliberately tried to structure itself to support projects which operate like that, albeit not entirely successfully

the rhetoric around free software and open source has very often minimized that aspect of how projects work in practice, or even denied it outright by claiming that contributors are doing it in their spare time

which has done younger programmers a disservice by talking up false narratives of what careers in open source look like

compounded by ways of doing open source such as npm or github that are far less community-oriented than the prominent projects when i started out decades ago

there’s a lot more small-project open source than there used to be, and i don’t know of any practical examples of ways to make them sustainable other than luck; and even medium-sized projects are pretty precarious

and yeah this mostly reflects that living under capitalism is precarious

i love the idea of collectivist community-oriented projects that take a firm ethical stance

the sustainable projects that i know of mostly got there by luck, but i wonder if there are lessons to be learned that could increase the chances of replicating the trick deliberately…

dunno, except i’m pretty sure there are more useful examples from outside software of how to organise people :-)