I am actually looking forward to hearing from the people here. Yeah Low-effort I know.
But I think this is an important topic to discuss, considering how much of the FOSS community is kept afloat by unpaid & volunteer-labour.
I am especially looking forward to any discussions of possible solutions
As a foss project maintainer i think a lot of people underestimate how few people are willing to take over and maintain a project.
Furthermore I think a lot of people underestimate the time and effort it takes to maintain a project.
We see foss projects dying all the time, despite the code being available!
I want to be a maintainer and help out but I just know it’ll be exhausting. I swap languages/projects all the time. I was on the DB (OLAP), architecture, GenAI and DevOps teams just this year alone. The context switching is really bad. I still would like to contribute but I’d want to pick a project that I used semi-regularly and it’s hard to identify when I’m so scatter-brained :/
I agree with you in general. Many small projects with limited popularity are one heartbeat away from disappearing forever. However, projects that are absolutely essential to prevent “collapse” as the video suggests will almost certainly find new life. Red Hat, Google, Canonical, Valve, Synology etc. that all rely heavily on open source projects will pump cash to keep them alive if it comes to that. It’s not true across the board universally, but in general collapse is not imminent.