In a recent article for InfoWorld, Matt Asay discusses issues surrounding the maintenance and sustainability of open source software, saying that “while open source software is free and infinitely reproducible, open source maintainers are precious and scarce.”
Asay writes:
Much of the “open source sustainability” discussion has focused on the one thing that really needs no help being sustained: software. As Tobie Langel rightly points out, “Open source code isn’t a scarce resource. It’s the exact opposite, actually: It’s infinitely reproducible at zero cost to the user and to the ecosystem.”
And, Asay says, it’s precisely because there’s a big pool of code that costs nothing to reproduce that the removal of people to actively maintain it creates issues.
Read the complete article at InfoWorld (free registration may be required).
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