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Open source sustainability is a 🌎 debate

José Miguel Parrella on May 04, 2019

For the past decade, I've received a daily ping with open source news coverage. It's a lot. One minute I'm reading a Reddit thread on distros, then...
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Frank Dana

lots of verbatims pointed out to expectations for the project health to sustain the individual developer's life.

Sorry, but in all seriousness, could somebody translate that into... like... non-business-jargonese? I can't even unpack what it's meant to be saying.

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José Miguel Parrella

It means many people that left a comment wrote something along the lines of: "[open source sustainability means] the possibility to contribute to open source software development while my life expectatives are assured" (all verbatims were captured in English which wasn't the native language of most respondents)

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Frank Dana

Ah, thanks! That's... clearer.

(Verbatim is a noun, now? When did that happen?)

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José Miguel Parrella

It might very well be an abuse of the language in market research (appreciate you pointing it out!) methods.sagepub.com/reference/ency...

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Rodrigo Gomes da Silva

Open source should JUST EXIST. It should be organic and non-opinionated. I don't see the point of talking about open source sustainability... It's Just working and growing for decades without the needing of people saying what should and what shouldn't.

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José Miguel Parrella

Yes, some folks in the non-US sample (and, anecdotally, even some in my US network) have raised this argument - something along the lines of the infallibility of open source as demonstrated by its continuous multi-decade existence despite the absence of cloud computing or VC funding through most of its history.