Open Source, Death, and Open Economy

Open Source is a great idea, great movement and a great boost to the progress of civilization. Open Data made transparent governments possible, which allowed people to regulate tough problems, not hide them. Open systems like Linux and Open Stack enabled building more useful software on top of more solid and stable basis (first for single operating system nodes and now for clouds and networks).

So why Open Source is dead? Because there is no such thing as software product - any software is alive as long as its code is live in the heads of its maintainers. As soon as maintainers leave, the product enters death spiral - new people enter the field to patch the product to the death. Open Source is dead, because maintaining Open Source software requires time, and every minute of that time you need to pay for food, for shelter, for the privilege to meet with your friends and be inspired. Open Source maintenance does not release maintainers from paying for all this stuff and doesn't bring them those payment tokens called `money`. So code in maintainers heads will have to die.

How come that current economy is so flawed? Does Open Source produce value? Definitely, yes. Does it solve problems for people? Yes. Do people feel grateful for Open Source? Well, sometimes (but that's also the question of consumer culture forced by current economy). And still open source developers leave their products to join (often meaningless) activities of reinventing things from scratch for other projects. Often doing things that they've paid for and not things they know and like.

How come that people with developed skills doing useful things have nothing to eat, and for food and shelter have to reformat their brain and became compliant with office slavery? Sometimes I feel like we should extend software freedom conservancy model from software to people and remove "people with money" from power part of this equation. Blockchain allows us to calculate personal values to remove this money-for-money gameplay. Gameplay that creates parasites out of people, parasites that are motivated to produce garbage, to consume and to battle each other for "market domination". Parasites don't like to be exposed, and they don't like to be parasites, so maybe Open Economy is an answer that can bring our focus back to the planet with depleting resources and increasing pollution that pushes our health and general feeling of the world down to the level of committing a suicide.

I'd like to believe, but I am loosing my insight sometimes. There are many good people who care about me in this world, and this letter won't be there if not them. But their lifetime is limited, and so is mine. I really wanted to boost progress to help with my health and global problems, but it seems I failed. This post is filled under a Python tag, which always was a part of that unconscious plan. I thought that I could enhance it to be an easier, and more intuitive tool to augment limited human abilities for automation, to help them concentrate on more important things. But it seems I failed. I still see things how they should be done, I still see that DX (developer's experience) need to raise to the top of people priorities. It is just that I am exhausted to compete for food and shelter and feel depressed over the need to reformat my natural intelligence network to do those (often meaningless) office things just to keep my body alive.

Reaction to Python development moving to GitHub

If you don't know, the Python core developers are considering move to GitHub, which I believe will abandon Roundup, Mercurial and a couple of other initiatives that some of us picked, because they were used by community and were useful to it. For example I added support for Jinja2 to Roundup, tried to add a new router component for it to enable adding new web APIs more easily, and now I am doing a release of new version, because that package is valuable.

Below is my post sent to https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/core-workflow as an immediate reaction to the PEP that addresses the migration. I think that people need to consider Python as something with much better potential than just "a product to execute computer scripts". I want people to think about it as about open process with all the involved complexity and dynamics issues, a place to study and learn about different culture than following the orders of your owner founder. Some want to see it to be isolated coding playground without all that disturbances and annoying people with external world problems. But it is unavoidable. There are already diversity statement and codes of conducts. It is time to stop being ignorant to economics for the balance.

Blender is a good example. 3D editor that every two years chooses a problem that is actual for community and makes a movie together with building necessary features in the editor. They discuss economics, try to address funding issues by working with funds outside of coding domain, bringing new initiatives, communicating and still staying open - not ignoring the issues and not trying to bring the same hammer on the new "nail". Why Python fails to follow the same route?

I don't know why it bother me that much. Probably because I am jobless and living in northern country where you can't live on street and need to pay rent, so "getting paid for the useful stuff that you do" is extremely important issue for me. But also I feel that my time is limited, and that it is very sad to spend my life behind the screen of computer, reinventing some code that was written numerous time for a company that can not support something that is already written.

I realize that with reduced exposure to a projects like Roundup and Mercurial it will be much harder (if possible at all) to gather critical mass of resources around people to experiment with sustainability models for open source, and doing these things is important, because we coming into the age of extremely powerful automation where people may not be that needed anymore. For me open source is the only way to gather data on what will happen, and maybe the only way to find the balance. Open source economics right now is when resources are limited, but there are many people how could use them, but if they use them, others (who probably can do better) may feel bad about this. This is a just a single problem that needs to be addressed in the process, and I wish that there could be that sustainable working process in the list.

Here is original mail sent: