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0 pointsjlarocco7y ago0 comments

Do you have anything to back that up, because it directly contradicts my experience.

I've only seen people paid to work on the biggest projects, often only when it's become entrenched in everybody's workflow (Linux, some GCC developers, some Python devs), had the source code released after closed development (OpenSolaris, Firefox), or got taken over by corporation (Clang and Apple, khtml/webkit/Chromium with Google and Apple).

The vast majority of OSS projects IME are tiny, have few developers, and not many users outside of the developer.

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chrisseaton7y ago· 2 in thread

> Do you have anything to back that up

Have you read Berdou's PhD research on the topic?

http://www.lse.ac.uk/media@lse/study/pdf/PhD_Berdou_2007.pdf

Paid developers are more likely to maintain critical parts of open source code bases.

jlaroccoOP7y ago

I had not, but it seems to back up my point.

From the Overview section: "F/OS software is developed by online communities of globally distributed contributors, the majority of whom are volunteers who rarely meet face to face."

And it uses KDE and GNOME as case studies, which are both very large, entrenched projects that are subsidized by companies like Red Hat and Canonical.

What I'm getting at, though, is that if you pick 1000 arbitrary repos on GitHub (or BitBucket or GitLab), 999 of them are not going to have any paid contributors. Once you start filtering by user and/or contributor counts you're removing a large amount of projects that aren't popular, but never the less count as open source projects.

chrisseaton7y ago

That's the majority of people, not the majority of the work. I said majority of the work. The PhD supports my assertion that the majority of the actual work is done paid.

I don't believe you for your 999 out of 1000 repos, but I'm not sure how we'd check that. When I browse people's GitHub profiles it's almost all little forks of things they're clearly using in their work.

I don't know what people think OSS is - it's not hobbies. The majority of our infrastructure is OSS - operating systems, compilers, browsers, virtual machines, tools, it's almost all OSS and all majority paid contributors.

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