Item — HN Reader

>"For years, the software engineering industry has operated on a comfortable, perhaps lazy, myth: that open source software is an infinite, self-renewing public good that costs nothing to consume and requires nothing to sustain."

Since when? Open source projects have for decades offered paid support. Projects like Red Hat, Snort, Security Onion and others. I don't know anyone that has ever thought this. It's always been generally accepted that someone has to support it, either paid professional services or a full time employee with expertise.

2 comments

> It's always been generally accepted that someone has to support it, either paid professional services or a full time employee with expertise.

Yes, it's always been accepted that someone has to support it, but someone else, not me. But these are important dependencies so I'm sure someone will support them.

It's such a common situation that there's a six year old xkcd about it that felt about ten years late at the time.

> I don't know anyone that has ever thought this.

I've known many people who have thought that. None of them were programmers, and many of them were managers.