Comment by blackoil

From all the discussion here and previous it seems OSS is unsustainable.

People pay for software, notably Office, IntelliJ, OS, Adobe, video games, enterprise s/w and many more. For normal consumer products things are simple you pay some money for product and can have simple expectations that s/w will work. Every once a decade the direction a s/w takes major change, and you have to decide if you want to stay with it or move to something else.

Now with OSS both sides expectations have become implicit and ambiguous. In letter they come with no warranty but in spirit it does. No sane person would depend on database/compiler which can stop working or won't fix bugs without recourse. It may be OSS but I don't have time/skills to fix myself, so implicit understanding is that community at large will fix it.

Next is the issue of payment to the community. how much should be the payment, who should be paying and should be paid? No payment was discussed up-front, but it is expected implicitly. Should I review all s/w I use to understand the payment I should have been making. Maybe I should stick to only commercial s/w as expectation of payment is clear or maybe s/w being free but created by large corporates are ok as no payment is expected. Is making s/w in NodeJS / Python risky, as I don't know if community is paying for all the libraries I am using and how much I should be paying?