Comment by disintegore

I have one major objection.

It's easy to forget, due to the vast wealth of genuinely great volunteer-driven projects out there, that an overwhelming share of open source contributions are actually funded by capital. It's hard to imagine the Linux kernel, or llvm, or even projects like React ever fizzling out due to maintainer burnout or disinterest.

This is fascinating, in my opinion, because our systems of accounting and economical analysis are by design terrible at keeping track of externalities. They are not good at analyzing the potentially holistic value of mutualist projects. Largely speaking whatever cannot fit on a balance sheet becomes the province of philosophy and culture.

Despite all that, in the modern culture of tech companies, the value of FLOSS seems to be understood and the companies that recognize it genuinely seem to out-compete those that don't. They recognize the value it creates for them, even if it's very difficult to estimate the costs that are avoided by using a FLOSS system that would otherwise need to be licensed or built. Even if the completely optional act of using one's own resources to contribute to open source software does not easily map to an equivalent or greater return in accounts receivable or company valuation.

What I mean by this is that the sustainability of "open source" broadly speaking is already demonstrated and I don't see that changing any time soon. What's not demonstrated however is the sustainability of OP's project. I think this is a challenge that they and their users should tackle without implicating the entirety of open source software as a culture, or attempting to impose any responsibilities upon users of open source software that don't already exist.