Since the beginning of time, those in power have been able to use that power against the weak, often with little recourse. In feudalism, the powerful ruling class controlled the land leading to oppression and exploitation of the people doing the hard work of farming and protecting the land. This may sound familiar, since many open source projects similarly have the power consolidated in the hands of the few even when others with less power are doing most of the work. In today’s cloud native world, the power dynamics have gotten even more complex. Large cloud providers have the most power and can create service offerings based solely on open source projects while doing little to no real work on those projects. Smaller companies who are doing a significant amount of the development on an open source project have less power than the cloud providers, but many still have the power to relicense those projects. The many users, contributors, and even maintainers who have less power can feel like the rug has been pulled out from under them. We’ve recently seen an increase in relicensing of open source projects and other tensions within communities that are directly related to imbalances in power that cause disruption within our open source projects.
We have mechanisms like forks where those with less power can counter these power moves, regardless of the forms they take. For example, the Oracle acquisition of Sun resulted in the LibreOffice fork of OpenOffice and the MariaDB fork of MySQL. The Redis relicensing resulted in the Valkey fork. Foundations have stepped up to provide a neutral host for some forks where maintainers, contributors, and other community members can participate as equals. But forking isn’t without difficulties, since it often fragments and disrupts the community, so it’s often considered a solution of last resort. But it’s not all doom and gloom, corporate involvement can also positively impact the sustainability of our open source projects, including the forks. Companies can allocate employee time to contribute to projects, or provide funding and other resources to help sustain open source projects. However, the power still resides with those companies, and they can decide to withdraw their support at any time.
As maintainers, contributors, and even users of open source, we devote our most precious resource to these projects, time. We need for the projects that we spend time on to be sustainable over the long term to avoid wasting this most precious resource. There is no way to predict which projects will be sustained over time, but this talk will contain detailed suggestions for how to look for warning signs. Who holds the power in the open source projects that we use and contribute to? How do they use that power? What governance processes are in place that provide checks and balances to avoid the misuse of that power? Beyond identifying warning signs, this talk will contain suggestions for how we can work within projects to help them become more sustainable. This talk will not only help people understand the power dynamics at play, but will also provide tangible steps that we can take as maintainers, contributors, and users to make better decisions about focusing our precious time on making our projects more sustainable.
