“Report finds few open source projects actively maintained | InfoWorld”

@baldur Ah, that delightful feeling of finding exactly the thing I need to fix the problem I’m having, only to discover that it hasn’t been updated or maintained since 2017…

@petebrown Ah, yeah. Know that feeling well.

@baldur my slightly cynical take on this is that 'open source' became a way of getting free labour for under-resourced projects. The underlying attitude culminated in social media, where the users provide nearly all the content for nothing (and most of the value). In this sense, there's not much difference between contributing to a software project on GitHub and posting comments on LinkedIn. It's not surprising then that many or most open source projects aren't maintained, because it was never really clear why anyone would do this work for free in the long run. There's an analogy with public open spaces. You can set up volunteer groups to maintain certain special areas, but you can't run the whole parks system on volunteers. You need to pay people to do the less prestigious or less visible bits. Or to put it slightly differently, in a true commons the commoners aren't exploited, because they share in the value they create.

@writingslowly Keep in mind the majority of Internet infrastructure is Open Standards & Open Source. Imagine no Linux nor Apache...nor Wikipedia. The real problem is when profit-driven commercial enterprises take over. I enjoyed my WordPress contributor role and it expanded my tech horizons.

@Skarjune definitely - there's a lot of diversity in 'open source', and finding successful governance structures is always a work in progress. In some ways, its amazing the products you mentioned have flourished.