I had a lot of fun with this, even though I rewrote my talk after hearing @stephenrwalli talk about how learning to do open source to full maturity is like learning to cook... with a big jump up at opening a restaurant. https://twitter.com/sunnydeveloper/status/1361803262966423552

You can think of @tidelift as trying to address the gap in that analogy. In the real world, you can’t accidentally open a restaurant! In software, you can bake a cake, say “hey, my neighbors might enjoy this”, put it on your window sill...

... and the next thing you know some of the worlds biggest companies are in your yard, eating your cake. Most of them are just hanging out, but some are making requests for the next cake—every ingredient has to be organic, and fair trade, and can you do a caloric analysis too?

And if the cake causes some stomach upset, the people who were formerly just hanging out are suddenly knocking on your door at 3am, asking for some antacid (or an epipen!), and yeah, more cake, but without whatever ingredient they’re allergic to.

Oh, and if you get sick of baking cake and try to hand off the responsibility to a neighbor, 99% of the time that’ll be great, and the other 1% of the time the neighbor will poison your new guests, so maybe you don’t want to hand it off. (Which @rarkins spoke to as well.)

This is not all bad! In the process, you might level up from being a home cook to baking really great cakes in a repeatable, efficient way (which is what @stephenrwalli was talking about before I hijacked his analogy).

And if you can successfully do that, some of your new neighbors might hire you, or at least throw some money in the tip jar. (Unless you’re actually just making pie crust, and they only want to pay the better-known piemaker next door.)

Critically, no one involved here is doing this out of malice! (Well, except the poisoner neighbor.) And since cake-making is cheap and easy, and lots of people find it fun, in fact overall this method of baking works out decently—at least at the highest level.

But that involves taking for granted that tons of people stop cooking for the neighbors all the time, leaving us with infrastructure made from half-baked cakes.

The traditional FOSS response to that is “that’s just the way it is! someone else will be along shortly to put that meal back in the oven and finish it!” What we’re doing at @tidelift (along with many others!) is asking “what if that status quo should change?“

What if, when you find yourself accidentally running a restaurant the customers... pay you for your time? help you understand and comply with city regulations? help you do the same for the people you buy ingredients from? and as a result, everyone gets much better restaurants?

Obviously, that’s not the story of all of open source—much of it is a very deliberate, very expensive (or efficient or both) restaurant, staffed by full-time professionals. But that’s definitely not all of it!

And instead of making up a bunch of hacks to cover up the problems caused by underinvestment, we think we can attack the problem at the root by simply Paying The Maintainers. Or the windowsill cake chefs as the case may be :)