Undersupported Infrastructure

We need you, but we can't give you any money

The phrase that makes up this post's subtitle was once uttered by software developer Harlan Stenn, president of the Network Time Foundation. With it, Harlan was letting us know people's usual, generally unspoken stance on the plight of the public digital infrastructure and many of its open-source software components on which we all depend in one way or another.

A few days ago, in the post about the joke of someone in Nebraska, we pointed out the enormous dependence that business giants, as well as small and medium-sized companies, national governments and, in general, Internet users have on those components or projects that are often maintained by a few subjects, with poor or without any remuneration. As we mentioned there, we intended to write a post about this problem of underfunding —which is part of a broader problem of "undersupporting"— and here it is. This text is mainly based on the report Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure (2016), written by Nadia Eghbal, and arises because it addresses an issue that has not received enough attention even today.

Introduction

We know that the open-source software community typically works on a decentralized, non-hierarchical basis —the irony is that the current digital capitalist economy is forged and maintained on so many of its free projects. So, no central organization or authority grants permissions or determines what is to be built, maintained, and used in the infrastructure. (Outliers are, for example, the IETF and W3C that establish specific standards and requirements in the most fundamental pieces or basic levels of the web).

From this community, individuals and groups create programming languages, frameworks, and libraries, some more complex than others, and make them available to anyone who wants or needs to use them. Usually, a new project is expected to improve an existing one —bringing new features or solving some of its problems— to be considered useful or even "the best available option" and worth adopting. Some projects turn out to be more preferred than others, and some simply end up being ignored.

Successful projects become increasingly known, implemented and used by teams of developers and technology companies. Apart from their good functionality, these components are widespread thanks to factors such as the developers' reputation, the attractiveness of the products' names, and the advertising campaigns carried out. While some open-source projects originate within a company and/or as part of a business, here we focus mainly on those that derive from independent individuals or communities.

Consumers, in turn, take advantage of these public goods to solve their specific problems. Companies, for example, turn to open-source software components to build and support their own products and services and make money from them. As more and more people demand software components, often maintained by a few developers, imbalances begin to appear. Consumers constantly send inordinate and outrageous requests to these individuals while providing them with no retribution.

Why do they generate open-source software?

Usually, it is volunteer subjects who work on developing and maintaining open-source projects. They do it as a hobby, an art they love and find satisfying, and as a way to solve their problems. These purposes can be linked to the desire to affect the lives of others positively, but, in general, we're not talking about "altruism." Many developers and maintainers of open-source projects need to think about their future economic prosperity, even when money may remain a taboo subject in the open-source community.

Money may still be seen by many as a perversion of the original idea of the open-source community, but let's face it: Blessed are those few who work full-time as volunteers on these projects and have no need to receive a penny. The truth is that one of the most common intentions of contributing developers is to gain a reputation. They usually intend to be recognized in the communities, prove their worth, and build their portfolio of work (sometimes with several small contributions), and then have the opportunity to get compensated to sustain their projects or merely be hired in large companies where they are well remunerated.

When developers are tied to these projects for one reason or another, they feel the heavy burden, which sometimes, when a project has been widespread, is as if it becomes an "ethical obligation" to the world. This burden reflects injustice, especially in the inequality of economic retribution. Developers who maintain open-source projects, often full-time, on which companies, government entities, and others rely earn nothing or very little compared to those who are part of these organizations.

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