I’ve been thinking about this, and I think that there is a single structure that makes for sustainable development of decentralized community software like Matrix and Mastodon. First, no companies are involved in the core development and governance. There is a foundation that employs full time or part time engineers and funds work. The foundation’s governing board comes from instances of the software that pay membership for the board to fund its work. Member instances have to meet a set of criteria to prevent tragedy of the commons and commercial capture, e.g., must be self funding without outside patronage or ads, must be democratically controlled by its user base, must have a mature moderation system in place… The software is not open source. It is free for noncommercial, self governing communities. Any other group must pay an annual licensing fee to the foundation, but is not eligible to be on the governing board.
This seems really strange if you grew up in the open source world starting in the 1990’s, but if the goal is to maintain the critical chain required for communities to continue to exist, prevent them being destroyed by malignant, moneyed interests, and not end up in tragedy of the commons, I don’t see another way.
I don’t know of many popular programming languages with closed source compilers. If another model has worked for the majority of programming languages, why can’t it work for communication software too? What about Signal, is that not working? I seems to be funded and is still open source.
there is a single structure that makes for sustainable development
What does ‘sustainable’ mean in this context? It sounds to me like Matrix isn’t considered sustainable. Is IRC sustainable? Is Emacs sustainable? Or are they too simple to be considered in this discussion?
If another model has worked for the majority of programming languages, why can’t it work for communication software too?
Why would you expect it to? Much of the development of our open source compilers is done by companies that want to use them (Apple, Google, Facebook, etc.). Their incentives are generally not too far misaligned with the other users of them. The incentives do not align for social software.
For Signal, that’s a weird one. They get enough donations to keep their small team afloat. Meanwhile developers at Facebook and Google that wrap their software and rebrand it get paid many times what Signal’s developers get paid. If Google decided they wanted Signal doing something very different, they could put enough money in easily to corrupt that direction. For now it’s a cheap resource for them to mine.
What does ‘sustainable’ mean in this context? It sounds to me like Matrix isn’t considered sustainable. Is IRC sustainable? Is Emacs sustainable? Or are they too simple to be considered in this discussion?
Sustainable here refers to expecting that the software can have a fairly stable team of people with departures replaced for the foreseeable future without requiring anyone to sacrifice themselves. Matrix, by their own admission, is not sustainable right now. IRC isn’t a piece of software, it’s many, and those projects have been born and died and continue to do so. Emacs is a program where the community of users are also developers of the program (to greater and lesser degrees), it has entrenched itself as a piece of identity and a status symbol for much of the community…and it also had periods in its long history when its development looked like it might be unsustainable.
I’ve been thinking about this, and I think that there is a single structure that makes for sustainable development of decentralized community software like Matrix and Mastodon. First, no companies are involved in the core development and governance. There is a foundation that employs full time or part time engineers and funds work. The foundation’s governing board comes from instances of the software that pay membership for the board to fund its work. Member instances have to meet a set of criteria to prevent tragedy of the commons and commercial capture, e.g., must be self funding without outside patronage or ads, must be democratically controlled by its user base, must have a mature moderation system in place… The software is not open source. It is free for noncommercial, self governing communities. Any other group must pay an annual licensing fee to the foundation, but is not eligible to be on the governing board.
This seems really strange if you grew up in the open source world starting in the 1990’s, but if the goal is to maintain the critical chain required for communities to continue to exist, prevent them being destroyed by malignant, moneyed interests, and not end up in tragedy of the commons, I don’t see another way.
I don’t know of many popular programming languages with closed source compilers. If another model has worked for the majority of programming languages, why can’t it work for communication software too? What about Signal, is that not working? I seems to be funded and is still open source.
What does ‘sustainable’ mean in this context? It sounds to me like Matrix isn’t considered sustainable. Is IRC sustainable? Is Emacs sustainable? Or are they too simple to be considered in this discussion?
Why would you expect it to? Much of the development of our open source compilers is done by companies that want to use them (Apple, Google, Facebook, etc.). Their incentives are generally not too far misaligned with the other users of them. The incentives do not align for social software.
For Signal, that’s a weird one. They get enough donations to keep their small team afloat. Meanwhile developers at Facebook and Google that wrap their software and rebrand it get paid many times what Signal’s developers get paid. If Google decided they wanted Signal doing something very different, they could put enough money in easily to corrupt that direction. For now it’s a cheap resource for them to mine.
Sustainable here refers to expecting that the software can have a fairly stable team of people with departures replaced for the foreseeable future without requiring anyone to sacrifice themselves. Matrix, by their own admission, is not sustainable right now. IRC isn’t a piece of software, it’s many, and those projects have been born and died and continue to do so. Emacs is a program where the community of users are also developers of the program (to greater and lesser degrees), it has entrenched itself as a piece of identity and a status symbol for much of the community…and it also had periods in its long history when its development looked like it might be unsustainable.