Open source software and top research universities (like MIT and Cambridge) create incredible value and share surprisingly many features — from simi

What Open Source can learn from universities to fix its funding

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2024-09-30 17:00:09

Open source software and top research universities (like MIT and Cambridge) create incredible value and share surprisingly many features — from similar cultural roots to high-level functions. From this perspective, GitHub might even be the largest informal university ever created.

What if we explore this idea for solutions to OSS problems? I have been excited to discover an unusual difference in sustainable funding tools of these similar worlds, which could pave a way to solving the open source maintenance crisis. But let's come there step by step.

Like in the open source world, unpaid enthusiasts laid out many foundational layers of modern science. Notable examples include a tax collector outlining modern chemistry (Antoine Lavoisier, 1789), an unemployed person developing computing theory basics (Ada Lovelace, 1843), a monk founding genetics as a science (Gregor Mendel, 1865), and of course, a patent clerk making groundbreaking contributions to physics (Albert Einstein, 1905). As science's complexity and recognition had vastly grown, it turned into a usual, reasonably paid job in the early 20th century.

Later in the 1980s, the free and open source culture emerged out of US universities and inherited their reputation-based features. Both scientists and OSS developers like to collaborate and care more about what other community members think about than how much the market is ready to pay for their work. It is even formalized in the peer review of scientific papers, code and other contributions. Notably, the open source community has not come up with its "h-index" yet, but uses GitHub's metrics like stars for quick orientation instead.