I live in Belarus, where human rights don’t exist, but I don’t do politics, I’ve got physical safety, access to food, alcohol (3$ for the liter of vodka), computer games, pirated music and movies and in general life could be good if not the money and girls that come for it. So take it with a grain of salt (or whatever substance you have access to).
We, as Open Source maintainers, developers and users, are powerless, because we have to beg for the resources to make the world better and maintain it. Fixing a bug in Open Source software and making a new release requires a corporate involvement to escalate a problem and receive funding. Because we, as maintainers, as busy chasing jobs to fill the gaps in our budgets to have a decent life and some kind of future. There is no time to care about our pet projects that help other people like us, and with age time starts to compress up to the factor of 2.7, so we can see it everywhere, and still are powerless and useless to change the money aspect. The aspect of using money to support the cases we want to care about. The people like us. And we can not help them, and can not even help ourselves. From this perspective all these Human Rights just look like cheap weapons of manipulation. When you bring them down from the generalization to specific cases, they don’t work.
Participating in this forum requires me to have no job, no money, no children, and being supported by my parents and friends. At 42, I may have no future, and that’s my motivation to send this message.
The entire “free software ideology” is cares NOTHING AT ALL for the well-being of the developers that make our software possible.
It’s not enough to publish the source code, but “you must both publish the code and forfeit your every right as the owner of the code under a free software license”, is exactly why we have so many stories like the core-js developer starving, the faker.js developer blew up his code, shell4j was full of huge security bugs, etc…
The reason developers of widely relied upon projects struggle is because free software “licensing” (forfeiting every right as the owner, yet still being on the hook for maintenance and updates) can only ever financially work for a very small minority of software packages.
I think for most projects the only hope of sustainability is to re-licensing with a fair source license of some kind, the prosperity license, os.cash, business source license, SSPL, etc…
Put all the licensing stuff away to see the point. Licenses are distracting from the core fact that making things in the open, where everybody can see and evaluate the value, doesn’t guarantee people food, home, clothes and medicine, even if the value is high. That’s why there are no human rights. The only “right” that is still there is to be the slave on the complicated labor market. Slave, because the whole time of a person is traded. If the person doesn’t have time to maintain the state of his neural network, the person becomes someone else. Reprogrammed to be the corporate worker, where there is no longer time to do things that make the world better. Only things that make money.
Me neither. That’s why I saying that human rights is just a useless concept, which is given way too much attention, resources and even been given as an excuse to start wars. Let me just take it from the air that if just 0.01% of the world’s war budget is given into donations to open source maintainers, there would no current problem of open source sustainability.