Updated 03-Aug-2025
- See also: Part 1: Stop using their stuff
For me, both open source (defined below) and sustainability (some kind of appropriate life-span and level of health) are both important, together. Though also I believe that reasonable business models around closed source (proprietary) should also be sustainable (in a non-rapacious sense).
What is Sustainability?
- Not necessarily identical with immortality, though usually sustainability is measured in terms of resources (expertise) over time.
- Project quaility is maintained (or improved) over time.
- Not tied to a single (usually intermittantly responsive) developer (or cabal).
- There can be a different maturity stages in terms of sustainability (for example, Wikipedia is hostile to non-insider edits, but some argue it is at a different level of maturity. Hmmm.
What are Open Source Projects?
- Well, it can be complicated, but usually you know it when you see it.
- FOSS (or for the French -- FLOSS) is Free (, Libre,) and Open Source Software.
- Projects include a lot more than just code, such as documentation, triage, bug reporting, milestone generation, etc.
- See Sustainability of Open Source software communities beyond a fork: How and why has the LibreOffice project evolved?. This research makes the case that project developers and maintainers can switch to a fork and therefore the open source developer community around a project can be sustained across multiple projects.
Will the questions ever end?
- Nope