Shower thought. If i accept Synopsys and Tidelift numbers, at least 50% of all the code running in apps out there is not only FOSS, but maintained by unpaid weekend warriors.
So probably on something like 1 to 2 engineer-hour a month.
This has massive implications. Among others, that to get enough funding to make sense in our current market for engineers, you would need to pay them to be idle most of the time. It creates a massive asymetry in terms of bangs for the bucks against paying.
It says that fundamentally, digital infrastructure maintenance is tilted to be a scarcity ecosystem forever. Bare massive ecosystem wide Excession.
It does open a different way to solve the problem that would be way more economical though. Raise productivity. If they can do far more during these hours, you could get great returns. And this works even if the scarcity stays. Accept the scarcity and cope with it.
It is not as bleak as it looks. There are ways to get better results. And it would be cheap.
It does mean that if you want to impose or advocate for additional work, you need to invest yourself into making it fits the scarcity. You cannot hope the ecosystem to adopt the tool or practice otherwise, as they are too constrained to do the work of evaluating or adapting it.
It means if you fail to get adoption, it is a signal your tool or practices are not adapted though. Don't ignore the signal.
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