Alex

I recently joined the ranks of 3d printer owners. The first thing I printed where a pair of risers for mounting some hall effect sensors on my garage door mechanism. Very simple shapes but super handy.

I used to think about it a lot when I was younger because it seemed so unfair that life comes to an end. As I’ve gotten older (and closer to the inevitable) I think about it less. Hopefully you’ll get to the point you realise worrying about something you can’t change isn’t productive use of the time you have left. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do what you can to eat well, keep fit and put off that final reckoning as much as you can.

Yes and no. A lot of the projects I work on the majority of the engineers are funded by companies which have very real commercial drivers to do so. However the fact the code itself is free (as in freedom) means that everyone benefits from the commons and as a result interesting contributions come up which aren’t on the commercial roadmap. Look at git, a source control system Linus built because he needed something to maintain Linux in and he didn’t like any of the alternatives. It solved his itch but is now the basis for a large industry of code forges with git at their heart.

While we have roadmaps for features we want they still don’t get merged until they are ready and acceptable to the upstream which makes for much more sustainable projects in the long run.

Interestingly while we have had academic contributions there are a lot more research projects that use the public code as a base but the work is never upstreamed because the focus is on getting the paper/thesis done. Code can work and prove the thing they investigating but still need significant effort to get it merged.

It’s one of the reasons I enjoy working on open source. Sure the companies that pay the bills for that maintenance might not be the ones you would work for directly but I satisfy myself that we are improving a commons that everyone can take advantage of.