If you live in the same online bubble as me, you must have heard about the xz/liblzma backdoor, and if you haven't you can read a TL;DR here.

In its wake, a lot of folks are discussing critical open source infrastructure, sustainability, expectations that can or can not be placed on hobbyist maintainers, and whether they need to payed for their contribution. People point out various foundations that have employed high-profile maintainers so that they could work on the project full-time, and others reasonably assert that such approach can't scale to cover all of the open source.

So, here's my hot take: they only way to sustainably develop free software is to not need to be payed for it. And the only way this could be achieved at a scale software industry needs is for people not to need a paid job to have a decent, comfortable and safe living. Not just for open source maintainers, every human being on this planet. Don't want to work? That's okay, enjoy days with your family and friends. Getting bored? That's cool, do something that's interesting to you, and if your work is beneficial to the society at large - enjoy our heartfelt thank yous.

If you ask me "but who would want to work as a trash truck driver then?", my answer is "go check out how many people play Farming Simulator and similar games". Damn, I myself spent days driving virtual trucks in Euro Truck Simulator, for negative amount of money - I had to pay for the game after all. Then there's also AI, which wouldn't really mind the stink of trash cans that need to be taken out.

And while what I'm saying may sound outlandish or communist, it's actually neither. The objective is to overcome material scarcity, and historically the need for human labor has been the main obstacle for that. I firmly believe that today's technological advancement level is sufficient to achieve that at least as far as physical goods go. It'll take much longer to get to the stage where all services can be comfortably provided on volunteer basis, but it no longer seems implausible to me. We don't even have to abandon capitalism (something I have mixed feelings about, but that's a rant for another day), it'll just shift into the realm of non-material or unique goods.