Hey Sean! I enjoyed our back-and-forth on this on Twitter (and believe we’re doing it in person on Monday :) and I apologize for misrepresenting your views or putting you on the spot. Although I can’t always include a full dialogue for brevity reasons, I purposely use embedded tweets so it’s easy for a reader to click through and read the rest of the thread for context.

I included your tweet here not because I thought it was wrong or to tear it down, but because I thought it was a great example of today’s cultural beliefs toward open source community dynamics.

You explicitly stated in our conversation that “bazaars have always beaten out the cathedral when it comes to tools without differentiation”. The purpose of this post was to suggest that bazaars don’t really exist at all: every “bazaar” is actually a cathedral.

While money doesn’t touch most of the community in an open source project, there are always a couple of people who are shouldering much of the responsibility and ARE being paid, directly or not, for that work. When we talk about successful open source projects, I think people tend to focus on the community aspect and forget the maintainers.

Finally, to be clear, I don’t believe in monetizing community projects in the ways you suggest, and have taken great lengths to emphasize that sustainability is not about money but time and community.

I apologize again for putting you on the spot. I spend a lot of time trying to balance views and adequately represent people, it’s more important to me than anything else, so I’m bummed that you reacted negatively to this. My goal is to include a multitude of perspectives (same reason I included Steve’s comment later in this post) so that we can find commonalities and have thoughtful dialogue, not to make people feel isolated or threatened.