It's true and they're now mostly dead. Either gone completely or in a zombiefied state.
This is the fate of virtually all closed communities. Yes, you avoid many problems, it's tempting, but you die in the end. Usually, quickly.
Open communities suffer from many problems, and employ a variety of not-terribly-pleasant solutions like dictatorships to deal with those problems. Yes, many can be described as "toxic."
But they're also alive.
And I've seen some of these private trees. The quality tends to be rather underwhelming. As you would expect from someone tinkering at the margins without cooperation from the main drivers of the project.
I somewhat agree with that, but the big problem I see is credit and politics.
Guido didn't develop Python alone -- there are a huge number of equally talented and hard-working Python contributors. How do you determine what to pay each one of them?
You could give the money to Guido to redistribute, but now you have a huge political problem on your hands, and the possibility of slowing down the project through hurt feelings and the like.
There's really no good solution that I see. That's not to say that we can't improve on the status quo, though. Patreon seems like a good step, though I haven't used it.
It's kind of a hole in capitalism, but I guess human nature has evolved to fill that hole. Some people are just motivated to do huge amounts of quality work, for the greater good, regardless of compensation.
I suppose the idea is that by paying people, we could encourage more work that benefits society. But to play devil's advocate, maybe it would have the opposite effect? Those people aren't motivated by money. Maybe paying them would bias the work they produce... they would come up with stuff that seems more "saleable/donateable" NOW rather than being creative about the things we need 10 years from now.
It's true and they're now mostly dead. Either gone completely or in a zombiefied state.
This is the fate of virtually all closed communities. Yes, you avoid many problems, it's tempting, but you die in the end. Usually, quickly.
Open communities suffer from many problems, and employ a variety of not-terribly-pleasant solutions like dictatorships to deal with those problems. Yes, many can be described as "toxic."
But they're also alive.
And I've seen some of these private trees. The quality tends to be rather underwhelming. As you would expect from someone tinkering at the margins without cooperation from the main drivers of the project.