Sunsetting Jazzband

Jazzband's model was interesting precisely because it tried to solve the bus factor problem by distributing maintainership across a community. The fact that it's sunsetting suggests the problem runs deeper than just individual maintainer burnout.

The real gap is that there's no natural mechanism for projects that are critical infrastructure for many companies to capture even a tiny fraction of the value they create. pip, Django, and the whole ecosystem that Jazzband helped steward are worth billions in aggregate business value. Their maintenance costs a few thousand dollars a year in volunteer time.

I don't think licensing changes alone fix this. Companies have legal teams that can route around them. What might actually work: large package registries (PyPI, npm) implementing a voluntary but strongly encouraged funding mechanism where companies self-report their usage and contribute to a foundation pool. It would need to be opt-in and friction-free, but even 10% adoption from mid-sized companies would transform the economics.

I don't know how many maintainers that are impacted by this, or what they are getting from Jazzband (I was not previously familiar), but the Apache foundation may be something to look into.

https://apache.org/

Jazzband maintained some incredible Django packages and tools that made it possible for me to build a system at my $JOB that would have been impossible to do on my own. It is a true tragedy of the commons situation where I was expected do more with less, and I didn't have the ability to contribute back/donate anywhere near the value that these projects provided to $JOB or myself. I did contribute personally, but it's very clear how all of this value has been extracted and used by large companies to build higher and higher walls for themselves, and none of the people that actually make any of this work get more than crumbs.

is it unrealistic to think the companies that benefit from orgs such as this could donate a fraction of a percent of their wealth to keep them going? the responsibility always seems to fall most on those with the least resources.

Unfortunate.

> 60% of maintainers are still unpaid.

That's actually not as bad as I would have guessed.

Jazzband have done the world a lot of good. They deserve better.

The Register post about the Slopocalypse to me feels tongue in cheek while this post seemingly takes it at face value. What's happening on GitHub is a mixed bag. I love what AI is doing to Ghostty.