Post #2296206
2026-05-09 11:36 UTC
Replies (4)
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@jannem@fosstodon.org 2026-05-09 11:54
@andrewnez@mastodon.social My small corner of academic software has the same issues. You can have three popular software packages in the same subfield. One is maintained by a PI who gets a grant to work on it part time with their trainees; one is run by a postdoc in their free time; one was written by a grad student for a paper and the student disappeared the moment the paper was published, never to touch the code again. And that is not visible anywhere.
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@Di4na@hachyderm.io 2026-05-09 12:50
@andrewnez@mastodon.social one fun metric we can use to show the alternative funding source you talk about at the end is that the number 1 reason project goes unmaintained are... The maintainer changed employer. We have relatively good data on this.
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@sdruskat@fediscience.org 2026-05-09 13:27
@andrewnez@mastodon.social Great read, thanks for writing it! It reminded me partly of this: https://indieweb.social/@tg/116522563497941266, without the nostalgia; the analogy being, I think, that we tend to get metrics for "platform-like" packages that are seen and used by the person in front of the screen, while the "boring" infrastructure bits are missed cos they don't (need to) follow every wave of "disruption"? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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@joshbressers@infosec.exchange 2026-05-09 15:31
@andrewnez@mastodon.social The number of people who understand this is an extremely small number My poster child for this is https://github.com/ossf/tac/issues/101 It's filled with opinions that don't change even when shown the data. Those are the same people that then built scorecard