"deprecation" kills Open Source projects, ecosystems, even private services. The people don't like to build their businesses, livelihoods on shaky ground that can collapse from under them at any point just by the decision of some maintainers who are doing something as a side-activity.

This seems to stem from the academic roots of Open Source. It grew from such projects in academic environments where deprecation of something would not cause anyone's business to collapse. Amplified by its adoption in large organizations in which deprecations don't cause major disruption and the organization would have ample time and funding to address these anyways.

This mentality even afflicts and hampers large private organizations - take Google:

A culture that has grown from its academic roots in MIT, where the funding mainly comes from the government or large military/private organizations. Carried over to the larger organization of Google as it matured, where there was ample funding and time for addressing such 'deprecations'. All good.

But they kept behaving towards their end-users in the same way. Constant 'deprecations', shutting down entire services on people's faces with little notice, literally giving a jolt to their small businesses, organizations, even livelihoods. Then they started noticing people earlier. But this didn't change a thing because the general public don't have the funding and resources that Google has for addressing such 'deprecations'.

So people started trusting Google. To such an extent that Google Cloud cannot get people on board even as their execs openly promise stability to the customers. Because nobody believes them anymore.

https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec...

Actually, turns out Google itself also doesn't have such resources. As evidenced by the recent 'inefficiency' talk that they gave to the company. So much engineering. But not enough product, in the face of a tech sector that is increasingly imperiled by rising inflation and dire economic times that do not permit floating organizations on overvalued stocks...

...

If even Google suffers from this kind of 'deprecation' behavior, imagine how much general Open Source suffers from this.

Obscure feature or security updates causing backwards-incompatible changes and breaking entire software setups, small businesses and individuals having to dedicate considerable time to maintaining their software as if they were software engineers who were doing it as a hobby.

That's what's hampering Open Source. Treating everyone as if they were software engineers using the Open Source software on the side, as a hobby.

They aren't.

They are people, a lot of them non-technical, with real lives, businesses and livelihoods that hang on that software.

And that is the major reason why Open Source keeps losing ground to proprietary, closed-ecosystem services that just give the users what they need to run their businesses and their daily lives without having to deal with Open Source maintenance problems.

So...

> The lifeblood of volunteer-run open source projects, which is most of them, is ultimately the motivation of the maintainers who work on them

No, the lifeblood of volunteer-run open source projects are their users. If there aren't users, there is absolutely no point to an Open Source software other than being a hobby for those who get involved in it. The users include corporate or intra-organization users too, by the way.

With such a mentality, Open Source can never change the world. Instead it would just keep losing ground or stagnating compared to closed-source private services and ecosystems that prioritize their users.