Does open source need its own Priority of Constituencies?
summary
Argues that W3C’s priority of constituencies (aka put user needs first) applies to open source: order people → end users → app developers → cloud providers → contributors → maintainers → theoretical purity. Uses W3C’s decision history (2007), population counts — billions of end users, millions of authors, thousands of implementers, tens of spec editors — and recent supply‑chain crises like log4j and faker.js to show maintainers do most upstream work but lack resources, so practical action is to move money upstream while acknowledging the framework isn’t a silver bullet.
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chapters (7)
- 0:00Introduction to open source crisis
- 3:57Emergence of new constituencies
- 6:47Priority of Constituencies in W3C
- 11:46Open source priority of constituencies
- 18:43Economic discrepancies in open source
- 20:07Benefits of upstreaming work
- 23:40Q&A on funding and organizations
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