I’ve told LF repeatedly that “education” as the leading point is insulting. Many maintainers know exactly what they need to do, but they lack time and energy for it. Lecturing them, I mean “giving them skills”, is… not actually a solution.

But it allows LF (and friends like GH) to continue elephant-in-the-room-ing the actual solution, which is paying maintainers for the trillions of dollars of value they create.

https://fosstodon.org/@donmccurdy/113512775802077660

@luis_in_brief this is the phishing training of the open source world

Or to put it a different way: open source maintainers are one of the most verifiably self-taught people in the history of the world, *when they want to be*. Happy to dig into tools, Google, books, mailing list archives, source code, stack traces, whatever. *If they’re motivated and have time for it.*

Saying “what they really need is… an online course” is… actually a tacit admission that what’s actually missing is time and motivation.

@joshbressers whatever you do, don’t click the (checks notes) github.com link

@luis_in_brief if I could put it more succinctly:

Fuck ‘em, I don’t need this shit

@luis_in_brief in all seriousness this might be the most insulting piece of communication I have ever received as an open source maintainer and I struggle to understand how it made it through an editorial process

@glyph growing “we need to do something” pressure is going to yield a lot of very bad “this is something”s

@luis_in_brief Education is great when it's opt-in. This is not opt-in.

@liw I mean it’s… sort of opt in? You can opt not to take the money :) but you have to motivate people to want to do the thing that the training is for, not just motivate them to do the training.

@luis_in_brief @liw What if you reminded them that they play an important role in the software supply chain? 😃

@jamesh @luis_in_brief As long as I can invoice for that...

I'd like to have a micro-cent every time the Linux kernel printk's on a Google, Amazon, or Microsoft server, please.

@luis_in_brief sad because LF does have some legitimately good education material — but that’s not the answer to this problem. The answer is money.

@c0dec0dec0de they’d better, they’ve spent enough money on it 🙃 but yes, if there’s no itch, no one is going to scratch, no matter how good the documentation is.

@webology @glyph serious q: can you be more specific? Because we’ve worked some with the scorecard stuff at Tidelift so I’m always curious where people see problems with it (there are many but at least some of them have become teachable moments)

@luis_in_brief Aaah, so now I know what was missing in my maintainer's life:
"Maintainers will get hands-on learning of security principles, tools like GitHub Copilot and Copilot Autofix"
Github Copilot!

Microsoft jokes from open-source...

@luis_in_brief @glyph As one of those maintainers who could use the funding to be able to focus on projects, this whole thing was a giant slap in the face. I've been doing this for goodness knows how long. I *know* what I need to do. The problem is I can't afford to allocate time for it.