When you become infrastructure

While listening to this interview, where the interviewee, Adriana Goh talks about open-source sustainability and the role that sovereign tech fund aims to play there, I started thinking about Tuist and how it has become the infrastructure for many companies.

As Adriana points out, unlike digital infrastructure, in physical infrastructure boundaries are more clear and the need for maintenance is more evident. Although it’s common in societies to only realize the importance of infrastructure when it’s not working. The thing is, and I feel this is something that many developers are unable to realize, that a piece of open-source software that you developed in your spare time can become the infrastructure for many companies. It’s not that you set out to build infrastructure for the world, but you accidentally end up doing so.

Most companies know about this. Looking from the financial perspective, it’s cost savings. This allows them to gear their resources towards other things, for example innovating at a different layer, which is fantastic. The problem is that along with most societies, which haven’t yet realized the criticality of digital infrastructure, many turn a blind eye to the importance of maintaining it. The response is often in the shape of a donation, which is appreciated, but it doesn’t solve the problem in most cases.

I’ve seen some companies emerging to solve this problem, but I’m highly skeptical about their approach. They approach the problem thinking that it’s a technical one, but I believe it’s a social one. Hence why I’m excited about the German government’s initiative to create a sovereign tech fund to create awareness and support the maintenance of open-source projects. Sure, you can try to remind companies about the importance of maintaining the infrastructure they rely on, but “reminding them about a cost they should take care of” is not something that they want to hear.

In the case of Tuist, we had to start evolving the project into a company to ensure that we could maintain it. Our mental health was at the table, and we were running a bit out of energy trying to maintain the project in our spare time. Did everyone like the move of turning Tuist into a company? Not everyone. Some thought “I chose Tuist because it was open and free, and now there’s a portion of it that is not.” They felt betrayed. But we didn’t know anything about what the project would become and what that would mean for us in terms of time and energy. So we decided to place our mental health and project long-term sustainability first over the interest of getting everything for free yet at the risk of the project dying.

I wish more companies and people would realize the importance of maintaining the infrastructure they rely on. But until that happens, or until governments like the German one step in to create awareness and support the maintenance of open-source projects, open-source developers like us will have to come up with creative ways to ensure that the infrastructure we build is maintained healthily.