17th February 2024 - Link Blog
Paying people to work on open source is good actually. In which Jacob expands his widely quoted (including here) pithy toot about how quick people are to pick holes in paid open source contributor situations into a satisfyingly comprehensive rant. This is absolutely worth your time—there’s so much I could quote from here, but I’m going to go with this:
“Many, many more people should be getting paid to write free software, but for that to happen we’re going to have to be okay accepting impure or imperfect mechanisms.”
Recent articles
- My fireside chat about agentic engineering at the Pragmatic Summit - 14th March 2026
- Perhaps not Boring Technology after all - 9th March 2026
- Can coding agents relicense open source through a “clean room” implementation of code? - 5th March 2026