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A related question I've asked myself a few times already, with no good answer yet: is it good for the long-term health of an OSS project if it has sponsored developer(s) from a single company?

If Cairo didn't have that support, it might have fizzled out much earlier. Or a more heterogeneous community might have emerged, which would be more resilient to a single sponsor dropping out.

If anybody has data (not just anecdotes) regarding this question, I would be very grateful!



> is it good for the long-term health of an OSS project if it has sponsored developer(s) from a single company?

Surely, the answer is "no" in absolute terms. In relative terms, however, the answer is "better than none" most of the time.


Having anything you care about being in a single failure domain is a bad idea.

- A single company is a bad idea. - A single maintainer is a bad idea. - Maintainers from a single country is a bad idea.

So yes, having all of your maintainers in one company is bad for long-term health.

But 1 is better than 0!




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