Tips: Load-Bearing Internet People

Detta är för dem som vill förstå hur Internet fungerar, djupt ner i dem dåligt kända basfunktioner, som de flesta inte ens vet om att de finns, låt vara vem som ser till att allt fungerar.

Load-Bearing Internet People

Posted on 2019-06-15 by Eric Raymond
I just finished giving a talk – by remote video – at South East Linux Fest, about the Load-Bearing Internet Person problem.

An LBIP is a person who maintains the software for a critical Internet service or library, and has to do it without organizational support or a budget backing him up.

That second part is key. Some maintainers for critical software operate from a niche at a university or a government agency that supports their effort. There might be a few who are independently wealthy. Those people aren’t LBIPs, because the kind of load I’m talking about isn’t technical challenge. It’s the stress of knowing that you are it and you are alone, the world out there has no idea what a crapstorm it would be if you failed at your self-imposed duty, and goddammit why doesn’t anybody care?

LBIPs happen because some of the most critical services can’t be monetized. How do you put a meter on DNS? Or time synchronization? Or having a set of ubiquitous and reliable crypto libraries? Where there’s no profit stream, markets are not going to directly solve this problem.

I know at least two LBIPs whose health has broken under that strain – Dave Taht and Harlan Stenn. Me, I’m still generally healthy, but my recent medical issues have re-focused my mind on the LBIP problem.

I spent seven years trying to solve this problem by founding an organization to collect funds from sponsors and distribute them to LBIPs. That was the Internet Civil Engineering Institute. It shut down late last month because, as it turns out, recruiting people who are both willing and entirely competent to run an organization like that is really difficult. I failed at it.

(I’ve designed and founded two nonprofits that survived my departure and are still on mission, one 17 years on and the other 26 years on. I’m actually good at that game, but ICEI failed anyway. Possibly someone smarter or more streetwise than me could have made ICEI work, but given my previous track record of success I don’t think that would be a smart bet.)

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