Hey everyone, thank you all for the very interesting discussion. I truly appreciate all the perspectives here and as @yuvipanda I fear I have way too many thoughts on this, so let me try to focus on one main point.
Are we concerned about vendor lock-in? Losing access to our data? Biased driving of software development priorities? Non-democratic governance? Anti-competitive incentives stifling further innovation?
I think that the point I am most concerned is both Biased driving of software development priorities and the consequences of donation based open science.
I suspect that decisions made in this broader discussion have far reaching influence on the pangeo community as a whole and I am struggling to cleanly separate this from the democratization of science. I have posted this over in the other thread to keep this shorter.
My main concern here is how the arguments for efficiency seem to strongly push a donation based approach to foster open science. @mrocklin said above…
I’m happy to pay for that personally.
While I think this is a very generous offer, I am skeptical that primarily relying on individual/corporate donations can lead to lasting change. While donating resources is fairly straight-forward ( I often have said the same thing as Matt above in the past), I really believe we cannot stop there as a mean to open up science to more people around the globe. I think this runs the risk of creating a strong dependency and power imbalance which has historically often created problems for developmental aid in general.
That being said I am in no way generally against strengthening/formalizing how the pangeo community engages with partners, but I think we need to be conscious about resulting power dynamics, and how to navigate them. Additionally I think it is paramount that such a decision is made in a forum/body where the people who do not have access to science tools at the moment have a seat at the table (as @briannapagan and @yuvipanda have already emphasized)!