Way back in 2015, I tweeted:
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.
— Tim Hopper (@tdhopper) November 3, 2015
Write a program to fish for him and you maintain it for a lifetime.
Today, that tweet appeared in a Nature article about the challenges of releasing and maintaining open source software.
The article opens with the story of how the first-ever image of a black hole was made possible by open-source software like Matplotlib, yet just five days after that historic announcement, the NSF rejected a grant proposal to support that very ecosystem, “saying that the software lacked sufficient impact.”