Hacker News Reader

Comment by eahman06 | Hacker News Reader

No it won't. You know what will destroy open source? Lack of money to develop it.

I am currently integrating some of the cleanest FOSS code I have seen, into a Linux setup, and I found their original funding proposal.. It was a German engineering lead and a dozen others in various roles. The first milestone was $9500 USD -- total. 100x that money would not have created this result. I believe they finished their second milestone (a year?) and that was probably more money.. but really, money alone is not enough, and too much is a detriment.

I've seen this prediction on a regular basis since the mid-1990s. Usually the prediction hasn't included the qualifier "sometime after 2018". Would you like to add a qualifier to your statement?

How healthy is open source these days? There may be any number of lines of library code publicly available, but I've felt that the four freedoms are less and less available in software that I'm the end user of.

This is already happens with rethinkdb.

Even after community "acquisition" the development process mostly dead https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/graphs/commit-activit...

This thread is about the health of open source in general. A specific project slowing down doesn't tell us anything about that. Especially since the project you're talking about was created by a business and abandoned by that business when the business situation changed. It seems perverse to infer anything about open source from that.

Yeah, I remember back when the Linux kernel was written by some Finnish nerd in university and given away for free. Thank goodness Google hired him back in 1995 to develop it or it would have died in infancy.

The Linux OS, even in 1993, was a combination of Linux kernel plus GNU userland tools and compiler plus X11 plus assorted goodies from the BSD world.

Developed, at least the first bit of time, on Minix, a Unix-like operating system that a university professor wrote as a teaching tool and gave away under a shared source license.

Linux' use of GPL was better than the shared-source license of Minix because you could distribute patched Linux kernels but had to distribute Minix improvements as patches to the original distribution. Linux' use of GPL was also what led everyone to contribute back to Linux while BSD derivatives were silently used to bootstrap software (including MacOSX) that never contributed back.

Linux also shows two properties that make up successful open source: there's an "inside" (kernel-land) and an "outside", and everyone profits if the inside-OSS part is made better and better while having minor kernel improvements is not a huge differentiator for most companies.

Contrast with the Redis addons by Redislabs: they want the ecosystem aspect of open source - people contributing back patches. But they also want to be the only ones to gain a livelihood from their code (which is their right as creators of the software but not conducive to the growth of an ecosystem). And they want their license to be treated as Apache-License-related, which is the part that smells of make-believe and dishonesty. But observe the part of having an ecosystem of different software parts (here: Redis and RedisLabs' extensions) that have an inside and an outside, as well as an ecosystem of developers/users who can make and share improvements to the software.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com