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Comment by TimJYoung | Hacker News Reader

Two things:

1) The PC software world did run for quite a few years on the model of predominantly commercial/proprietary software, most of it being closed-source, so it's not like it is some far-fetched idea that doesn't work in economic terms.

Personally, I prefer the commercial license/source-included model, with the emphasis on the author/company getting paid to ensure that the situations like the one described here are avoided. You can then have additional educational licenses for ensuring access to developer tools for educational purposes, but that's up to the author/company.

2) If you directly pay someone to write software, I would expect any such arrangement to include the source code as part of the work product, regardless of the ultimate visibility of the source code to outside parties.

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The history of cryptocurrency in particular and business law in general shows that adding money to the system doesn't automatically result in trustworthiness. Even the giant corporations providing cloud computing do decide to abandon products and discontinue services, or dramatically raise prices.

As someone else suggested, maybe the way to go is to rely on foundations. Maybe individuals shouldn't be taking on the burden of maintaining software alone? Maybe JavaScript needs a more slow-moving organization like Debian to handle package integration, with all the bureaucracy that entails?

Absolutely - adding money doesn't automatically result in trustworthiness. What it does do, however, is make the transaction fall under legal commerce, which gives the purchaser/user rights and remedies that they do not have with free (as in cost) software.

With foundations or any other form of over-arching bureaucracy, you risk stultifying software developers and harming innovation. It's really, really hard to beat the self-organizing aspects of free markets combined with commercial legal frameworks.

Well okay, but these aren't opposites. Large businesses cooperate internally using bureaucracy. They cooperate externally using (and funding) foundations and other open source work.

There is market demand for stability and it can be a competitive advantage over innovative but unstable alternatives. (Consider why Go and Docker are so popular.)

And why do companies start and fund foundations? Because their customers have doubts. It's better for stability than a market that's not based on standards.

Do you have any rights with paid devices? A kindle comes with 8 hours, 59 minutes of disclaimers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxygkyskucA

>The PC software world did run for quite a few years on the model of predominantly commercial/proprietary software, most of it being closed-source, so it's not like it is some far-fetched idea that doesn't work in economic terms.

And now Microsoft uses linux on the majority of their own cloud offerings. Open source beats propriety software on economic terms a lot of the time. It doesn't matter that both can work in economic terms, it matters which one is better in economic terms.

I don't think this book has been completely written yet. I think we're just now starting to see some of the major issues with FOSS, so don't throw up that "Mission Accomplished" banner yet.

FOSS is very much like the internet, in general: it was great when it was a small group of technical, like-minded, dedicated individuals working towards common goals. It starts falling apart, however, once you introduce the rest of the world into the system because the world primarily works on the basis of ruthless self-interest.

FOSS was going nowhere until the rest of the world got introduced to it. It was of more or less purely academic interest for a very long time.

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