Open Source: From Community to Commercialization | Hacker News Reader

Open Source: From Community to Commercialization

a16z.com

33 pointskjhughes17 comments

> One of my favorite anecdotes from the early days of open source – when it wasn’t yet even called open source, and was just “free software”

Goddamned that's annoying, speaking as a Free software partisan.

On the off chance that anyone reading this doesn't already know what I mean...

"Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software" https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....

> The terms “free software” and “open source” stand for almost the same range of programs. However, they say deeply different things about those programs, based on different values. The free software movement campaigns for freedom for the users of computing; it is a movement for freedom and justice. By contrast, the open source idea values mainly practical advantage and does not campaign for principles. This is why we do not agree with open source, and do not use that term.

Perhaps the author is using the scare quotes to refer to the time before the GNU GPL and other formalised Free Software licenses? I wasn't there but I'd imagine back then "free software" might've included what "freeware" meant later?

EDIT: Reading the article more carefully, I was probably wrong. From their point of view, Free Software (and the civic value?) is inferior to Open Source (and mature business models) - perhaps understandable from a VC point of view?

In the isolated context of the quote you pulled, the authors were talking about history (note that they wrote "the early days of open source") and they're correct: in the time period before Eric Raymond et al popularized the term "open source" (~1998?)[0], we also called non-GPL software "free software".

Rummaging through my archives, I looked at a README.TXT I wrote in 1992 for a software utility (including the C source code) I gave away for $0 and I used the term "free software" even though it was not GPL. (I wasn't even aware of GPL back then.) Today, my software would be called an "open source permissive license".

In other words, RMS's essay from 2007 "Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software" may try to educate us on the difference between "free" vs "open source" but it can't go back in time and rewrite my historical usage of "free" in my README.TXT in 1992.

[0] usage trend of label "open source" after 1998 essay "Cathedral & Bazaar": https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=open+source&ye...

> I used the term "free software" even though it was not GPL. (I wasn't even aware of GPL back then.) Today, my software would be called an "open source permissive license".

Free Software doesn't have to be licensed under the GPL. Open Source licenses and Free Software licenses are the same. Perhaps you're thinking of the distinction between copyleft (GPL style) and non-copyleft (BSD style)?

>Free Software doesn't have to be licensed under the GPL.

Yes, I understand that but using RMS's criteria in his 2007 essay (subsection "Practical Differences between Free Software and Open Source"), my 1992 software (without strong copyleft protection) would be "open source" and not "free software". My point is that I called it "free software" even though it violates RMS's definition because the alternative label of "open source" didn't gain currency yet.

Also, the "free as in libre vs free as in beer" wasn't a well-known meme in 1992 either: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=free+as+in+bee...

Which criterion did your software violate in RMS's definition—I fail to see anything applicable in the subsection that you point to?

>Which criterion did your software violate in RMS's definition

When I gave away my software for free (e.g. on a disk), it would have files such as:

- foobar.exe (requires non-free proprietary Microsoft C compiler to rebuild this exe -- because of MS specific API calls)

- foobar.c (had some proprietary C code in it)

Basically, a user could run my software for $0, but they couldn't rebuild the executable using non-free tools. But in 1992, I wasn't aware of RMS's philosophy about "free as in libre" so I (and many others) just called it "free software".

Technically correct. "The best kind of correct."

I bow.

This is a fantastic article with valuable knowledge, though it really should be stressed that the conclusion are still opinions.

Open Core as 2.0 is a terrible ideology, as it is basically crippleware.

Open Source 3.0 as blockchain tokens is a junk idea promoting ponzi ideology.

Or the claim that Open Source will be advertising driven is just a horror waiting to happen as we've already seen with FB.

None of these are good ideas.

What is important to observe tho is that Open Source has driven all of the value creation that he's talked about. WITHOUT cheap memes or gimmicks. For 30 years!!!

OSS is just fine and will continue just fine, and I predict, will even transform other industries (medical, manufacturing, etc.) with the same type of value add.

> For 30 years!!! [--] OSS is just fine and will continue just fine

Don't you see the threats? Past performance vs future predictions?

Very informative. Curious of what others think of the measurements of the three pillars of open source:

- Project-Community Fit: GitHub stars

- Product-Market Fit: Downloads

- Value Market Fit: Revenue

How about: how many companies actively contribute to the project?

I think this is pretty interesting metric and should show the difference between true community efforts (maybe Linux, GCC?) and those where opening the source is just a way of selling more.

Yes, the number of contributing companies to the project is a good metric too. One more thing is their depth and significance of the contribution, though it might be very difficult to measure.

The first two are total bullshit metrics.

Basically any Github metric in isolation doesn't mean much. Anecdotally, I once worked on a ML framework in Rust[0]. For at least a few months after release the metrics looked good on paper (Top 5 Rust project by stars at the time) and also had a few smaller contributors. Sadly next to no actual adoption and no healthy community around it that was able to pick it up after we had to stop maintenance.

Downloads are about as bad. Just have one or a few users that have CI or deployment patterns that download the package a lot, and your numbers lost any meaning.

[0]: https://github.com/autumnai/leaf

Thanks for sharing and I am sorry for your project. It was a cool idea. Any idea why no actual adoption? Is this possibly because of the product-market fit mentioned in this post?

I am thinking aloud here: maybe the product-market fit, project-community fit and the value-market fit were not so clearly separated or sequential but more interrelated from the very beginning. You have to find the value-market fit and define the business problem first and then the community will thrive? The value to the community is not only what the project can bring to the business, but also the value this project can bring to its contributors and adopters.

> Any idea why no actual adoption?

I would say the main reason probably was that it wasn't really usable. We first optimized for performance, so that we were able to show that we are competitive there and neglected usability. Anything more than a simple MNSIT example was incredibly verbose.

Adoption would've probably come with some time (and there was quite some interest in the niche), but the project was a last ditch effort of our dying startup, so we didn't have enough time really.

A Github star means basically nothing outside "someone thought this looked vaguely interesting at some point". E.g. being shared widely at an early stage can get you lots of stars quickly, but doesn't say anything about your project actually being useful for the community, being used, ...

Downloads are a quite difficult metric too without more context. E.g. depending on your project, you might just get tons of downloads because you're an easily replaceable sub(-sub)-dependency of something popular, because of some your users have download-happy CI, ...

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