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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

Open source software is dying because software is dying. Once upon a time people lines up for hours to get the latest software. Boxes were and CDs were proudly displayed on office shelves. But software isn't the hot thing. Services are king. Facebook and youtube aren't software. TikTok isn't software. They are services and services are much harder to open source.

There are a few. Tor and Signal are good examples. They are software that enables an underlying service. So they get attention. People want to contribute. Imho if F/OSS wants to thrive it has to focus on those projects that provide services that people can proudly say that they use and to which they can proudly contribute time and energy.

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Thank you for bringing up a new angle that I hadn't considered before :)

Yes, we should look into how one can adapt the "free speech" open source spirit to work for services.

Self-hosting. Otherwise you’re forever limited to whatever the service provider’s understaffed moderation team translated from the corporate email and plugged into the filters this afternoon.

While self-hosting is a good option for us developers, I'm pretty sure that most normal people will not do it. So to reach the critical mass needed to make an open source project financially viable, I don't think we can rely on self-hosting.

As an addendum, this is also where (extended-family-level or city-wide) community-hosting comes in though unless your services are federated or have other attractors, it's difficult to attract users.

You’re not wrong, but since service providers control what happens on their servers, and have no obligation to allow any particular speech, then self-hosting (or its close cousin, federation) are the only ways to assert publication control of your own posts.

> look into how one can adapt the "free speech" open source spirit to work for services

Unless you want to treat service providers as public utilities, which isn’t necessarily a bad idea, just an uphill battle.

> Signal are good examples.

Is Signal a good example? It is not federated and you can't connect to an alternative server from the Signal client. When I use signal I feel like I am using a free service.

well there are many services people use proudly. Previously authors of opensource projects used to run consultancy for their softwares. But now days, many such projects get ported to public cloud in no time. So for these projects, public cloud providers are only (direct) customers.

IT IS TIME TO UPDATE YOUR LISCENSE TO ADDRESS PUBLIC CLOUD PROVIDERS else sooner or later open souce gonna die

We seem to be slowly moving from an ownership model to a subscription model where you pay "rent" with money or data. Not just software but hardware as well. How long before smartphones are simply fused shut preventing you from opening it and you have to return the smartphone before upgrading to another.

That's a somewhat consumer-centric view of the software world. But it's true that, even in business, there is something of a shift towards managed services vs. on-prem software.

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