A holistic vision of open source beyond 2021
monetize.substack.com
monetize.substack.com
I'm not sure if you actually meant to do this, but you're really only talking about open source as it relates to business. Linux didn't start out of a business need and most open source projects weren't started or even long term maintained by businesses. It was only when we discovered that businesses were using and making/saving money off open source that we figured out that splitting your day job and your hobby while someone makes a killing off your software is antithetical to ones life.
While I agree with much of your article, I'd add another point: businesses need to stop trying to run open source and using it for PR and recruiting. This practice has put a huge tax on the open source community because it makes people think that their rules, largely from corporate America, apply here. Open Source was, and always will be, a global effort that doesn't need American exceptionalism rearing it's ugly head. Rather, businesses need to take a step back, understand the culture and priorities of open source and then try to fit in. After all, the cultures, priorities, and attitudes of open source are what made it useful to corporations in the first place.
Companies don't care. They don't even care about the law these days (see Uber, AirBnB, Facebook & privacy, etc. etc.)
If OSS wants companies to behave in certain ways, it should be encoded in the license that comes with the software, at a minimum.
My suggestion would be to have a license that makes the software free to use for anyone and companies with a maximum net profit of (say) $1M. Above this, companies need to negotiate a different (paid) license. This would enable OSS authors to have an income from their work, while not changing anything else about OSS as the price of software is basically pennies for big companies.
But wouldn't that make it non-free software? (according to the FSF definition).
Anyway, this is not about definitions.
In the end, it might be in the interest of companies too if every company paid for their FOSS. Right now, it is not in the interest of companies to pay because that would be an advantage to their competitors. So in a way, it's a vicious cycle that needs to be broken.
But it is. If people cannot run your software freely, for any purpose, then it is not free software (and that includes users who are big companies). There's really no way around that. If you are worried that companies may use your software without giving back to the community, the best is to use a copyleft license like GPL or AGPL. You can also dual-license your software as AGPL/proprietary, and sell proprietary licenses at different prices according to the client. This is a fairly common setup, and many companies appreciate it (the only issue is that all external contributors to your project must surrender their copyright to you).
In other words, it's free software. But for big companies not free as in beer.
Perhaps you should explain your objections against big companies paying for open-source software? That would be more helpful than focusing on whether it's called free or not, or on how organizations defined things in the past.
GPL isn't always adequate because some OSS authors might want their software to help entrepreneurs bootstrap their businesses.
My own objection is against non-free software. It's alright that companies pay for software. In my experience big companies are really happy to pay for free software (regardless of its license), as long as they can steer the software towards their needs, have an assurance that development does not break their tests and use cases, etc.
The GPL has no provision against entrepreneurs using it for bootstrapping their businesses; I do not understand your remark in that sense.
This is illogical. This would mean companies would never pay for any software - proprietary or FOSS - because either way, whoever is getting that money is turning around and also giving/selling the software to your competitor.
Literally the only reason companies don't pay for FOSS is they are pathologically disinclined to buy things if they don't have to. They're perfectly happy to spend money to make products, however, which is why they'll spend $500K on development of some half-baked internal tool rather than spend $200K on a license. (they also have no control over their bloated tech departments, who are full of engineers who'd rather churn out new backend tech shit than build good products for end users)
Forcing them to pay for FOSS will just result in them building more crappy things. They don't care that the result will suck or be a waste, they just don't want to buy things.
Hasn't Amazon often had no profits? Not even Hollywood accounting, but plowing revenue into growth. Are governments and nonprofits free? This doesn't seem like a promising direction to me, even though I share the goal of economic traction for free-software development.
This is how you get a million pointless subsidiaries and/or Holloywood accounting.
It would be better to incentivze companies to donate their engineers' time and work into improving the source code. Often they refuse to do that because they're petrified of patent, licensing, and intellectual property rights issues. Make that a no-brainer for them, and maybe suddenly they'd see the value in not only paying for it, but even contributing to it. I think the true value big companies can bring is an entire software development team and the 'test environment' of a big production use case.
The Polyform Small Business license does this, though the threshold is $1M in revenue, not profit.
Well, open source was created in order to make (some of) the ideas of the hippy free software movement more acceptable to businesses, so, I think you got that part backwards.
At the cost of losing the free software ideals, open source has gone mainstream, and nowadays a large fraction of the work that goes into big established open source projects is done by paid developers working for corporations. Thus, to a very large extent, open source IS businesses. They are making it in their image, to fit their needs.
I guess the lone hacker/activist has been sidelined, and others with more resources have taken over the show.
There won't be only one way of doing OSS. But I believe there will be again a rise of independent software hackers and this time they will be better equipped with tools for automation, distribution, funding, marketing, etc.
> When I go to Github, the things I notice about a project are the number of stars and forks. These are easily gameable metrics that are supposed to indicate community engagement. The second thing I notice[...]
This is a habit that you have to train yourself into picking up. For that reason, I find it odd that the author acknowledges that these are poor proxies for the things the author is really interested in.
Maybe it's because I don't play video games, but it's easy for me to forget that GitHub even displays the number of stars and forks on a repo--it's part of the UI cruft that I ignore. In fact, it's jarring when people mention them in comments, or people tout the high number of stars and forks on project pages. It's like we're living in different worlds, each with a completely different set of values.
to me that's also always a jarring (and negative) signal. Especially since plenty people use stars as bookmarks. (And don't even get me started on the ones that believe someone starring a repo is a reason to send them emails about the project! Luckily that's rare)
GNU started with the goal of bringing free/open alternatives to a Unix/POSIX-like user-space, dev tools environment, and operating system, out of a sense of freedom and a strong distaste towards playing to the tune of big players. F/OSS was never about innovation, so with Linux and the (shortly later opened-up) BSD being excellent alternatives in the mid/late-90s, where's the noble goal today, when F/OSS is abundant "on github", and cloud providers are taking advantage of it?
> the entire discussion along the lines of Free vs Open ... clearly hasn't helped with anything.
The whole point of Free (I don't know what the point of "Open" source is, but I don't want to engage in all that here) software is that the user can edit the code.
I was thinking only this morning that smartphones aren't really computers, they are malls. Sure there's a computer in there, several, but only in the same way that there are computers in your car.
And everybody is okay with this.
And it's safer!
And the freedoms you're losing you didn't know about in the first place anyway so no one misses them.
I don't like it but it looks to me like humans are shaping up to be cells in some sort of mega-cyborg.
(I'm having a ranty Sunday morning...)