Comment by sangnoir | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sangnoir | Hacker News Reader

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> But I find it depressing to read threads like this.

Me too - it's as if the entire scene has "sold out". I'm younger than you are, but I entered the Free Software(TM) scene as a zealot and a true believer - you probably had to back in the day because the overall software quality of the entire ecosystem wasn't close to parity to proprietary solutions (some parts of it were clearly superior, e.g. Apache vs. IIS). I think this high bar resulted in a self-selected group being involved in LUGs and similar groups. These days, the bar is much lower, thanks to Github and the large number of high-quality FOSS projects that are market leaders - far better than proprietary equivalents.

My theory is that with this self-selecting filter gone, a lot of developers are now part of the community for self-serving reasons, so their attitude is ...mercenary. Its now all about "How does this project help me and make my life convenient as a developer" rather than "How does this project help software users like me": it's a subtle difference, but with far-reaching consequences.

I don't think we were naive - we thought we had won when corporations defected, but our victory was subverted and it feels more and more like most corporations are a fifth column. "Open Source Software" is slowly suffocating "Free Software".

>Its now all about "How does this project help me and make my life convenient as a developer" rather than "How does this project help software users like me"

I don't think this is a new thing, or something that is necessarily correlated. I've seen plenty of old open source projects that are totally obtuse and obscure to everyone but the developer -- having that attitude is not mutually exclusive with being a FOSS enthusiast. Probably more people are developing this stuff for money now, but that's a different thing from the "selling out" you were talking about.

Github didn't change much here if you ask me, in the old days it was Sourceforge, and you can still find a lot of those obscure projects still hosted there.

> I don't think this is a new thing, or something that is necessarily correlated.

Agreed - it's not new, but its certainly related as it is at the root of the philosophical differences between BSD-style licenses and GPL, and the respective licenses popularity over time support my thesis.

Not only are more people developing stuff for money, there are fewer who are developing it to scratch an itch and giving it to the world for free. For a large number of people (too large, if you ask me), the process is now:

1. Author popular open source project

2. ???

3. Profit

Free software used to be a way to avoid exploitation, now developers (and corporations!) are tripping over themselves to exploit the popularity of their FOSS projects - that's what feels like "selling out", because money/control is the goal now.

> Github didn't change much here if you ask me, in the old days it was Sourceforge, and you can still find a lot of those obscure projects still hosted there.

Git, Github and turn-key CI lowered the bar by a lot! Forking an existing project or getting a new one off the ground is much easier now, which is a blessing and a curse - but mostly a blessing. Building and packaging software by hand (ok, using Makefiles) would filter out all, but the very committed - and that was what you had to do in the Sourceforge era. I didn't say it was impossible in the past, only that the technical (and commitment) bars were much higher

Money and control was always the goal though. Linux has always been popular with sysadmins that used it to run their company's servers so they could, you know, make money. Some of it was invested back. I don't think those big initial investments really came from anywhere else.

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