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Comment by mnd999 | Hacker News Reader

It does feel like we’re coming towards the end of the open source era, imho for several reasons.

* Developers looking to try out new tech are increasing looking towards hosted free tiers instead of OSS. It’s just easier not having to figure out how to run a backend.

* The well documented (in this article) push away from copyleft licences due to the selfish and non-participatory approach of major cloud providers to OSS.

* The reduced incentive to contribute to OSS as hiring trends have drifted away from positive contributions towards leetcode etc.

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I think anyone who starts to get serious about writing software quickly ends up chafing at the constraints imposed by the free-to-paid pipelines. You get to a point where you're paying $500/mo for some project and you realize, well, I might not migrate that thing but I can definitely do it a lot cheaper for the next one if I learn some new chops. And when you face a client you can tell them how much you'll save them (or you can pocket half of it). The easiest hosted solutions are always good for trying things out, but would I commit a client's software to being backed by one? I don't even know if they'll be around. At least if I know my own infrastructure I know I can chill without being updated without warning or someone going out of business.

OSS in the end is not less technical debt, but it's less urgent and less centralized and better to monitor. Less volatile than any end to end solution.

This is probably harsh to say, but if a $500/mo expense is what breaks the bank, you can't seriously claim to be operating commercially successful software. Even small businesses spend $XX,000 a month on labor and transaction fees and vendors and rent...etc. If the option is $500/mo for some other guy's work or $3,000/mo to hire a new developer to work on recreating the already existing system full-time, the choice is pretty clear.

Small businesses are definitely not casual about 500$ mo. It is also unlikely you need to rewrite small business shop entirely to move it or that it would take too long time.

I'm not doing commercial software for end users. My projects are usually in-house apps for midsize businesses. The largest one is a local hotel chain whose entire server infrastructure I've gotten to under $400/mo. That serves their employee-facing apps (front desk and back-of-house), their reservations system (~1k bookings per day), their website (~100k uniques per month), email systems and training software. If I told them it was going to cost $3k a month, they wouldn't balk. But they've compensated me well for being able to shave it down considerably over time. It's a great company that appreciates owning their own code. If I can write software once that they would otherwise have to pay a subscription for, they'll happily shell out $100k for their own version if it saves them $2k/mo in SaS. Much of what I've saved them over time has gone into my own bank account, and they've ended up with a pretty amazing ecosystem. But also, it has to do with hard lessons I've learned from not relying too much on SaS platforms. So many have come and gone since I started writing software. In the end each one becomes a single point of failure.

> It does feel like we’re coming towards the end of the open source era, imho for several reasons.

I disagree. It takes time for open and free alternatives to newer software to emerge. Sometimes they never do. What is going on is that a lot of software is niche, and doesn't have the huge, horizontal utility of say, the Apache web server. At this moment, commercial clouds are at the center of a lot of applications, and the cost of cloud computing may require significant revenue to support operating the software. As open source, self hosted clouds become more popular, things will change.

>The well documented (in this article) push away from copyleft licences due to the selfish and non-participatory approach of major cloud providers to OSS.

I'm not sure they are non participatory. I do see where some creators of open source end up having to compete with AWS, but this literally has been the case forever. For example, many early mailserver and mailing list publishers ended up competing with the neighborhood ISP for email and mailing list hosting. It's the same old same old, just the names are different.

>The reduced incentive to contribute to OSS as hiring trends have drifted away from positive contributions towards leetcode etc.

This isn't true, either. Most companies jump when they see an open source developer, because we know very well what that developer is capable of. There's more to a developer than ability to write software, and I suspect a lot of the weird hiring processes out there are biased towards non-development skills. For larger companies, there's ability to adhere to policy, political/people skills, ability to produce under absurd levels of pressure, ability to tolerate incompetence, and your ability to be a good non-squeeky cog in the machine. A lot of open source developers don't have those skills, and probably would not stay very long at a company that interviews for those skills.

The trend towards skills verification (leetcode is one of the many ways to do this) is a counter to the number of people who are simply unskilled or lack sufficient practice to work as a professional developer at the level they are applying for. When I advertise jobs, 84% of the applicants are either flat-out unqulaified (missing required items on their resume) or fail a very simple "write a function that does a and b and returns c.

Speaking for myself, the FOSS ideals were great while I was an university student and most of my expenses were paid by external sources, the moment I got to try to make a living out of it, I ended up like the majority, back to commercial products.

As the usual security exploits in FOSS prove, no one, including big corps is willing to make it work as per ideals.

So in the end we get back to the shareware and public domain that dominated the 16 home computers, we just call it dual licensing, or put it behind SaaS walls.

I feel the opposite. Each day more and more projects are choosing to launch using truly free licences like the MIT or the BSD. Software now is more open and freer than ever.

You're free to license things however you wish, however let's not delude ourselves into thinking that permissive licenses somehow result in more "freedom" than copyleft licenses. The only freedom that you get with a permissive license is the freedom to make code non-free, which is to say, permissive licenses result in strictly less code being free.

Depends on which freedoms a given software author prioritizes.

For authors who want to maximize the freedoms of developers who directly download their software to make and redistribute derivatives and reverse dependencies and to redistribute the whole stack of their application under their choice of license with no obligations other than a notice requirement, yes, MIT and BSD style licenses maximize those freedoms.

For authors who want to maximize the ability of indirect downstream end users of their code, even those who are unaware of the origin of the code running on their system, to make sure they can fix it or have it fixed to remove bugs or better meet their needs, copyleft licenses such as the GPL do better protect those freedoms.

For the user-style freedoms in the above paragraph as applied to direct (rather than indirect) downstream users of the software author, either license is equally protective.

All of these licenses protect software freedoms, but they differ a lot in the details.

> It does feel like we’re coming towards the end of the open source era, imho for several reasons.

One of the reasons it feels that way is that there is way more software out in the wild than before. Because there is just more of it, you can draw potentially false conclusions based on where you look.

From my perspective (I work in Javascript land), OSS is going through a renaissance. There is so much high quality OSS software out there is kind of blows my mind.

> Developers looking to try out new tech are increasing noisy about hosted free tiers instead of OSS.

Fixed that for you.

Don't underestimate the silent masses who still depend on doing things "the old fashioned way". The internet can provide us with a very distorted view.

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