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Comment by anonyme-honteux | Hacker News Reader

Open source projects are under financed and their maintainers are overwhelmed. I would rather read proposed solutions about that because that seems like the more important problem.

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The economics of independently lead open source is still a problem with no solutions in sight.

The economics for corporate controlled open source are quite clear. It's a cost saver for corporations to open source solutions to common problems. This gets others to buy in, which spreads maintenance costs and ensures that no one is seriously winning in the domain of the project. Essentially de-risking cost/benefits in the domain of the project.

Another problem, which the author didn't discuss, is that corporate controlled software is often designed by a committee, or designed by those with political capital within the corporation. There is not usually a strong selection mechanism for good system designers, or good open source leaders. Go is a happy and rare exception. Projects coming out of corporations are often not as well designed as projects which rose to prominence organically through differential amplification by the community.

I’d also like to throw another counter example out. C# and Typescript from Microsoft are both excellent languages and are led by Anders Hejlsberg.

Is that the same Anders Hejlsberg who developed Turbo Pascal and Delphi for Borland, another company which microsoft successfully crushed in the 80's and 90's? (Hint: It is).

We could have C# 30 years before we did if it weren't for microsoft.

C# came out in 2000; Microsoft didn't even exist in 1970.

The C# language team are doing a great job. Most of what I hate about C#/.NET—such as the lack of a UI framework that runs on Linux, as I just bemoaned in another comment—was either inherited from the earliest versions or got forced through by management at MS.

Anders Hejlsberg doesn't have anything to do with C# for a few years already.

His focus is TypeScript.

Mads Torgersen has been leading C# design since version 7, more or less.

The economics of all this is where it's at, and so important to understand.

Look at through a lens of scarcity. What Google sells that is 'scarce' is not the Go runtime - it's ads and other things.

But an independent open source project doesn't really have a source of 'scarcity' that it can sell.

https://journal.dedasys.com/2007/02/03/in-thrall-to-scarcity...

Since the 70s, Washington has largely abandoned public investment in favor of the private sector. Zero surprise that this dynamic emerged in the software industry.

Of course, in an alternate timeline where the government successfully funds public/"open source" software, this post would be titled "Stop Building on Government-Controlled Languages".

Even worse, neoliberal policies have taken things developed with public dollars and gave them away to private firms for them to close off and take ownership of.

Look at what happened to NSFNet and how it's no longer a network that's open but now a part of a large, billion/trillion dollar oligopoly with no obligation to serve anyone who won't make them a profit.

Every where in "west". 1975 is the critical year.

1971 was when Washington really abandoned the Westphalian, internationalist, UN-arbitrated world order in favor of seeking unipolar world domination, by abandoning the gold-backed USD in favor of a violence-backed USD/"petrodollar".

Thank you for the info.

> Open source projects are under financed

Freemium format. It floats the WordPress plugin ecosystem. That ecosystem has $1 bn size. Likely larger now since that statistic was made 1-2 years ago.

You give the base software and most if it free. You provide paid addons for niche, corporate, business use cases etc. Everyone is happy - the userbase gets their software free, advanced & business users have advanced features that could not have made it into the main software in addition to having paid support. And most important for everyone - the project & its organization can sustain itself and it can keep maintaining its software.

So become a corporation?

I think whatever format that works would be ok, right? A cooperative, or a foundation with an attached company (a la WP foundation + Automattic etc), whatever that works would be ok.

I typoed corporation. My point was that you would become the very thing you were trying to avoid.

There is no problem in organization. What matters is who controls an organization and how it works. A corporation is just an organizational entity. It can be run in many ways. It does not have to be organized and run like a privately owned capitalist corporation.

The difference isn't organization, it's whether the goals of the project need to be yoked to a profit motive. If they are, invariably you're going to eventually put the cart before the horse.

How do you accomplish that for a programming language? Make the language open source but sell a proprietary debugger? And how does that solve the problem corporations controlling languages, given that you would presumably have a corporation controlling at least the proprietary components?

> How do you accomplish that for a programming language?

That's a more difficult case of course. But I believe enterprise support and custom enterprise features/addons could help in the case of languages.

> corporation controlling at least the proprietary components?

WP plugins are still GPL. But the users can buy, download them from the original source, install them on their site, and update them from their site with one click. Coupled with premium support, this works well. Its a bigger risk and hassle to 'pirate' the plugins from 3rd parties rather than just getting everything directly from the source. (though such 'piracy' does have impact).

In any case, one organization controlling at least the proprietary, custom enterprise components is much better than the alternative.

Think Pycharm.

Look at Laravel. Open source framework creates saas opportunities, conference opportunities, sponsorship opportunities.

Look at tailwinds, open source lib with saas opportunities that netted the creator millions of dollars

I am just going to link to a comment that I agree with - because I don't agree that open source projects are under financed.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33985785

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