Hacker News Reader

Comment by zokier | Hacker News Reader

The ending paragraphs:

> Perhaps this is not only the future of open-source software. No closed-source developer can match the pool of talent the Linux community can bring to bear on a problem. Very few could afford even to hire the more than 200 (1999: 600, 2000: 800) people who have contributed to fetchmail!

> Perhaps in the end the open-source culture will triumph not because cooperation is morally right or software ``hoarding'' is morally wrong (assuming you believe the latter, which neither Linus nor I do), but simply because the closed-source world cannot win an evolutionary arms race with open-source communities that can put orders of magnitude more skilled time into a problem.

Problematically I don't really see anywhere discussion where that large amount of skilled time originates; the economics of the situation. Even developers need to put food on the table.

View on HN

Yeah the fallacy is that most open source comes from independent programmers

What has undoubtedly happened since Raymond’s time is that Intel, Google, etc became the biggest Linux contributors

Mozilla has been almost entirely funded by search revenue for decades

Big pieces of open source like the JVM and MySQL seem to require corporate stewards, for better or worse

Microsoft did a 180 on open source, to some acclaim, which I’m still skeptical of

So the framing is it a bit wrong now, and modern writing probably needs new terms to make these distinctions clear

There is independent open source but it seems clear that most open source is funded by commercial entities

Further, the largest open source projects --- Linux included --- are increasingly gatekept, and have their own priesthoods. And that's arguably been for the good!

But it's a different kind of gatekeeping to the increasingly exploitative and user-hostile world of commercial closed-source software. Perhaps "leaders" in a very literal sense would be a more apt term than "gatekeepers".

That's one way that the FOSS model will always have a built-in advantage: if anyone steering the ship tries to throw the users overboard then someone else can always fork the project as a last resort. This has actually happened in a few significant cases and is always there as a warning sign to anyone thinking of steering a new course for the wrong reasons.

I believe the same thing everyone else does about the superiority of open-source software development. I just don't think this article is a good explanation of where that superiority comes from. In large part, the importance of Linux's code being open is that it makes it safer for large corporations (Intel, Google) to invest time in it; that has nothing to do with a bazaar ethic!

I've come around to thinking of corporate open source as a way companies can partition what they want to compete vs collaborate on. This is sort of a variation on the commoditize your complement strategy. Most of business is not zero sum, so I don't think it's particularly surprising competitors do agree on sharing the cost of maintaining infrastructure that isn't their moat or basis of market share.

That doesn’t seem fundamentally bad to me. What do you think the risks are of this approach?

Open source has gotten infinitely more industrial-commercial, but it has only further proven again and again and again the Bazaar model.

Cathedrals develop fast & then quickly move to only ossify & stagnante. Bazaars beget diversity & experimentation & exploration, which is expanded upon & grown & reused, and can keep "feeling" at the edge.

Heck yes software organizations realized their stale dry inwarsa focused industrial processes were being outclassed, were making them uncompetitive versus software models where the world could participate suggest & expand the ideas.

That the corpoate world has assimilated some of the genetics to remain competitive at all seems unremarkable to me, versus the story of how vastly the Bazaar model has come to be necessary to be an at all longstanding player.

Also in the end I don't think every commercial product has an equally good free alternative.

I am wondering if you can share a few words your skepticism around Microsoft and Open Source.

You sound pragmatic and I might learn a lot from your views.

Corporations are not people and I still see some people within MS do some dumb stuff. That said, the company overall seems to have embraced Open Source quite fundamentally and genuinely.

First off, most of .NET is firmly and truly Open Source at this point. Azure is deeply in bed with Linux. Microsoft Edge shows that MS has learned that they can add value without having to take on the entire codebase.

Well it's mainly a personal choice, but for example I pointed out dark patterns with VSCode here with regard to telemetry

i.e. according to VS Codium, they are not able to fully disable telemetry

https://lobste.rs/s/mt2p8g/google_groups_has_been_left_die#c...

And the fact that basically all software is filled with dark patterns these days, so you might be able to say Microsoft is far from the worst offender

But personally I would choose to invest my time elsewhere

---

I would probably rather use commercial software with telemetry enabled as long as it was disclosed, rather than "open source" with intentional confusion around the issue

>Very few could afford even to hire the more than 200 (1999: 600, 2000: 800) people who have contributed to fetchmail!

I'm willing to bet those "200" people are 1-3 core contributors and 197-199 people who once fixed some bug and have like 2 commits in the whole codebase, or changed a comment's message.

Also "Fetchmail" as some kind of high bar? Commercial companies have produced software with 10 to 100x the scope and user base (and quality). Including back then.

Notice how the argument breaks down.

It is the case that the open source model has made Linux difficult to compete with (though that is in significant ways the result of commercial development; still, those corporate contributors were coerced into open source development by Linux's success, and would have done things differently in a VxWorks alternate history).

But that same open source model produced Fetchmail. Most startups could produce something comparable to Fetchmail, even if forced to use 1999 tools. The open source model didn't turn Fetchmail into an insurmountably dominant tool in its space; Fetchmail had fallen into irrelevance even before Google Mail made all of these kinds of tools irrelevant.

> 200 (1999: 600, 2000: 800) people who have contributed to fetchmail

That doesn't sound believable. How did he come up with these numbers?

Looking through the commits?

You mean like this?

  $ git clone -q https://gitlab.com/fetchmail/fetchmail.git
  $ git -C fetchmail/ shortlog -s | wc -l
  46

OK, they started using git only in ~2010, so earlier commits are less likely to be attributed correctly, but still, that's not even the same order of magnitude.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com