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Comment by Traubenfuchs | Hacker News Reader

Open source is EXTREMELY HARMFUL to the non-owning/entrepreneuring class: Big business can built their billion dollar companies on open source, while the developers lose out: Without open source, companies would have to hire more devs to implement solutions, or they would have to pay external devs money for their solutions. This would also foster competition between different solution offerings.

It's very unfortunate that software engineers, especially the good ones able to create libraries used by pretty much everyone, seem to lack the drive to monetize their work and instead accept payment through GitHub stars, likes and prayers.

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What a peculiar comment on this article in particular. The author mentions right in the article that they run several open source project as a business venture, placing them squarely in the entrepreneuring class. It's just that libjpeg-turbo doesn't seem to be very successful from a monetization standpoint.

> It's very unfortunate that software engineers, especially the good ones able to create libraries used by pretty much everyone, seem to lack the drive to monetize their work

It seems quite obvious to me that most open source libraries are used by pretty much everyone because they are free to use. Personal projects rapidly become unfeasibly expensive if you need to pay even just a few bucks for 30-50 dependencies each, and businesses have procurement procedures around purchases that tremendously inflate the real cost of purchasing something. "Free" is the only price at which such friction is avoided, and so is the only price at which software spreads to large amounts of users.

This is why we have AGPL. The testament for its effectiveness is the visceral revulsion it evokes from "entrepreneur" types.

> The testament for its effectiveness is the visceral revulsion it evokes from "entrepreneur" types.

Exactly. It is interesting to me that GP uses the word "open source" while entirely missing the point of free software [1], and how copyleft licenses were designed to resist corporations taking from the commons without contributing back from the start.

> “Free” and “open” are rivals for mindshare. Free software and open source are different ideas but, in most people's way of looking at software, they compete for the same conceptual slot. When people become habituated to saying and thinking “open source,” that is an obstacle to their grasping the free software movement's philosophy and thinking about it. If they have already come to associate us and our software with the word “open,” we may need to shock them intellectually before they recognize that we stand for something else. Any activity that promotes the word “open” tends to extend the curtain that hides the ideas of the free software movement.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....

You're looking at open source from the production side, but have you thought about the consumption side? I'm old enough to remember when Sun Microsystems expected you to pay for a C compiler.

Imagine trying to write Javascript when every package you import incurs a license fee.

> This would also foster competition between different solution offerings

In practice, it seems not to work out that way: the nadir was probably the early 90s, when Microsoft had killed off all the competing PC operating systems and Jobs had yet to return to Apple.

Monetization of open source only really works if

a) the non-commercial usage is restricted, so there's a reason to buy a commercial license, and

b) The copyright is assigned to a singular person or entity so there's no confusion as the recipient of money.

Sadly both of these things conflict with Open Source either definitionally ("no restrictions on use") or in spirit ("single copyright holder/CLA means no or an exploited community").

Strongly agree with your first part, but with the second part, it's not always a lack of drive. I have a ~3k stars github project, and tried fairly hard to monetize it (even took VC money at one point), but without any success.

I realized that monetizing is mostly about selling, which I'm simply not good at (probably because I hate it). Telling open source developers to simply get more hustle isn't really a solution.

A big open source project isn't even good for your career. In my experience, recruiters don't care at all.

This is confusing to me.

Rather than one or two good, open, reference implementations everyone uses you'd rather have multiple proprietary solutions? That seems worse for people who want to learn from a commons of knowledge and hugely inefficient and a waste of time.

I can see an argument for copyleft style licenses for this stuff (though I fundamentally disagree with them, freedom based on copyright that requires police and courts to enforce isn't free) but you appear to be arguing for completely closed solutions, though I assume I'm misunderstanding?

In my opinion, excess greed is far more harmful.

I am very glad I get to use open-source software at no cost. There are profiteers, sure, but I believe in the end open-source software will be more beneficial for society as a whole as it is much easier to reuse code.

That's why we have the Copyleft licenses like the GPL, which are also Open Source.

It's pretty simple. Developing and sharing open source work is paid hobby at best. There is almost no other rewards, even to try improving one's employability is hazardous at best. Always have, always is. This a cause a lot of frustration to people that expected anything else, but it's true to most non-economically motivated work.

It's done, or should be done, by people that want to build things they like and share it. Any other use is just some kind of hidden or not so welcome motive, and seen for what it is. Billion dollars companies or not.

I feel like the type of license does matter, consider the case if most open source as AGPL instead of MIT for example?

Is this sarcasm?

It's weird. Without Open Source, I don't know how small companies could compete against, I don't know... Oracle, for example.

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