Free and Open Source Software–and Other Market Failures
cacm.acm.org
cacm.acm.org
However, the core idea of sharing source code is not exclusive to the FOSS movement. This concept aligns with the original intentions of the Berne Convention. The United States adopted the Berne Convention relatively late, in the late 80s if I'm not mistaken. Before this adoption, source code made publicly available without prior copyright registration procedures was effectively considered public domain. This situation allowed businesses and startups to exploit these sources to create closed-source commercial products without crediting the original authors.
The Berne Convention was a game changer. It introduced a new rule that simply making source code publicly available automatically grants the author exclusive copyright of their work, without any bureaucratic hurdles.
This rule opened up new possibilities for programmers to create open-source projects in the broadest sense. Nevertheless, due to historical reasons, it was not an easy task for the public to understand this new reality. The FOSS movement worked hard to convince people that publishing software in source form is perfectly fine.
However, the free-software philosophy can be quite restrictive compared to what the Berne Convention actually allows authors to do with their work. This ideology is so pervasive today that many programmers believe that publishing source code must involve using an OSI-approved (F)OSS license. Any deviation from this is often seen as supporting outdated business models and harming the programming community's ability to share their work with the public.
These misconceptions likely arise because the FOSS movement has taken the lead in promoting the principles of the Berne Convention, adding its ideological restrictions. The rarely acknowledged truth is that the Berne Convention offers a wide range of possibilities that could benefit the community of authors more than big-tech corporations. The Four Freedoms of Free Software significantly restrict these options for authors.
More importantly, big businesses have already adapted to this new reality and are utilizing this philosophy to their advantage.
I haven’t worked in OS development so I’m almost certainly naive here. But, the philosophy of minimal programs always seemed like the solution to this kind of thing? Ideally the program which breaks should be only a couple thousand lines long, so you can fit the whole thing in your brain and fix it, right?
Golly!
Software still sacks
Windows still used by default
Windows still dreadfully bad. Especially relative to FOSS
Consumers still getting g locked in to substandard products by vendor lock in
The modern frustrations are different, but not entirely different
Yes, open source is now common place.
But I sometimes wonder if it, too, is a market failure, in that many projects are governed by, or mostly funded by, single entities, e.g. Facebook (React), Google (Flutter, Go, Android), Docker (Docker), and so on...
Is C++ a better example of open source, with broad industry contributions?
What about WebAssembly? Major browsers (Chromium) can pretty much refuse to support some functionality, and that'll be the end of that. The power centralization has severe consequences for openness.
I'm not convinced that community/industry-driven public-good type of FOSS will continue to flourish. If anything, I worry that we'll end up with a bunch of "open source" projects that in reality have built-in limitations (or as the author said "a carefully engineered bottleneck"), that prevent truly open adoption (like HashiCorp preventing contributions that compete with their commercial edition feature offering).
The important part though is that people have the freedom to use, modify, and learn from them. Imho it would only be market failure if that freedom disappears.
In practice, however, the source code can be overwhelmingly large or complex, e.g. Chromium.
And yes, even if you're blocked from contributing to the project, you could 'just' fork it. But it would be incredibly hard to maintain a fork, and to get users to use/support it.
It is therefore important to distinguish between community-owned projects (e.g. Linux Foundation) that aim to be inclusive, and those that are privately-owned, and can easily have political behaviors (e.g. intentionally ignoring contributions, e.g. VSCode, because it goes against your interests, e.g. .NET, Copilot, etc.).
There is nothing inherently wrong with Facebook making React open-source. React undoubtedly benefits everyone.
However, the issue lies in the fact that this practice doesn't create a true "market". Facebook has made a relatively small and insignificant portion of their source code available for free, which doesn't impact their business significantly. Meanwhile, they have encouraged thousands of programmers around the world to develop React extensions and publish them for free under similar terms. For an individual programmer, unlike Facebook, this means giving away 100% of their work effort without charge. While this benefits society in terms of knowledge sharing, it almost always financially benefits businesses and big tech companies.
Overall, this model creates a situation where most programmers end up doing part of the job for businesses for free, and they have to earn their living by working for these companies as well.
This model exploits programmers' labor in two interconnected ways. Simultaneously, there is widespread public promotion that publishing under OSS licenses is moral and the only way to go.