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> If it’s truly open source, one business shouldn’t dominate the project’s development. That’s tantamount to the project becoming shared source that accepts com

by avar 8y ago

> If it’s truly open source, one business shouldn’t dominate the project’s development. That’s tantamount to the project becoming shared source that accepts community contributions. Open Source has never meant anything of the sort. You always have a tyranny of the maintainer. Whether that's because it's one guy's hobby project and he's not interested in your patch because he doesn't personally need it, or because it's some giant corporation and it doesn't align with their interest, or anything in between. In either case, Open Source has never been about other people being obligated to do work for you, which is what accepting a patch amounts to. Most contributors don't stick around, so integrating something means carrying technical debt going forward. It's about you being able to say the maintainer is wrong, and invest your own time in maintaining a fork or a local patch. Anything beyond that (like upstream accepting your patch) is just gravy.

softwaredoug 8y ago
You’re right, I was overzealous with that statement. I think my opinion would be the “free” in FOSS is not supported when a business monopolizes a community. That building a company to effectively control the project is at odds with a healthy open source community. I hate defending Amazon. But if we think of Amazon as “in the Mongo community” then what Mongo, etc are doing is picking winners and losers in their community. That gets ugly, and creates a lot of incentives in that community for everyone to say “all hail Mongo Inc”. Effectively the community around the project becomes indistinguishable from the user community around a proprietary software. Everyone takes from the mothership, few give back, nobody questions or debates centralized decisions made, learned helplessness ensues... I personally feel this is very counter to what FOSS is and should be. And I dont think it’s in the long term interests of the project, community and user base around the project

by avar 8y ago

softwaredoug 8y ago

You’re right, I was overzealous with that statement. I think my opinion would be the “free” in FOSS is not supported when a business monopolizes a community. That building a company to effectively control the project is at odds with a healthy open source community. I hate defending Amazon. But if we think of Amazon as “in the Mongo community” then what Mongo, etc are doing is picking winners and losers in their community. That gets ugly, and creates a lot of incentives in that community for everyone to say “all hail Mongo Inc”. Effectively the community around the project becomes indistinguishable from the user community around a proprietary software. Everyone takes from the mothership, few give back, nobody questions or debates centralized decisions made, learned helplessness ensues... I personally feel this is very counter to what FOSS is and should be. And I dont think it’s in the long term interests of the project, community and user base around the project