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In spite of all its amazing aspects, one obvious drawback of the open source movement is that it devalues a lot of stuff that you could once build a business ar

In spite of all its amazing aspects, one obvious drawback of the open source movement is that it devalues a lot of stuff that you could once build a business around and support a lot of people making a living. Category after category of software businesses have declined in the face of great free alternatives - OS's, languages and compilers, server software, databases. Tears for Larry Ellison aside, I do feel social systems / economies work best when there's a mutual exchange of value, a win-win rather than a win-lose, and the classic simple payment in exchange for software has a certain fairness and sanity to it. E.g. the iOS app store was a lot nicer and high quality before ad-supported / in-app purchases became the norm. Anyway something like ESR proposes here seems promising. I'm not an open source maintainer myself (except for my magnum opus https://github.com/QuadrupleA/private-secure-sharing-buttons https://github.com/QuadrupleA/private-secure-sharing-buttons) but seems like a lot of important-project maintainers find themselves in a demanding position with little reward besides ego-stroking or future promise of job opportunities to make money elsewhere.

trevyn 7y ago
The value of everything approaching zero is a signal of a post-scarcity world, which seems like a good thing, even if it requires some adjustment.
- jackyinger 7y ago
  If the useful open source software development work was not scarce these maintainers would certainly not be under immense pressure. To boot, the entire idea of post scarcity is preposterous. Until the theorized heat death of the universe, there will always be uneven distribution of resources and some things that are better than others.
- mattmanser 7y ago
  I think it's more because there's a lot of software that's too cheap to charge for, but has too many edge cases for the average programmer to get right. Logging is a perfect example, server-side logs are all handled by free frameworks (too cheap to charge for, but everyone needs it), but client-side is often handled by companies (just complex enough to make money on). The former is often handled by LBIPs like Eric, where-as the latter is either written in house (usually badly) or you get something like Sentry.
  - erikpukinskis 7y ago
    The beauty of software is only one person needs to get it right and then we all can use it.
erikpukinskis 7y ago
> I do feel social systems / economies work best when there's a mutual exchange of value That’s too broad of a claim to possibly be true. Many things are required for smoothly running economies, and sometimes a ledger is the problem and sometimes it’s the solution.
- 0815test 7y ago
  > sometimes a ledger is the problem and sometimes it’s the solution. And sometimes it's the solution in search of a problem cough cough blockchain cough cough
  - erikpukinskis 7y ago
    If everyone you need to send money to is legally accessible through the international banking system, I’m happy for you. But don’t throw the others under the bus. Some people have family in places you can’t easily send money to, it’s not a joke.
jandrewrogers 7y ago
A key nuance is that open source has largely only devalued software that any competent software engineer could write. In this sense, open source replaces software that was essentially selling labor rather than expertise. A developer always has the option to write this software themselves if they don't want to pay for it. The price of a product of undifferentiated labor will converge on the cost of that labor in a well-functioning market, which in the case of open source is effectively zero. On the other hand, software that requires rare and difficult to acquire expertise -- software development where competence is insufficient -- faces little threat from open source in practice. This creates two-tier markets that differentiate on the replicability of capability. Products that are replicable by any software developer eventually will be in open source. But there are still large gaps in capabilities between closed and open source in some markets because the average software developer has no obvious way to replicate those capabilities on a purely technical level. In essence, you can only make money if you are doing hardcore R&D. This strongly incentivizes the creation of new capabilities but also disincentivizes publication of CS research. You see this in markets like databases, where open source has captured almost the entire market for undifferentiated capabilities, and there is a lucrative high-end market with unique product capabilities that don't exist in open source or CS literature. The trend toward treating CS research as trade secrets, originally started because algorithm patents were impractical to enforce, turned out to be effective at maintaining profitability in high-end software products if open source can't replicate capability.
- Tomte 7y ago
  > A key nuance is that open source has largely only devalued software that any competent software engineer could write I don't think so. Take GCC or Clang, for example. While I have taken a lot of compiler courses at university, I couldn't build a production compiler for a real language, without dedicating a decade of my life or so to it. What Open Source projects really bring to the table is massive manpower over decades. Those projects that become popular, at least. And then no smaller dev shop (or single developer except Fabrice Bellard and a handful others) can possibly compete.
  - jandrewrogers 7y ago

trevyn 7y ago

The value of everything approaching zero is a signal of a post-scarcity world, which seems like a good thing, even if it requires some adjustment.

jackyinger 7y ago
If the useful open source software development work was not scarce these maintainers would certainly not be under immense pressure. To boot, the entire idea of post scarcity is preposterous. Until the theorized heat death of the universe, there will always be uneven distribution of resources and some things that are better than others.
mattmanser 7y ago
I think it's more because there's a lot of software that's too cheap to charge for, but has too many edge cases for the average programmer to get right. Logging is a perfect example, server-side logs are all handled by free frameworks (too cheap to charge for, but everyone needs it), but client-side is often handled by companies (just complex enough to make money on). The former is often handled by LBIPs like Eric, where-as the latter is either written in house (usually badly) or you get something like Sentry.
- erikpukinskis 7y ago
  The beauty of software is only one person needs to get it right and then we all can use it.

erikpukinskis 7y ago

> I do feel social systems / economies work best when there's a mutual exchange of value That’s too broad of a claim to possibly be true. Many things are required for smoothly running economies, and sometimes a ledger is the problem and sometimes it’s the solution.

0815test 7y ago
> sometimes a ledger is the problem and sometimes it’s the solution. And sometimes it's the solution in search of a problem cough cough blockchain cough cough
- erikpukinskis 7y ago
  If everyone you need to send money to is legally accessible through the international banking system, I’m happy for you. But don’t throw the others under the bus. Some people have family in places you can’t easily send money to, it’s not a joke.

jandrewrogers 7y ago

A key nuance is that open source has largely only devalued software that any competent software engineer could write. In this sense, open source replaces software that was essentially selling labor rather than expertise. A developer always has the option to write this software themselves if they don't want to pay for it. The price of a product of undifferentiated labor will converge on the cost of that labor in a well-functioning market, which in the case of open source is effectively zero. On the other hand, software that requires rare and difficult to acquire expertise -- software development where competence is insufficient -- faces little threat from open source in practice. This creates two-tier markets that differentiate on the replicability of capability. Products that are replicable by any software developer eventually will be in open source. But there are still large gaps in capabilities between closed and open source in some markets because the average software developer has no obvious way to replicate those capabilities on a purely technical level. In essence, you can only make money if you are doing hardcore R&D. This strongly incentivizes the creation of new capabilities but also disincentivizes publication of CS research. You see this in markets like databases, where open source has captured almost the entire market for undifferentiated capabilities, and there is a lucrative high-end market with unique product capabilities that don't exist in open source or CS literature. The trend toward treating CS research as trade secrets, originally started because algorithm patents were impractical to enforce, turned out to be effective at maintaining profitability in high-end software products if open source can't replicate capability.

Tomte 7y ago
> A key nuance is that open source has largely only devalued software that any competent software engineer could write I don't think so. Take GCC or Clang, for example. While I have taken a lot of compiler courses at university, I couldn't build a production compiler for a real language, without dedicating a decade of my life or so to it. What Open Source projects really bring to the table is massive manpower over decades. Those projects that become popular, at least. And then no smaller dev shop (or single developer except Fabrice Bellard and a handful others) can possibly compete.
- jandrewrogers 7y ago