6 ms·
I think we have got open source funding all wrong. The thing that makes open source great is that, in parallel, half a million projects are ticking along from
by benologist 7y ago
I think we have got open source funding all wrong. The thing that makes open source great is that, in parallel, half a million projects are ticking along from which we are learning what is good, what is bad, what is the future of our art. It is education. It is research.
We look for 100,000 individual solutions to making rent while FAANG are just sitting there with a quarter trillion plus in cash waiting to benefit from the best everything that emerges from this massive, free R&D pipeline. Take the best ideas, hire the best programmers, copy the best software, adopt the best practices. From top to bottom you could probably find 10,000+ open source contributors across their stacks, and to enable that open source software required even more contributors, and influencing it all was the previous generations of contributors.
I think the best solution is FAANG pay it forward and support the entire opensource R&D pipeline that enables them to hoard so much money. Between them they hire more people than there are open source developers so it's ridiculous they cannot support them all. It's a security issue that they do not support them at all for the most part, like with OpenSSL, like with injecting ads into node modules, like with selling modules to be repurposed as malware. We haven't even found the stuff compromised by state agencies yet.
- icebraining 7y ago> I think the best solution is FAANG pay it forward and support the entire opensource R&D pipeline That's not so much a solution, but a new problem: how to get FAANG to actually do that?
- lacker 7y agoGoogle+Microsoft+Facebook contribute quite a lot to open source though. React, Angular, TypeScript, Kubernetes, TensorFlow, etc etc....
- benologist 7y agoTo write React Facebook needed 20 years of R&D done by open source... jquery, mootools, long list of dead stuff today we needed to learn from. If Facebook needs 1000 projects to show them how to produce the best React then they need to keep 1000 projects in the pipelines so they can build the best successor to current solutions too. That's why they need to fund open source.
- kortilla 7y agoNo they don’t. They didn’t find any of those projects and it worked out quite well. Let a thousand flowers bloom.
- benologist 7y agoThey need all those projects to surface good ideas and they need all that parallelism to identify mistakes they can avoid. Without it what do they base decisions on? React would be guesswork or an internal tool built in isolation that only solves their specific problems if even that good. This is how software is evolving. If there is no parallel evolution it will take 1000x longer to do so. If it takes 1000x longer to evolve it takes 1000x longer to invent opportunity and savings for FAANG.
- kortilla 7y agoAnd you have made no arguments supporting the notion that they need to fund open source for that to happen.
- root_axis 7y agoThis is true of all software whether you're Facebook or a solo open-source developer; we all stand on the shoulders of giants, literally nobody doing work today can claim otherwise. > That's why they need to fund open source. They do. They pay employees to work on software they contribute to the open-source community. To build React, Facebook had to rely on "20 years of R&D" but also millions of dollars in engineering hours.
- benologist 7y agoFunding open source != paying thirty people a few hundred grand and the thousands they depend on nothing. It is an obvious resource allocation problem. Why should the resources not come from the companies extracting the most cash value from open source?
- 7y ago
- kortilla 7y agoYou vastly overestimate how far that money would go to just “hire all the open source developers”. You miss the point of open source if you think it entitled you to money from people who use it.