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> Open source software is more than a license and code. It is a community and the digital public square. Unfortunately, there's absolutely nothing about the OS

> Open source software is more than a license and code. It is a community and the digital public square. Unfortunately, there's absolutely nothing about the OSS community that actually instills this mantra in people. I like to think that I also see OSS as a community and digital public square, but there's no universality to that philosophy. > Either we as a community hold ourselves and others within our community to a higher standard than the text of a license, or licenses will inevitably become increasingly restrictive in the future, to the detriment of all. There's just no way that the community will ever do this because there are inherently conflicting incentives to participating in OSS. If you tried to explicitly motivate people to do this, you'd immediately get pushback from the individualistic elements of the community that don't want to participate in something that they feel is politically motivated or that Amazon did nothing wrong. OSS is a great thing that has tremendously benefited the industry, but the idealism of a community acting together without any consequences or incentives to do so is truly folly. As much as I wish OSS had more of a true community feel to it (and I think there are little pockets where this is tangibly felt), OSS largely exists to provide tools for commercial software development. Those people are out to build businesses and accrue wealth, not fortify the OSS community. I'm sure there are people that actually work to accomplish both, but the vast majority of founders and companies I've worked for in my career don't see OSS as a community. They see it as a giant puzzle box where each piece is an OSS project and their goal is connect pieces together in order to sell a product to somebody. Get acquired/IPO and you've solved the puzzle.

tannhaeuser 6y ago
> OSS is a great thing that has tremendously benefited the industry I'm beginning to question this. The proliferation and commoditization of F/OSS is what made SaaS business thrive, and made it so that integration and polish is the only avenue left to make a buck, leading to our paltry attention economy, oligopoly, and platform lock-in by network effects. This after decades of personal computing striving to liberate users from mainframes. F/OSS is also drying out - when was the last time you used a piece of software that truly achieved something useful on its own rather than solving a perceived problem that only exists because of the idiosyncratic nature of the web and cloud stacks? Meanwhile, maintainers of popular F/OSS get nothing in return.
- dboreham 6y ago
  It benefitted the hardware industry in the same way free gasoline would benefit the auto industry.
- Intermernet 6y ago
  "when was the last time you used a piece of software that truly achieved something useful on its own rather than solving a perceived problem that only exists because of the idiosyncratic nature of the web and cloud stacks?" Go and Rust. Probably unpopular opinions, but I'm very glad those two languages are open source.
  - pwdisswordfish0 6y ago
    I'd bet that this outlook is the sort of narrow-sighted, can't-even-understand-the-question sort of thinking that the person you're responding to had in mind when asking the question—as what not to focus on when talking about the successes of FOSS. That even with the point made in a very straightforward way it gets responses like this is a huge signal of what sort of problem we're dealing with. Go and Rust amount to infrastructure, not software that "truly achieve[s] something useful on its own".
- save_ferris 6y ago
  > The proliferation and commoditization of F/OSS is what made SaaS business thrive, and made it so that integration and polish is the only avenue left to make a buck, leading to our paltry attention economy, oligopoly, and platform lock-in by network effects. Do I think F/OSS played a role in these issues? Absolutely. Do I think it's the primary role in causing these issues? Definitely not. I'd argue that weak antitrust law, ill-intentioned VC money, and lack of oversight of software titans play the biggest role in what you've described here. Yes, F/OSS gave the companies tools to iterate over app development quickly, but they were pushed for hockey stick growth and total market domination by the checkbooks, and the government has completely failed to police their behavior. F/OSS gave people with questionable incentives the ability to do questionable things, but it didn't create the motivation to do those questionable things. > when was the last time you used a piece of software that truly achieved something useful on its own rather than solving a perceived problem that only exists because of the idiosyncratic nature of the web and cloud stacks? I actually use a fair amount of F/OSS that is independently useful to me, projects like Hammerspoon, MIDIMonitor, VLC, MuseScore, and others. Yes, the majority of F/OSS that I use is for commercial purposes, but that's certainly not exclusive. > Meanwhile, maintainers of popular F/OSS get nothing in return. I completely agree with this, and I think it's one of the most critical problems to the F/OSS movement.

tannhaeuser 6y ago

> OSS is a great thing that has tremendously benefited the industry I'm beginning to question this. The proliferation and commoditization of F/OSS is what made SaaS business thrive, and made it so that integration and polish is the only avenue left to make a buck, leading to our paltry attention economy, oligopoly, and platform lock-in by network effects. This after decades of personal computing striving to liberate users from mainframes. F/OSS is also drying out - when was the last time you used a piece of software that truly achieved something useful on its own rather than solving a perceived problem that only exists because of the idiosyncratic nature of the web and cloud stacks? Meanwhile, maintainers of popular F/OSS get nothing in return.

dboreham 6y ago
It benefitted the hardware industry in the same way free gasoline would benefit the auto industry.
Intermernet 6y ago
"when was the last time you used a piece of software that truly achieved something useful on its own rather than solving a perceived problem that only exists because of the idiosyncratic nature of the web and cloud stacks?" Go and Rust. Probably unpopular opinions, but I'm very glad those two languages are open source.
- pwdisswordfish0 6y ago
  I'd bet that this outlook is the sort of narrow-sighted, can't-even-understand-the-question sort of thinking that the person you're responding to had in mind when asking the question—as what not to focus on when talking about the successes of FOSS. That even with the point made in a very straightforward way it gets responses like this is a huge signal of what sort of problem we're dealing with. Go and Rust amount to infrastructure, not software that "truly achieve[s] something useful on its own".
save_ferris 6y ago
> The proliferation and commoditization of F/OSS is what made SaaS business thrive, and made it so that integration and polish is the only avenue left to make a buck, leading to our paltry attention economy, oligopoly, and platform lock-in by network effects. Do I think F/OSS played a role in these issues? Absolutely. Do I think it's the primary role in causing these issues? Definitely not. I'd argue that weak antitrust law, ill-intentioned VC money, and lack of oversight of software titans play the biggest role in what you've described here. Yes, F/OSS gave the companies tools to iterate over app development quickly, but they were pushed for hockey stick growth and total market domination by the checkbooks, and the government has completely failed to police their behavior. F/OSS gave people with questionable incentives the ability to do questionable things, but it didn't create the motivation to do those questionable things. > when was the last time you used a piece of software that truly achieved something useful on its own rather than solving a perceived problem that only exists because of the idiosyncratic nature of the web and cloud stacks? I actually use a fair amount of F/OSS that is independently useful to me, projects like Hammerspoon, MIDIMonitor, VLC, MuseScore, and others. Yes, the majority of F/OSS that I use is for commercial purposes, but that's certainly not exclusive. > Meanwhile, maintainers of popular F/OSS get nothing in return. I completely agree with this, and I think it's one of the most critical problems to the F/OSS movement.