6 ms·

A holistic vision of open source beyond 2021

25 points by bibryam 6y ago

kodah 6y ago
> The value is in the long term sustainability of a project, that can outlive a company acquisition or bankruptcy (such as Oracle and the Jenkins project). Today, the successful open source model is more an epitome of user adoption, healthy community cooperation, and long-term sustainability, along the free as in free speech source code. I'm not sure if you actually meant to do this, but you're really only talking about open source as it relates to business. Linux didn't start out of a business need and most open source projects weren't started or even long term maintained by businesses. It was only when we discovered that businesses were using and making/saving money off open source that we figured out that splitting your day job and your hobby while someone makes a killing off your software is antithetical to ones life. While I agree with much of your article, I'd add another point: businesses need to stop trying to run open source and using it for PR and recruiting. This practice has put a huge tax on the open source community because it makes people think that their rules, largely from corporate America, apply here. Open Source was, and always will be, a global effort that doesn't need American exceptionalism rearing it's ugly head. Rather, businesses need to take a step back, understand the culture and priorities of open source and then try to fit in. After all, the cultures, priorities, and attitudes of open source are what made it useful to corporations in the first place.
- amelius 6y ago
  > Rather, businesses need to take a step back, understand the culture and priorities of open source and then try to fit in. Companies don't care. They don't even care about the law these days (see Uber, AirBnB, Facebook & privacy, etc. etc.) If OSS wants companies to behave in certain ways, it should be encoded in the license that comes with the software, at a minimum. My suggestion would be to have a license that makes the software free to use for anyone and companies with a maximum net profit of (say) $1M. Above this, companies need to negotiate a different (paid) license. This would enable OSS authors to have an income from their work, while not changing anything else about OSS as the price of software is basically pennies for big companies.
  - enriquto 6y ago
    > My suggestion would be to have a license that makes the software free to use for anyone and companies with a maximum net profit of (say) $1M. But wouldn't that make it non-free software? (according to the FSF definition).
    - panta 6y ago
      Yes, but mega-corps are exploiting free software and killing it in a way. Personally I believe it would be in everyone’s interest to fight back. Maybe we could have “human-scale free software” alongside the traditional model.
      - 0xbadcafebee 6y ago
        "mega-corps" have been using free software in the same way for 20 years. If they were killing it, wouldn't it be dead by now?
    - amelius 6y ago
      No, because paying for the software is now a luxury-problem. You make money from the software, so you're effectively paying a negative amount already. Anyway, this is not about definitions. In the end, it might be in the interest of companies too if every company paid for their FOSS. Right now, it is not in the interest of companies to pay because that would be an advantage to their competitors. So in a way, it's a vicious cycle that needs to be broken.
      - enriquto 6y ago
        > Anyway, this is not about definitions. But it is. If people cannot run your software freely, for any purpose, then it is not free software (and that includes users who are big companies). There's really no way around that. If you are worried that companies may use your software without giving back to the community, the best is to use a copyleft license like GPL or AGPL. You can also dual-license your software as AGPL/proprietary, and sell proprietary licenses at different prices according to the client. This is a fairly common setup, and many companies appreciate it (the only issue is that all external contributors to your project must surrender their copyright to you).
- jabl 6y ago
  > Rather, businesses need to take a step back, understand the culture and priorities of open source and then try to fit in. Well, open source was created in order to make (some of) the ideas of the hippy free software movement more acceptable to businesses, so, I think you got that part backwards. At the cost of losing the free software ideals, open source has gone mainstream, and nowadays a large fraction of the work that goes into big established open source projects is done by paid developers working for corporations. Thus, to a very large extent, open source IS businesses. They are making it in their image, to fit their needs. I guess the lone hacker/activist has been sidelined, and others with more resources have taken over the show.
  - bibryam 6y ago
    One does not replace the others though. There are still independent hackers doing a great deal of open source (Let's put them in the free software category). That is especially true for the node community. There are many projects build by full time employees dominated by 1-2 companies (a good example here are the ASF projects). There are gigantic projects that are possible to be developed in high pace only through collaboration even between competitors (Kubernetes in CNCF) There won't be only one way of doing OSS. But I believe there will be again a rise of independent software hackers and this time they will be better equipped with tools for automation, distribution, funding, marketing, etc.
Rickasaurus 6y ago
The big question is how automatic and streamlined can you make this governance, because I know for sure most devs doing open source today want nothing to do with it. However, if it meant a path to being actually paid to do open source, maybe they would.
- bibryam 6y ago
  Agreed 100%. The recent attempts are getting better and better: Github sponsors, Tidelift and their decentralized versions will be the foundation to enable modern day independent hackers. Open source needs open funding/governance infrastructure that is automated.
jasoneckert 6y ago
One aspect I wished the author of this post touched on are the challenges that open source governance will have between copyleft and permissive open source licensing models (the former designed for long-term viability and the latter designed to get project traction in the short term).
- tannhaeuser 6y ago
  Or, maybe the "community" (if there is one) is fed up with framing the entire discussion along the lines of Free vs Open, which clearly hasn't helped with anything. At least it hasn't helped to keep Linux sane (what's the use of it when it's being pulled into vendor-dominated directions a la systemd, gnome, and k8s?). Nor has it stopped the mass enslavement of business, users, and devs into "The Cloud". Nor has it stopped Linux to become world's largest spynet (Android). GNU started with the goal of bringing free/open alternatives to a Unix/POSIX-like user-space, dev tools environment, and operating system, out of a sense of freedom and a strong distaste towards playing to the tune of big players. F/OSS was never about innovation, so with Linux and the (shortly later opened-up) BSD being excellent alternatives in the mid/late-90s, where's the noble goal today, when F/OSS is abundant "on github", and cloud providers are taking advantage of it?
  - carapace 6y ago
    I upvoted you (despite being an avowed team "Free" type) because I think you're right, > the entire discussion along the lines of Free vs Open ... clearly hasn't helped with anything. The whole point of Free (I don't know what the point of "Open" source is, but I don't want to engage in all that here) software is that the user can edit the code. I was thinking only this morning that smartphones aren't really computers, they are malls. Sure there's a computer in there, several, but only in the same way that there are computers in your car. And everybody is okay with this. And it's safer! And the freedoms you're losing you didn't know about in the first place anyway so no one misses them. I don't like it but it looks to me like humans are shaping up to be cells in some sort of mega-cyborg. (I'm having a ranty Sunday morning...)
    - deleted 6y ago
pwdisswordfish0 6y ago
The author writes: > When I go to Github, the things I notice about a project are the number of stars and forks. These are easily gameable metrics that are supposed to indicate community engagement. The second thing I notice[...] This is a habit that you have to train yourself into picking up. For that reason, I find it odd that the author acknowledges that these are poor proxies for the things the author is really interested in. Maybe it's because I don't play video games, but it's easy for me to forget that GitHub even displays the number of stars and forks on a repo--it's part of the UI cruft that I ignore. In fact, it's jarring when people mention them in comments, or people tout the high number of stars and forks on project pages. It's like we're living in different worlds, each with a completely different set of values.
- detaro 6y ago
  > or people tout the high number of stars and forks on project pages. to me that's also always a jarring (and negative) signal. Especially since plenty people use stars as bookmarks. (And don't even get me started on the ones that believe someone starring a repo is a reason to send them emails about the project! Luckily that's rare)
  - bibryam 6y ago
    stars, forks are the metrics that first hit you when you browse a project, so it is part of what THE platform hosting most OSS projects tries to convince us matter. There are other ways to check real people involvement in the project (such as issues, PR) but even these can be single company employees. I'd say we are missing open financial metrics that are missing.?

25 points by bibryam 6y ago

> The value is in the long term sustainability of a project, that can outlive a company acquisition or bankruptcy (such as Oracle and the Jenkins project). Today, the successful open source model is more an epitome of user adoption, healthy community cooperation, and long-term sustainability, along the free as in free speech source code. I'm not sure if you actually meant to do this, but you're really only talking about open source as it relates to business. Linux didn't start out of a business need and most open source projects weren't started or even long term maintained by businesses. It was only when we discovered that businesses were using and making/saving money off open source that we figured out that splitting your day job and your hobby while someone makes a killing off your software is antithetical to ones life. While I agree with much of your article, I'd add another point: businesses need to stop trying to run open source and using it for PR and recruiting. This practice has put a huge tax on the open source community because it makes people think that their rules, largely from corporate America, apply here. Open Source was, and always will be, a global effort that doesn't need American exceptionalism rearing it's ugly head. Rather, businesses need to take a step back, understand the culture and priorities of open source and then try to fit in. After all, the cultures, priorities, and attitudes of open source are what made it useful to corporations in the first place.

amelius 6y ago
> Rather, businesses need to take a step back, understand the culture and priorities of open source and then try to fit in. Companies don't care. They don't even care about the law these days (see Uber, AirBnB, Facebook & privacy, etc. etc.) If OSS wants companies to behave in certain ways, it should be encoded in the license that comes with the software, at a minimum. My suggestion would be to have a license that makes the software free to use for anyone and companies with a maximum net profit of (say) $1M. Above this, companies need to negotiate a different (paid) license. This would enable OSS authors to have an income from their work, while not changing anything else about OSS as the price of software is basically pennies for big companies.
- enriquto 6y ago
  > My suggestion would be to have a license that makes the software free to use for anyone and companies with a maximum net profit of (say) $1M. But wouldn't that make it non-free software? (according to the FSF definition).
  - panta 6y ago
    Yes, but mega-corps are exploiting free software and killing it in a way. Personally I believe it would be in everyone’s interest to fight back. Maybe we could have “human-scale free software” alongside the traditional model.
    - 0xbadcafebee 6y ago
      "mega-corps" have been using free software in the same way for 20 years. If they were killing it, wouldn't it be dead by now?
  - amelius 6y ago
    No, because paying for the software is now a luxury-problem. You make money from the software, so you're effectively paying a negative amount already. Anyway, this is not about definitions. In the end, it might be in the interest of companies too if every company paid for their FOSS. Right now, it is not in the interest of companies to pay because that would be an advantage to their competitors. So in a way, it's a vicious cycle that needs to be broken.
    - enriquto 6y ago
      > Anyway, this is not about definitions. But it is. If people cannot run your software freely, for any purpose, then it is not free software (and that includes users who are big companies). There's really no way around that. If you are worried that companies may use your software without giving back to the community, the best is to use a copyleft license like GPL or AGPL. You can also dual-license your software as AGPL/proprietary, and sell proprietary licenses at different prices according to the client. This is a fairly common setup, and many companies appreciate it (the only issue is that all external contributors to your project must surrender their copyright to you).
jabl 6y ago
> Rather, businesses need to take a step back, understand the culture and priorities of open source and then try to fit in. Well, open source was created in order to make (some of) the ideas of the hippy free software movement more acceptable to businesses, so, I think you got that part backwards. At the cost of losing the free software ideals, open source has gone mainstream, and nowadays a large fraction of the work that goes into big established open source projects is done by paid developers working for corporations. Thus, to a very large extent, open source IS businesses. They are making it in their image, to fit their needs. I guess the lone hacker/activist has been sidelined, and others with more resources have taken over the show.
- bibryam 6y ago
  One does not replace the others though. There are still independent hackers doing a great deal of open source (Let's put them in the free software category). That is especially true for the node community. There are many projects build by full time employees dominated by 1-2 companies (a good example here are the ASF projects). There are gigantic projects that are possible to be developed in high pace only through collaboration even between competitors (Kubernetes in CNCF) There won't be only one way of doing OSS. But I believe there will be again a rise of independent software hackers and this time they will be better equipped with tools for automation, distribution, funding, marketing, etc.

Rickasaurus 6y ago

The big question is how automatic and streamlined can you make this governance, because I know for sure most devs doing open source today want nothing to do with it. However, if it meant a path to being actually paid to do open source, maybe they would.

bibryam 6y ago
Agreed 100%. The recent attempts are getting better and better: Github sponsors, Tidelift and their decentralized versions will be the foundation to enable modern day independent hackers. Open source needs open funding/governance infrastructure that is automated.

jasoneckert 6y ago

One aspect I wished the author of this post touched on are the challenges that open source governance will have between copyleft and permissive open source licensing models (the former designed for long-term viability and the latter designed to get project traction in the short term).

tannhaeuser 6y ago
Or, maybe the "community" (if there is one) is fed up with framing the entire discussion along the lines of Free vs Open, which clearly hasn't helped with anything. At least it hasn't helped to keep Linux sane (what's the use of it when it's being pulled into vendor-dominated directions a la systemd, gnome, and k8s?). Nor has it stopped the mass enslavement of business, users, and devs into "The Cloud". Nor has it stopped Linux to become world's largest spynet (Android). GNU started with the goal of bringing free/open alternatives to a Unix/POSIX-like user-space, dev tools environment, and operating system, out of a sense of freedom and a strong distaste towards playing to the tune of big players. F/OSS was never about innovation, so with Linux and the (shortly later opened-up) BSD being excellent alternatives in the mid/late-90s, where's the noble goal today, when F/OSS is abundant "on github", and cloud providers are taking advantage of it?
- carapace 6y ago
  I upvoted you (despite being an avowed team "Free" type) because I think you're right, > the entire discussion along the lines of Free vs Open ... clearly hasn't helped with anything. The whole point of Free (I don't know what the point of "Open" source is, but I don't want to engage in all that here) software is that the user can edit the code. I was thinking only this morning that smartphones aren't really computers, they are malls. Sure there's a computer in there, several, but only in the same way that there are computers in your car. And everybody is okay with this. And it's safer! And the freedoms you're losing you didn't know about in the first place anyway so no one misses them. I don't like it but it looks to me like humans are shaping up to be cells in some sort of mega-cyborg. (I'm having a ranty Sunday morning...)
  - deleted 6y ago

pwdisswordfish0 6y ago

The author writes: > When I go to Github, the things I notice about a project are the number of stars and forks. These are easily gameable metrics that are supposed to indicate community engagement. The second thing I notice[...] This is a habit that you have to train yourself into picking up. For that reason, I find it odd that the author acknowledges that these are poor proxies for the things the author is really interested in. Maybe it's because I don't play video games, but it's easy for me to forget that GitHub even displays the number of stars and forks on a repo--it's part of the UI cruft that I ignore. In fact, it's jarring when people mention them in comments, or people tout the high number of stars and forks on project pages. It's like we're living in different worlds, each with a completely different set of values.

detaro 6y ago
> or people tout the high number of stars and forks on project pages. to me that's also always a jarring (and negative) signal. Especially since plenty people use stars as bookmarks. (And don't even get me started on the ones that believe someone starring a repo is a reason to send them emails about the project! Luckily that's rare)
- bibryam 6y ago
  stars, forks are the metrics that first hit you when you browse a project, so it is part of what THE platform hosting most OSS projects tries to convince us matter. There are other ways to check real people involvement in the project (such as issues, PR) but even these can be single company employees. I'd say we are missing open financial metrics that are missing.?