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There's a famous essay about the Tragedy of the Commons -- the high level idea is that if there is a resource that is commonly available for free then some user
by Pfhreak 6y ago
There's a famous essay about the Tragedy of the Commons -- the high level idea is that if there is a resource that is commonly available for free then some users will exploit it for their own gain. It originally referred to ranchers who would overuse communal grazing lands, but I think the lessons apply equally well to open source as well.
In my opinion, a healthy open source ecosystem relies on people using and contributing back, supporting the distributed creators that make the ecosystem possible. This historically has been something of a gift economy or social contract, but it's become wildly distorted by companies (e.g. Amazon/AWS) attempting to overuse the commons resource and make profit from it.
So it comes as no surprise that when one rancher comes in and overgrazes the common resource, the other participants might want to make some changes in rules. These new licenses aren't "just because", they come from lived experience of entities like Amazon coming in an exploiting a shared resource.
And I get it, the letter of the law says, "Do whatever you want with this shared resource". And there are plenty of folks who believe that Amazon has done nothing wrong -- the rules allowed for overgrazing, so naturally the right thing for Amazon to do was to overgraze.
I personally see it differently -- Amazon is hiding behind the letter of the licenses and totally distorting a community, exploiting the gifts of the engineers' labor, and getting us to point our fingers at one another over the "one true definition of 'Open Source'" rather than constructively figuring out ways to protect the community of open development and reward the individual workers who volunteer their time.
- x0x0 6y agoI also find it befuddling that people here appear to be very opposed to their dependencies monetizing. We should be in favor of our deps being well monetized; we get high quality features, good engineering, fast (and ideally proactive) security, etc. Our eng teams are making multi-million dollar investments into our dependencies and having to port away is extremely costly, both in dollars and opportunity cost.
- guerrilla 6y ago> There's a famous essay An essay famously refuted by the work of the first woman to win a Nobel prize in economics. She spent half her life collecting evidence showing that in reality what you describe is more often not what actually happens and outlining the conditions (derived emperically) under which commons resource management works. [1] 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom#Research https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom#Research
- Pfhreak 6y agoI don't think I claimed it was categorically true, it's just a useful essay to read and understand. I don't believe a frog gave a scorpion a ride across the river or that Paul Bunyan chopped trees out West either, but they are useful cultural artifacts to aid in understanding our world.
- 838812052807016 6y agoI'm not sure the tragedy of the commons applies here since there is no scarce resource. How does a big company profiting from open source code hurt the open source project?
- nopzor 6y agothe scarce resource are the maintainers of the project (often paid and sustained by the oss vendor)
- zokier 6y agoUnlike pastures, software doesn't wear out from use.
- Pfhreak 6y agoFirst, software absolutely rots, second, software isn't the commons. The people contributing to it are.
- pjfin123 6y agoThe difference between not giving back to open source and over grazing is not contributing to open source doesn't actually hurt other. It's just not helping others.
- Pfhreak 6y agoIt's not just that Amazon is not contributing back -- they are not contributing back at scale. They are consuming at scale. They have the scale to distort the established understanding of how a thing works. Like, we've all seen the "have a penny/need a penny" trays at cash registers, and we all understand that sometimes we take or leave things there. Amazon is basically able to send someone to every single cash register in the city and take all the pennies. Sure, maybe that's not explicitly disallowed, but it definitely breaks the model.