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What comes after open source? (2019)
- taneq 5y agoI've always found the, uh, "IP-flexible" environment of Shenzhen to be a fascinating insight into what a fully open source world would look like. From what I've seen (please correct me if I'm wrong!) no energy is wasted on licensing or who you should ask for permission, because what are they gonna do to you? And little effort is wasted on locking things down, because they'll just crack it anyway. If you can make something you just do it, and then you ship it and hopefully make some money before someone copies it. And the rate of progress is incredible! Mostly because of the huge amount of hard work done by the people working in in the industry here, but also because there's less time wasted on these regulatory questions.
- fiddlerwoaroof 5y agoYeah, I think IP creates a local-maxima where it seems essential to have IP to have innovation. But, it’s not at all clear to me that it doesn’t simultaneously restrict innovation: all the locked down walled gardens, content silos and such make it significantly harder for people to recombine inventions in unforeseen ways.
- bcrl 5y agoPatents certainly cause unforeseen damage all the time, sometimes with damages with far too many zeros to be considered at all reasonable (like what happened to Blackberry a few years back). My personal belief regarding software is that if a skilled practitioner of the art can come up with a particular solution when given similar design constraints for solving a problem, the solution should not be considered novel and worthy of patent protection. Sadly this is not anywhere close to how patents actually work in the real world.
- makapuf 5y agoI'd agree with your definition of novel except for the addition "in a minimal timeframe or effort" because else of course you can replicate the same outcomes with about the same effort.
- api 5y agoThe rate of progress is fast, but how are the wages and opportunities? Does this progress translate into progress for the people doing it or is it a rat race to nowhere? There are many ways to goose growth and progress that are bad for people.
- Ericson2314 5y agoServices are bad and libraries are good. (Extra proof: the latter can be turned into the former if you really want, but not vice versa). Cryptocurrency doesn't factor into any of this.
- wrnr 5y agoAs a programmer I agree, but for a business a service might have a nice mote and offer the right incentives to develop and sell a service. A crypto service is the worst of both worlds, in this case the income just goes to the miners.
- thayne 5y agoAnd the enegy companies that sell the power for mining, and the chip makers that sell chips for mining.
- wrnr 5y agoBut chips and power-plants are harder to create then just copying software.
- thayne 5y agoFrom my understanding, mining is generally pretty difficult to do profitably.
- calvinmorrison 5y agoAnd the African children mining the metals!
- MereInterest 5y agoFollowing it that way is like following the glass maker in the standard broken window fallacy.
- thayne 5y ago
- thayne 5y agoI'm not sure if I agree that crypto is the future, but I agree with most of the rest.
- ximm 5y agoNot to be confused with the identically-named article by Steve Klabnik from around the same time: https://steveklabnik.com/writing/what-comes-after-open-source https://steveklabnik.com/writing/what-comes-after-open-sourc...
- saurik 5y agoWow... this article (the not-the-OP one you linked to here, from the guy I mostly know from his missionary work for the Rust ecosystem) represents a complete misunderstanding of what the Free Software movement is prioritizing... it was painfully disappointing (but I guess not surprising) to read this :(. The core disagreement between the philosophy of Free Software advocates and the world of modern Open Source developers is that the former is fighting for the rights of end users to analyze and even specifics modify the software they use and to achieve this they are willing to severely limit developer freedoms. This is a move that many developers don't like, but this article is somehow missing that disagreement entirely and us claiming that Free Software is somehow missing the point because developers actually want "[a list of things involving the production of software]" that the Free Software people are going to point out does not in any way help achieve freedom for users.
- steveklabnik 5y agoI fully understand that the free software movement believes that they are doing things for the rights of end users.
- jka 5y agoI believe that too, and believe that companies (handwavy) are looking forward to permissive open source licenses becoming de rigeur so that they can build and bundle projects cheaply without contributing back (proprietary-style hacks behind closed doors will suffice to ship; production costs reduce, and, strategically, air -- developer time -- to the FOSS ecosystem becomes gradually easier to stifle).
- bitwize 5y agoTelekommunisten.
- ilaksh 5y agoMarketplaces may be examples of open services. Such as the smart contract-based Uber or Amazon.
- pjmlp 5y agoEasy, return of shareware and public domain. That is what dual licensing is, only with rejuvenated names for a newer generation born after FOSS became mainstream and found out money needs to be earned somehow.
- mhuffman 5y agoSadly, I think this will be gone forever soon! If you are on Linux, everything might continue for a while, but for Mac and Windows, the writing is on the wall ... there is a near future where nothing will be installable on your computer unless it is "authorized" by Microsoft or Apple.
- kwertyoowiyop 5y agoIs disk space cheap enough now to have a “GitHub for state”?