46 ms·

“Open source” is not broken

262 points by BrainBuzzer 5y ago

commandlinefan 5y ago
> boast of their “innovation” and “growth” without … contributing … from corporations that don’t bat an eye at donating billions to (often dubious) “social” organizations - often ones that criticize them anyway.
- dgreensp 5y ago
  That is pretty funny!
- haukem 5y ago
  The legal and fiance constructs of many open source projects are pretty badly organized. This makes it hard for accounts at big cooperation to handle them. Many open source projects are also pretty bad at marketing to non developers and do not have an aggressive founding campaign. Some “social” organizations are much better at this and have very good people taking care of marketing and accounting to people who control money. Most members of open source projects just want to code and not take care of tax exception for donations and filing out the correct tax forms in time.
  - raxxorrax 5y ago
    If they manage accounting and marketing hat might make sense. Many projects are probably looking forward to such forms of free contribution.
akagusu 5y ago
Of course "open source" is not broken. It works exactly how it was intended to work and it perfectly models our economic system where a lot of people do essential work but are underpaid or not paid at all. tl;dr: "open source" means free labor for corporations.
api 5y ago
FOSS is the victim in a way, but that means it must defend itself. OSI needs to get off their asses and acknowledge the problem and work with the community to develop licenses that limit SaaSification and other forms of appropriation in a way that is compatible with the principles of open source and lacks the optics (FUD) problems of the GPL approach. I’m not holding my breath since the OSI is funded almost entirely by huge companies that are quite happy with all the free labor they are exploiting. So far the OSI has plugged it’s ears and pretended everything is fine, and OSS zealots attack the character of any lowly developer who isn’t happy providing uncompensated labor to surveillance capitalist behemoths. I don’t see FOSS surviving another generation if this doesn’t happen, or at least not in a form that isn’t weaponized to herd everyone into proprietary cloud environments.
- judge2020 5y ago
  This would be solved if people were educated on dual-licensing - no new license needs to exist if you go GPL and have a paid commercial license.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
    Probably AGPL if SaaS is a concern.
    - trixie_ 5y ago
      People who want their OSS to be widely adopted wouldn't touch AGPL with a ten foot pole.
- hardwaresofton 5y ago
  There's another option -- those seeking to SaaSify F/OSS can support/partner the software they use. Sustainable hosting isn't something that larger corporations are into, but the right companies can do it, and as companies that have this mindset/condition built in (best if in writing, of course) grow, F/OSS becomes more sustainable by default. All it takes is a reasonable % of revenue contribution to the F/OSS powering your stack. I think the range should be 20% to 50%[0], but even if it was 10%, imagine if open source projects that power even small to mid size tech companies in the world received 10% (or even 3%) of the revenue being collected? The problem of getting the money down to F/OSS that powers inner machinery (libraries, frameworks, etc) is a bit tougher, but I think that could work out easily by doing a general % of revenue and deciding allocation. For example even if you do a 1% allocation to libraries in particular, as libraries are reused much more easily, at scale library authors will do quite well. Maybe a license that asks for a % of revenue is an easier static goal but I'm optimistic enough to think that the partnership approach could work. [0]: https://nimbusws.com/#sustainability https://nimbusws.com/#sustainability
tptacek 5y ago
It seems like both sides of this supposed debate are saying precisely the same thing, with one side ("how dare we suggest anything is wrong wth open source") taking umbrage for no apparent reason. The premise of "both" arguments is that open source maintainers are being exploited.
- ghaff 5y ago
  Except they're mostly not. While it's not hard to find exceptions most of the maintainers and other coder associated with major open source projects are being paid by companies to do so.
  - haukem 5y ago
    This really depends on the project. Many people just do it in their spare time and have a normal software engineer or similar role working on proprietary software using open source. Some are still at university and studying. Some are contracting and probably also get some new customers thorough their open source work. I do not have real data, but I assume that more than 50% of the effort invested in open source is not directly paid by a company. For the Linux kernel 20% to 30% of the commits come from people doing it as a hobby, the Linux kernel is supported very well by big cooperations.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      You're right. It really does vary. However, in the case of the Linux kernel just about 8% were unpaid as of five years ago. https://thenewstack.io/contributes-linux-kernel/ https://thenewstack.io/contributes-linux-kernel/ I assume that projects like Kubernetes and OpenStack are similar. Obviously many smaller projects are largely developed by people on their own time. I expect this also applies languages and things like that which aren't largely corporate efforts like Go and Rust are.
    - watwut 5y ago
      Majority of people responding to FOSS studies is paid by companies. It is biased toward Linux related open source projects a bit. The thing is, while there are maintenaners of important projects working for free, the idea that most of major open source development is for free is mostly mythology. Large projects are backed by companies.
gtsop 5y ago
Re the author of "open source is broken": The irony of bashing open source on a websiate using systems/code/infra containing thousands of open source lines of code which I am sure he hasn't paid for... has probably escaped his attention. Honestly, I am not sure why there is an argument anymore. Let people write or use free or proprietary software as they see fit. You all know the pros, you all know the cons, make a decision and god's speed, live your life. I side with the free software. You do you.
- xena 5y ago
  As the author of that article, I am starting to prefer they/them pronouns. It would be nice if you could update your comment to refer to me correctly, however this is not a demand. There is a lot more happening behind the scenes than you know of, I make a tiny fraction of my donations public knowledge.
  - KronisLV 5y ago
    Edit: another person pointed out that the actual comment sounds like an ad hominem, which i do not condone. However, some of the phrasing made me think, hence the question (more clarification below). > The irony of bashing open source on a website using systems/code/infra containing thousands of open source lines of code which I am sure they haven't paid for... has probably escaped their attention. Hey, what are your thoughts on the OP's argument, though? I read your article and it did seem to have plenty of truth to it, much like other articles that i've read in the past: https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html Personally, i use a lot of open source software and i definitely won't pay for most of it, many people out there won't pay for any of it. I don't find that ironic, i find it sad. There is no obligation or anything to encourage anyone to donate to the authors, most people don't care. If i went to work on Monday and suggested that we as a company throw money at open source, i'd probably be looked at funny. In the company, near the holidays we have an initiative where employees vote for charities and each vote gets 100 EUR donated towards them... but curiously, no one even considers something like that for open source projects, despite there being hundreds if not thousands of those in their dependencies. I think it's probably a cultural issue to some degree, simple psychology otherwise.
PaulKeeble 5y ago
Its probably time for the next generation of open source licensing to make the code not usable for profit making purposes, thus ensuring open source is either funded by the companies that use it or forms its own separate community away from corporations.
- unbanned 5y ago
  I just wouldn't use it then. Or I'd use it and just not tell anyone. Or take its essence and build it from ground up with a different name. Who's gonna sue me?
- js8 5y ago
  Why when you already have GPL? Most companies do not allow GPL software to be used for products.
  - goalieca 5y ago
    It becomes murky when you don’t actually ship software and use it as a service in the backend. GPL is from the olden days when you actually distributed your software. Now it’s only the front end and that ships as source still because wasm and the rest haven’t taken over yet.
    - inops 5y ago
      AGPL then. It extends the meaning of "distribute", but is still FSF/OSI-approved
      - xyzzy_plugh 5y ago
        AGPL is super scary for corporations, as it's not clear where the boundaries are and no one wants to go to court to find out. GPL is relatively straight forward: as long as you don't link to it, make sources including any changes available to your users. AGPL is like, okay maybe everything needs to be released. And when you are also using proprietary third party software it becomes a real hairy mess.
jph 5y ago
> If there was a paywall, even for $1, how many people would install a library? I would LOVE this solution. I use open source professionally, and I continually advocate for ways to pay open source projects and developer. And if there's a way to pay extra to fund a feature, or hire a developer as a consultant, so much the better. In my experience, companies are highly willing and able to pay for software and services that accelerate the companies' goals. If you want to pay for open source, then I can suggest Open Collective, Patreon, and GitHub Sponsors as ways that are working well IME. Or consider donating to nonprofit open source advocacy organizations including Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Free Software Foundation (FSF), Apache Foundation, Linux Foundation, and similar groups.
- usrbinbash 5y ago
  >companies are highly willing and able to pay for software and services that accelerate the companies' goals. The are also willing to buy things and keep everyone else from using them.
jollybean 5y ago
The problem is Free as in Beer and Free as in Speech are related. The issue is not $1 downloads so much at is the overhead, pain and issues that come along with it. It's hard to manage and control downloads, usage, and the legal issue might be that any hint of licensing problem makes it 'no go' from a corporate perspective. So the gap between 'Free Beer and Speech' and 50-cent Beer and Speech is enormous.
- sneak 5y ago
  If it's free as in freedom then the first downloader to pay $1 can just mirror it and allow free downloads. Free as in freedom always necessarily denotes free as in beer as well. It's not an accident or side effect.
  - progval 5y ago
    But the mirror may be less convenient. This works for OsmAnd+ for example: it's FOSS, free (as in beer) on FDroid, but costs 25$ on Google Play.
    - sneak 5y ago
      Yeah, the Blink ssh/mosh client for iOS is GPL3 but costs $19.99 in the App Store. I'm about to pay someone with a developer account a few hundred bucks just to publish a free renamed build of it to the App Store, because that's ridiculous. https://blink.sh/ https://blink.sh/ https://github.com/blinksh/blink https://github.com/blinksh/blink https://apps.apple.com/app/id1156707581 https://apps.apple.com/app/id1156707581
      - jollybean 5y ago
        I think you're missing the point here. People's time is valuable, especially expert developers. The 'Code' only part of the issue with respect to input cost. Someone has to maintain that dev. account, maintain their skills, stay on top of distribution policies, probably take on some legal risk, keep the build kind of up to day. That takes skill. We mostly want it that way so that distribution is clean and clear and reasonable for those involved. If it's a niche product, then $20 is not going to add up to a lot of money. If it's a professional product, then $20 is basically $0 for all intents and purposes, it's the cost of a stapler on which case cost should not be a problem. The AppStore is generally an open market, if $20 price is too high and someone is raking in big profits, someone can publish the same thing. In the end, what we want to achieve is a price point that matches the material value creation involved in the 'maintenance of the build and distribution aspects'. That's actually efficient, and what we want. There's no such thing as 'free' - it's all time and labour and there are number of issues involved. FOSS should be considered 'volunteer labour' which makes the underlying costs more apparent, the code and licensing is a distraction from that.
icambron 5y ago
I don't think OSS is broken either, but I don't get the complaint here. People and companies use things because it's advantageous to them to do so. When you release software that's free (as in beer), people and companies are going to use it for free. It doesn't matter whether it's "hypercapitalism" or not. You simply can't eschew all of the systems available for extracting value from your labor and then complain that you're unable to extract value from your labor. In particular, this doesn't make any sense: > While I believe that it is unethical for large for-profit corporations to not support FOSS projects from which they derive (extract?) immense amounts of value, it is not illegal, thanks to the system. It's been made specifically, intensionally legal by the people creating it. So of course it's legal, and it's weird to say, "I went out of my way to make this free, but it's unethical for you to actually use it for free". In capitalism, you have the right to set your own price for your labor and property, and there are lots of mechanisms for charging people for stuff. That's what all these software vendors are doing! In contrast, the MIT and Apache licenses say "I made this but do whatever you want". We choose this license when making things because we want everyone to do what they want. We can't be angry when they do.
IceDane 5y ago
Did this guy really just write a rebuttal to an article that he didn't bother to read well enough to understand? They are literally arguing the same things. The article he is arguing against is not trying to shit on open source. It's trying to explain how insane it is that so much open source development is so critical but so massively underfunded. The original article isn't saying that the idea of open source is fundamentally broken. It's the consumers of open source software whose morals are fundamentally broken. Please, for the love of all that is holy, just spend like 5 extra minutes reading what you are arguing against next time. This is so embarrassing that I'm feeling the second-hand embarrassment.
sidlls 5y ago
Open source is most certainly broken, and not just due to the various financial, freedom and security issues these two articles focus on. My biggest peeve: documentation is often minimal (e.g. API docs only) or filled with useless toy examples that are effectively just rephrasing of API docs. The entire underpinning of free and open source software is silly: software in this context isn't an academic pursuit producing knowledge that should be freely shared to our collective advancement as a civilization. It's a hammer, a wrench, a table: in short, a product. That fundamental category error made by our community is the source of all the problems with F/OSS, financial and otherwise.
- loic-sharma 5y ago
  I agree with what you say, but FYI docs is one of the easiest yet most valuable thing a person can contribute. As a maintainer, I wish I had more feedback and contributions to the docs!
  - rdpintqogeogsaa 5y ago
    As someone who wrote large parts of the docs for a project: The reason that I imagine few people do it is because if you get involved with the documentation, you will be on the hook for tracking the library closely and keeping the documentation up to date; there will be an implicit, external pressure that the documentation continues working. That becomes a lot of work very quickly, so I tend to only get involved in libraries that will quickly hit some kind of stable maintenance mode or in which I have personal stake and thus just need to polish up my own notes for how to get off the ground.
    - danenania 5y ago
      Updating docs should be part of the responsibility of adding a new feature, just like adding tests and making sure no existing tests are failing.
- throwaway984393 5y ago
  You know, one of those terrible aspects of open source is that if you see a lack of documentation, you can just contribute it yourself. Good luck contributing new docs to literally any proprietary product.
candiddevmike 5y ago
I recently looked into open sourcing Homechart (https://homechart.app https://homechart.app). It's free to use already (for self hosting), but some users wanted it to be open source (almost entirely for auditing purposes, but I doubt they'd even read the code). I don't want anyone using it for commercial purposes, and I found a few licenses that would prevent this-- namely Commons Clause, but at the end of the day I didn't see a benefit to having it OSS aside from appeasing some OSS purists. The app is already free, and I don't need the added burden of responding to issues and pull requests (and supporting the code they add). EDIT: I also don't want folks redistributing custom builds or effectively reselling it somehow. I'm a solo dev, I don't have the resources to litigate and enforce any kind of restrictive license.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  If you want to allow audits but don't care about Open Source, just do a source available / shared source license like tarsnap.
  - candiddevmike 5y ago
    Sure, but then I can't prevent forks or folks distributing custom builds unless I start doing DRM notices and litigation. It's infinitely easier to keep it closed source.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
      Legally you can, and practically do you really think people can't reverse engineer your stuff if they want? Alternatively: it sounded like you just didn't want to support it or deal with pull requests; do you care about unofficial unsupported builds? Edit: And yes, just distributing binaries and not worrying is the least work; I just wanted to point out that you can have it both ways if you ignore "Open Source".
sneak 5y ago
> FOSS is free as in freedom and not free as in beer (cost). Actually, and critically, it is both! You can't have free as in freedom without being free as in beer first.
- icy 5y ago
  You certainly can. You can charge for the software, and release its source under a free license. The user can choose to download the source and build it themselves, or pay for the built software (or the service).
- carapace 5y ago
  You can give away the code (and the right to use it) but still charge for development, maintenance, and auditing.
mrweasel 5y ago
It feels like we moved from a world where open source software was develop by a community, to one where most of us are just consumers of the code. I don't know if where actually more contributors 20 years ago, relatively speaking, but much of the code was also less complex. Open source is still remarkably successful and the only reason why the whole Log4J RCE is such a big deal, is because the library is hugely successful. The failing isn't in the work of the author(s), but those of us who been consuming the code. We don't need to fund the main developers, what we need is for the project, and projects like it, to be true communities. That mean that all the companies who have been relying on open source need to allocate time to community work. We pay for open source software by helping build it and that goes beyond creating an issue on Github or complaining about missing features and poor documentation. We all part of the open source community, but we seem to have forgotten how it works. Now we believe that we can throw money at the problem, but that still leaves a single developer with the responsibility for a massive code base. OpenBSD was right: "Show us the code or shut up".
- newaccount74 5y ago
  I think you are absolutely correct. The best way to contribute to Open Source software is to literally contribute to it. We don't need to turn OS maintainers into service providers that sell support contracts to enterprises. Enterprises could just contribute to projects in kind, eg. by auditing a library, by fixing a bug, or by writing some docs.
- einpoklum 5y ago
  > It feels like we moved from a world where open source software was develop by a community, to one where most of us are just consumers of the code. Are you sure that's even a contradiction? I mean, if you start with a developer community, and add a lot of people who simply had not been exposed to / using the software, you get to the situation of "most of us being just consumers of the code". Now, you could argue that communities have been fraying/weakening over the past few decades, but that would be almost an orthogonal argument. > That mean that all the companies who have been relying on open source need to allocate time to community work. We need to funnel some social resources into building and maintaining such communities. If companies were to do that, then great, or rather, not great but sort-of-ok. The thing is, they aren't doing it, as they are fundamentally motivated not to: It hurts their profitability (except perhaps for vague extra-long-term concerns). So, it's not useful to say that "companies should do it".
bshipp 5y ago
I feel like we should at least reference some companies who "do FOSS right" by releasing internal projects to the ecosystem. in the data science realm, for example, I've made heavy use of Superset and Airflow from Airbnb as well as the Plotly tools (Dash, etc) and numerous others. In many ways FOSS is thriving and on the cutting edge, and in others (especially project maintenance) it seems to be struggling. But let's at least recognize some of the good actors in that space.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
I didn't get that the original article was bashing the concept of open source; more like it was bashing the "on the ground reality" of today's open source. I think that there's a great deal of "brokenness" in the way that the software development community works, in general. Because OS is so ubiquitous, and because, as the author mentions, so many people make money on it, we think of OS as the problem. I think the general quality level of software is catastrophically bad, in many instances. This is because people rush to do "big things," and they aren't actually ready to manage these "big things." One example is overengineered design. This is something that we're all guilty of. Indeed, today, I am in the process of completely rewriting a view controller that I designed, that has that whole "Lucy and the Chocolate Factory"[0] thing going for it. The only solution was to take off, and nuke it from orbit. When I create an overengineered design, it becomes brittle, and difficult to maintain or extend. What triggered my rewriting this, was because I needed to modify the way that the layout was done, and found it to be a complete bitch to figure out. Fortunately, I am very experienced, and also wrote the original (messy) code. It would be another matter, entirely, if it was a "black box" dependency. I probably would have avoided modifying the layout, which would have resulted in a much lower quality of UX for my app. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkQ58I53mjk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkQ58I53mjk
einpoklum 5y ago
> Then why is it that millions of FOSS developers, despite knowing that their work may be consumed by for-profit corporations for nothing in return Well, that in itself is already some kind of return. Widespread use - even in a commercial setting - means widespread interest in your work and possibly in you. That might not directly translate into $$$ in the bank, but it is quite useful psychologically, technologically (think: issue reports and triage, testing of new functionality, input on future design) and even financially, in a roundabout way. Still, the main reason - for many of us anyway - is that we wrote, and write, based on _need_: We needed the software, or our friends/coworkers needed it, or maybe we perceived a public need; we wanted to satisfy this need, and there you have it. ---- Nitpick: > A world without Wikipedia. Wikipedia could have functioned just fine on some commercial equivalent of a Wiki. Wikipedia editing does not involve working on MediaWiki source code. So, not a good example IMHO.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  We would just keep using Encarta.
phkahler 5y ago
The core "problem" stems from software having zero production/replication cost, and we live in a world where nobody is used to funding development. Even software companies are charging rent for what already exists, and using some of that to develop their next version or new product. The zero cost reproduction enables the free collaboration, but doesnt fit our existing ideas around paying for things. I think that notion that all commercial software is rented needs to be widely understood.
- quadrangle 5y ago
  Yes to everything you're saying. I'd highlight your points in a different priority order. The fact that our society lacks effective concepts for supporting and sustaining anything abundant is the KEY issue. Your "doesnt fit our existing ideas around paying for things" point. Our whole capitalist system has no means to encourage us to leave nature alone where it happens to provide us immense value. Our system just destroys it (and eventually itself in the process). That we even allow monopolies on products that are basically just ideas is a grotesque aberration. Although we need to fund development, a lot of it could happen without funding if we simply supported healthy natural systems and didn't have legally-supported monopolies. The challenge that open-source projects have basically amount whether the developers can live okay enough and not have to deal with competition and exploitation from large-capitalized monopolists.
- trixie_ 5y ago
  Replace 'rent' with 'support. If a commercial company builds on top of software with a license that says 'use at your own risk' then the buck stops with them. That's why companies buy libraries from other companies that are supported - as in the liability can be passed down the line.
  - DarylZero 5y ago
    All of the commercial software companies also say "use at your own risk." The buck stops with the consumer of the software.
  - phkahler 5y ago
throwaway984393 5y ago
Nerd Sniping is HN's official sport at this point
rob_c 5y ago
Note to author you're arguing with a bronie, so not exactly a cognitively unbiased crowd... But seriously, this is that businesses are broken and grab a free thing and use it. If businesses were gassing employees because they got free ammonia to clean their buildings we wouldn't be blaming the ammonia producers. Please, stop blaming tools for the axe wielding by morons users. I'd say educate the users, but we all know thats not gonna change any time soon...
- rob_c 5y ago
  I didn't realise there were so many people hating on the open source model here, well at least now I know for the future...
preommr 5y ago
I feel like this is more an issue of people talking past each other rather than having actual differences in opinion.
tw04 5y ago
>If FOSS was broken, the internet as we know it today wouldn’t exist; the countless marvels of technology that we take for granted and techno-economies that thrive on them wouldn’t exist; I guess I just vehemently disagree. Nearly all of the early open-source software that made the internet possible was produced in universities. The only reason it was sustainable was because it was professors being paid by the university, or students doing it for free. Implying that means it's viable for all these other projects that were created and maintained outside of a university setting is just not accurate. There's also this fallacy of: it worked this long so it will continue working forever. For me the long and short of it is: the only way I can foresee open source working in the way the purists want is if there is a universal basic income. SOMEONE has to pay the bills, and as we've seen time and again, hoping to feed your family on donations is a fool's errand. With UBI, artists of all kinds (including developers) can pursue things that would otherwise be impossible. Without it, we're left with the constant push and pull of people either burning out maintaining stuff in their spare time, or hoping a given corporate maintainer wants the same features and functionality as the community.
- gutitout 5y ago
  I just feel like we can do something better than a this model. If there’s UBI than the next steps is also owning the production. That is a slippery slope. Consolidated power is not very Open Source.
- netizen-936824 5y ago
  In my opinion, corporations and govt entities should switch to a model in which they don't purchase software but instead have internal staff work on the FOSS that's used in the group. This could help the FOSS ecosystem while removing the profit incentives that people have to make shitty pointless web apps. Although I'm sure some shitty pointless web apps will still get made, I think this could shift the dynamic of the software production ecosystem for the better.
- chasd00 5y ago
  > …the only way I can foresee open source working in the way the purists want… Well the point of open source is it works however the person opening the work wants. There’s a license compatible with every philosophy out there. Take your pick. Open source isn’t broken because it can’t really break at all. For something to break it would have to have a concrete form to begin with.
orblivion 5y ago
A half baked idea, curious what people think: Would it be possible to create an insurance policy against these major FOSS vulnerabilities? The insurance company would then require audits of your tech stack, and fund security research. This is analogous to what car insurance companies already do. And then companies who are not insured are viewed as suspect, etc etc. There's apparently a misalignment of incentives because there's a break in the chain of responsibility. The idea here is to close that loop.
- convolvatron 5y ago
  car insurance companies hires actuaries that correlate driving speed to payout and adjust rates accordingly. if you think that software quality and risk can be so easily quantified then you clearly dont have your hands in software.
  - orblivion 5y ago
    What about insurance companies that need to predict weather disasters? Is that also more predictable than software? If it's something harder to predict, is there a way you could put error bars around it? Granted premiums could get high as a result.
    - atq2119 5y ago
      The key is establishing a market for this kind of insurance policy. That can only happen if companies are made liable. That needs to happen at some point, though it's not clear how to do it without getting unpleasant unintended side effects.
      - orblivion 5y ago
        Companies already don't like to deal with this stuff right? However much liability already exists, they're already having a bad day trying to patch all this stuff. So maybe they'd want to know they'll get compensated for the resources spent on that.
squarefoot 5y ago
The problem is not in Open Source itself but in the environment it lives in. So many big corporations benefit from FOSS without giving anything in return? Well, then tax them. I mean lightly, say take .01% of the biggest 100 annual profit, then distribute part of it to the 100 more important FOSS projects and part to other FOSS projects whose developers are either unemployed or in financial difficulties, important projects with too few or no maintainers, that is, where it is necessary. It doesn't seem that hard to me, but I'm sure neither FAANG nor any other giants would take this step if it doesn't become law somehow. To become law, however, it may need some changes in our definition of healthy capitalism, which to me is the hardest part.
Starlevel001 5y ago
The most obvious sign that "Open source" is broken is that everyone uses that term and not Free Software.
- bityard 5y ago
  "Free Software" generally refers specifically to GPL-licensed software, which one of many popular "open source" licenses. (GNU claims that their use of the word "Free" refers to freedom, not price.) This (IMO, weird) debate seems to be around all kinds of open source projects.
  - DarylZero 5y ago
    >"Free Software" generally refers specifically to GPL-licensed software, That is very incorrect. See https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      Oh, come now. It may be in principle incorrect... But in practice, not very.
- carapace 5y ago
  You zing, but there's a grain of truth there, isn't it? "Free" software began when RMS wanted to fix his printer and got locked out by Xerox. "Open" software was an attempt to woo business to use free software but (arguably) threw the baby out with the bathwater by eliminating the "virality" of the GPL et. al., which was kind of the whole point (of "Free" ethos.) The whole Free vs. Open issue is effectively moot anyway since everybody uses proprietary closed systems. Even the FOSS folks use GitHub.
rhdxmr 5y ago
Oh my goodness.. if open source had not existed in the world, the world must not be as good as today. The world w/o OSS must fall behind the world w/ OSS. If open source is broken, it must be repaired. I have contributed to OSS for over 2 years and it makes me feel fun and feel a sense of achievement. And I feel so grateful towards who had contributed to open source and had cultivated open source culture. I received help a lot from OSS and lots of open knowledge from the internet. And now I want to give it back to open source culture and I think I am making the world better a little bit.
kklisura 5y ago
The great thing about open source is that anyone can participate for free and for whatever reason: some for the feeling of giving back, some for creating something useful for others, some like it as challenge, some for the street cred., etc. and most people don't expect to be paid. The idea of paying for OS cannot exist in such environment until everyone is on board with that idea. If you create something and demand to be paid, someone will most definitely create something similar and release it for free.
jbirer 5y ago
My philosophy (albeit it might not be shared by many) is that if you are going to do a job, either do it well and all the way through or don't do it. I see many half-assed (for the lack of a better term) open source jobs where the developers do not respond to criticism and feedback in other words than "you should be grateful we did X and Y after all", with an air of arrogance and saintliness for even doing anything. I would analogize it with me going to a charity and giving them my food leftovers and getting mad when they do not like it.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- trixie_ 5y ago
  It's not a job, it's a hobby someone shared online with you. They owe you nothing.
- atq2119 5y ago
  The corresponding analogy to your comment is going to the charity that gives out food and getting mad at them because you don't like the food. If you don't like it, just leave or don't go there in the first place. Certainly don't harass the volunteers.
1970-01-01 5y ago
>Whose fault is it then? I believe that it is the society’s fault, the system’s fault, no matter how abstract or vague that sounds. C'mon, man! Your argument is that its all society's fault, and FOSS isn't broken! That's the weakest argument I've ever heard for keeping it!
Exendroinient 5y ago
In general, society has problems with monetization of valuable things. It's not only the case with FOSS, it's also holds true with science and a long term not quarterly counted products development. Sadly vile entertainment and advertising is perfectly monetized.
- trixie_ 5y ago
  If you choose to monetize then you probably will end up accepting liability for it as well if it goes wrong. For a lot of open source developers putting a 'use at your own risk' license on the software is easier. Let another company sell/support it if they want. Or build a company around it yourself to offer support.
  - TheCoelacanth 5y ago
    I don't think that's the case at all. Most commercial software comes with a 'use at your own risk' license, or if you're really lucky, will cap liability at the amount you paid.
    - trixie_ 5y ago
      If you're a company buying software from a vendor for network management, security, business operations, etc.. and it goes wrong, yes they are very very liable. It's the whole reason why many companies avoid building anything on unsupported technology in the first place.
      - DarylZero 5y ago
        Most commercial software comes with a 'use at your own risk' license
frizzle112 5y ago
Author describes a classic tragedy of the commons situation - many reap the benefits but there's little incentive to invest in OSS. Analysis from there is weak. The incentives I think fairly clearly lead to major underinvestment in open source relative to the ideal level because of the incentive problems Even if there is some investment and some significant success if there was investment of time and money order proportional to usage of major OSS components.
bluefox 5y ago
Solutions involving companies paying directly to the people whose code they use miss the point. The reason is that software shared with the world is often shared out of passion and idealism. If only code that's useful to some companies is paid for, the world of free (as in beer or otherwise) software as we know and love is still unsustainable, and not just because fledgling projects tend to be inferior in many ways to everything that came before. Some software is written simply for the fun of it. Future Crew were kids writing demos and putting them out (by the way, an executable for a program that's written in assembly is not so far removed from its source code; so whether they put out the source code or not is immaterial, here the point is "free as in beer"). These demos were unlikely to be directly useful to companies, but we were still amazed by them and some of us got into programming because of them. Do you want to live in a world where only people who produce software that's useful to some company can sustain themselves? Their parents provided them with food and shelter, so they didn't have to think too hard about writing and releasing it. People in this thread claim that they don't feel exploited, probably for similar reasons. They probably have an income or enough money to make them feel comfortable giving something away. What happens when circumstances don't go your way, though? Then, while you live off your savings, see them shrink day by day, you realize that society doesn't give you the basic stuff that's needed for living, so why the hell should you give anything away? If you already gave stuff away while you were fat and healthy, and this stuff is being used profitably by others, the resentment can only grow.
- trixie_ 5y ago
  It's easy to write code and release it with a 'use at your own risk' license on it. Offering support and accepting liability for problems with your code isn't fun or easy.
  - DarylZero 5y ago
    No one accepts liability for software problems. Not free software developers, not Microsoft, not Google, not Oracle. Mostly only OEMs of non-computer equipment, such as Boeing, warranty physical products that include software. For code that doesn't run in planes or cars or other machines -- there is no warranty.
betwixthewires 5y ago
> While I believe that it is unethical for large for-profit corporations to not support FOSS projects from which they derive (extract?) immense amounts of value, it is not illegal, thanks to the system. While I very much agree with the article on it's core topic, this is incorrect. It is not illegal thanks to the license. The FOSS world created the licenses, it is made legal by choice, it isn't due to the system. "The system" very much allows for this problem to be entirely avoided. If you're happy making free software but you don't want anyone to profit from your work without cutting you in on the success you contribute to, consider a dual license. Maybe the free software world should consider addressing this problem in some license scheme, a couple of options being royalties paid if the software is used in profit generating endeavors, or even something more restrictive, like requiring all derivative works and works being supported by licensed software to release their source as well. Imagine if Android were licensed in this way, google would not get to marry proprietary crap to it, as just one example.
jack_pp 5y ago
is it not possible to have a licence that says if you want to use this code to sell a service for a profit you must contact the owner and negociate a deal? this way if you are developing in the open source bubble you get to use software for free. if you want to build a service you get to test the software for free and if your company takes off then you must pay for your foundation.
- trixie_ 5y ago
  It's totally possible and many unpopular open source projects out there do just that.
assbuttbuttass 5y ago
> Whose fault is it then? I believe that it is the society’s fault, the system’s fault, no matter how abstract or vague that sounds. I find it interesting that the author wasn't willing to call out Capitalism by name.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
roca 5y ago
Blaming "society" is a nothingburger. It doesn't point towards any solution. Ditto "capitalism" (although the OP doesn't go there) --- people pursue desires and respond to incentives; you can call those effects "capitalism" if you like but you'll struggle with them under any kind of economic arrangements. My self-diagnosis as an unpaid open source maintainer (rr) is that we like to share, the marginal cost of sharing with potentially everyone is close to zero (at least early in a project), so throwing code on Github with a liberal license feels good. It also benefits the project to some extent because some improvements may come back. But then we see rr creating huge value for people, some of whom are very well paid for their work, and none of that is coming back to us, and that seems unfair even though we did technically agree to it --- sure, you don't have to give back, but it would be the nice thing to do. But in software it's very easy to extract a ton of value from dependencies without really noticing, and very hard to give back systematically. So it's the same old story --- perfectly good human instincts aren't a 100% fit for our modern environment. What if we made it easier to identify the value we're all extracting and contribute back systematically? If we did, maybe we could build social norms around that. E.g. imagine we had tools that monitor your software development workflow, identify the tools and libraries you use, and quantify your usage via some heuristics. Then imagine you integrate something like Github Sponsors so you can allocate $X to support all your dependencies and make that happen at the press of a button. Then imagine we advocate for professional software developers to allocate 1% of their income that way, and agitate for Big Tech companies to make that a policy.
okareaman 5y ago
I learned from the actix-web debacle that I don't want to ever do libre or open source software. If people want to complain to me about my code and call me a lousy programmer, then they have to pay me for the right. A sad day for Rust https://steveklabnik.com/writing/a-sad-day-for-rust https://steveklabnik.com/writing/a-sad-day-for-rust
mcguire 5y ago
As an anecdote, all of my work on open source (and I've been working on and with open source software for the better part of 30 years) has been because I had something that needed to be done and writing, adapting, or fixing open source packages was the fastest, easiest, and cheapest way of doing that. My employers paid me to get things done, not to write software. Writing, adapting, or fixing software is the means, not the end.
jrm4 5y ago
The thing is, the answers for this are all here and old. I'm just kind of waiting for people to figure it out. If you're creating cool stuff and giving it away, great! No obligation. If, however, you're creating a paid product or service -- there already exists a ton of law and precedent and ideas about obligations. We just need to remember these and start using them again. These ideas and law generally point to: If you put a product out there, and make claims about what it can and cannot do (either explicitly or implicitly) then you must be held responsible for the harm if people reasonably rely on it and you screw up. That's it. That's the entirety of it. FOSS is one of your inputs, could be seen as something like gasoline or trucks or whatever. It's your job as a company to handle those safely and make sure they don't goop out and cause harm, and if you don't get this right, you should be sued. Edit -- and of course, sometimes the companies are too slow to make this happen and so we need regulation. We perhaps need an EPA or FDA for software.
mraza007 5y ago
I have huge respect for Open Source Devs. Developer Ecosystem wouldn’t be same without them. I truly appreciate their efforts to make amazing software in there free time and it means a lot to me. As a developer I owe a lot to open source thats why If I can’t contribute to their software I always try to personally thank them when using their software.
phendrenad2 5y ago
I see two sides arguing past each other. One side says "FOSS isn't broken, because X", the other side says "FOSS IS broken, because Y!". Neither side tries to refute X or Y. We all have our personal goalposts. Why argue over a headline? Why not argue with the other side on common terms? It's like if I say "fruitcake is terrible" and someone says "I like fruitcake, I use it as a paperweight and a doorstopper" as a rebuttal.

262 points by BrainBuzzer 5y ago

> boast of their “innovation” and “growth” without … contributing … from corporations that don’t bat an eye at donating billions to (often dubious) “social” organizations - often ones that criticize them anyway.

dgreensp 5y ago
That is pretty funny!
haukem 5y ago
The legal and fiance constructs of many open source projects are pretty badly organized. This makes it hard for accounts at big cooperation to handle them. Many open source projects are also pretty bad at marketing to non developers and do not have an aggressive founding campaign. Some “social” organizations are much better at this and have very good people taking care of marketing and accounting to people who control money. Most members of open source projects just want to code and not take care of tax exception for donations and filing out the correct tax forms in time.
- raxxorrax 5y ago
  If they manage accounting and marketing hat might make sense. Many projects are probably looking forward to such forms of free contribution.

akagusu 5y ago

Of course "open source" is not broken. It works exactly how it was intended to work and it perfectly models our economic system where a lot of people do essential work but are underpaid or not paid at all. tl;dr: "open source" means free labor for corporations.

api 5y ago

FOSS is the victim in a way, but that means it must defend itself. OSI needs to get off their asses and acknowledge the problem and work with the community to develop licenses that limit SaaSification and other forms of appropriation in a way that is compatible with the principles of open source and lacks the optics (FUD) problems of the GPL approach. I’m not holding my breath since the OSI is funded almost entirely by huge companies that are quite happy with all the free labor they are exploiting. So far the OSI has plugged it’s ears and pretended everything is fine, and OSS zealots attack the character of any lowly developer who isn’t happy providing uncompensated labor to surveillance capitalist behemoths. I don’t see FOSS surviving another generation if this doesn’t happen, or at least not in a form that isn’t weaponized to herd everyone into proprietary cloud environments.

judge2020 5y ago
This would be solved if people were educated on dual-licensing - no new license needs to exist if you go GPL and have a paid commercial license.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  Probably AGPL if SaaS is a concern.
  - trixie_ 5y ago
    People who want their OSS to be widely adopted wouldn't touch AGPL with a ten foot pole.
hardwaresofton 5y ago
There's another option -- those seeking to SaaSify F/OSS can support/partner the software they use. Sustainable hosting isn't something that larger corporations are into, but the right companies can do it, and as companies that have this mindset/condition built in (best if in writing, of course) grow, F/OSS becomes more sustainable by default. All it takes is a reasonable % of revenue contribution to the F/OSS powering your stack. I think the range should be 20% to 50%[0], but even if it was 10%, imagine if open source projects that power even small to mid size tech companies in the world received 10% (or even 3%) of the revenue being collected? The problem of getting the money down to F/OSS that powers inner machinery (libraries, frameworks, etc) is a bit tougher, but I think that could work out easily by doing a general % of revenue and deciding allocation. For example even if you do a 1% allocation to libraries in particular, as libraries are reused much more easily, at scale library authors will do quite well. Maybe a license that asks for a % of revenue is an easier static goal but I'm optimistic enough to think that the partnership approach could work. [0]: https://nimbusws.com/#sustainability https://nimbusws.com/#sustainability

tptacek 5y ago

It seems like both sides of this supposed debate are saying precisely the same thing, with one side ("how dare we suggest anything is wrong wth open source") taking umbrage for no apparent reason. The premise of "both" arguments is that open source maintainers are being exploited.

ghaff 5y ago
Except they're mostly not. While it's not hard to find exceptions most of the maintainers and other coder associated with major open source projects are being paid by companies to do so.
- haukem 5y ago
  This really depends on the project. Many people just do it in their spare time and have a normal software engineer or similar role working on proprietary software using open source. Some are still at university and studying. Some are contracting and probably also get some new customers thorough their open source work. I do not have real data, but I assume that more than 50% of the effort invested in open source is not directly paid by a company. For the Linux kernel 20% to 30% of the commits come from people doing it as a hobby, the Linux kernel is supported very well by big cooperations.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    You're right. It really does vary. However, in the case of the Linux kernel just about 8% were unpaid as of five years ago. https://thenewstack.io/contributes-linux-kernel/ https://thenewstack.io/contributes-linux-kernel/ I assume that projects like Kubernetes and OpenStack are similar. Obviously many smaller projects are largely developed by people on their own time. I expect this also applies languages and things like that which aren't largely corporate efforts like Go and Rust are.
  - watwut 5y ago
    Majority of people responding to FOSS studies is paid by companies. It is biased toward Linux related open source projects a bit. The thing is, while there are maintenaners of important projects working for free, the idea that most of major open source development is for free is mostly mythology. Large projects are backed by companies.

gtsop 5y ago

Re the author of "open source is broken": The irony of bashing open source on a websiate using systems/code/infra containing thousands of open source lines of code which I am sure he hasn't paid for... has probably escaped his attention. Honestly, I am not sure why there is an argument anymore. Let people write or use free or proprietary software as they see fit. You all know the pros, you all know the cons, make a decision and god's speed, live your life. I side with the free software. You do you.

xena 5y ago
As the author of that article, I am starting to prefer they/them pronouns. It would be nice if you could update your comment to refer to me correctly, however this is not a demand. There is a lot more happening behind the scenes than you know of, I make a tiny fraction of my donations public knowledge.
- KronisLV 5y ago
  Edit: another person pointed out that the actual comment sounds like an ad hominem, which i do not condone. However, some of the phrasing made me think, hence the question (more clarification below). > The irony of bashing open source on a website using systems/code/infra containing thousands of open source lines of code which I am sure they haven't paid for... has probably escaped their attention. Hey, what are your thoughts on the OP's argument, though? I read your article and it did seem to have plenty of truth to it, much like other articles that i've read in the past: https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html Personally, i use a lot of open source software and i definitely won't pay for most of it, many people out there won't pay for any of it. I don't find that ironic, i find it sad. There is no obligation or anything to encourage anyone to donate to the authors, most people don't care. If i went to work on Monday and suggested that we as a company throw money at open source, i'd probably be looked at funny. In the company, near the holidays we have an initiative where employees vote for charities and each vote gets 100 EUR donated towards them... but curiously, no one even considers something like that for open source projects, despite there being hundreds if not thousands of those in their dependencies. I think it's probably a cultural issue to some degree, simple psychology otherwise.

PaulKeeble 5y ago

Its probably time for the next generation of open source licensing to make the code not usable for profit making purposes, thus ensuring open source is either funded by the companies that use it or forms its own separate community away from corporations.

unbanned 5y ago
I just wouldn't use it then. Or I'd use it and just not tell anyone. Or take its essence and build it from ground up with a different name. Who's gonna sue me?
js8 5y ago
Why when you already have GPL? Most companies do not allow GPL software to be used for products.
- goalieca 5y ago
  It becomes murky when you don’t actually ship software and use it as a service in the backend. GPL is from the olden days when you actually distributed your software. Now it’s only the front end and that ships as source still because wasm and the rest haven’t taken over yet.
  - inops 5y ago
    AGPL then. It extends the meaning of "distribute", but is still FSF/OSI-approved
    - xyzzy_plugh 5y ago
      AGPL is super scary for corporations, as it's not clear where the boundaries are and no one wants to go to court to find out. GPL is relatively straight forward: as long as you don't link to it, make sources including any changes available to your users. AGPL is like, okay maybe everything needs to be released. And when you are also using proprietary third party software it becomes a real hairy mess.

jph 5y ago

> If there was a paywall, even for $1, how many people would install a library? I would LOVE this solution. I use open source professionally, and I continually advocate for ways to pay open source projects and developer. And if there's a way to pay extra to fund a feature, or hire a developer as a consultant, so much the better. In my experience, companies are highly willing and able to pay for software and services that accelerate the companies' goals. If you want to pay for open source, then I can suggest Open Collective, Patreon, and GitHub Sponsors as ways that are working well IME. Or consider donating to nonprofit open source advocacy organizations including Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Free Software Foundation (FSF), Apache Foundation, Linux Foundation, and similar groups.

usrbinbash 5y ago
>companies are highly willing and able to pay for software and services that accelerate the companies' goals. The are also willing to buy things and keep everyone else from using them.

jollybean 5y ago

The problem is Free as in Beer and Free as in Speech are related. The issue is not $1 downloads so much at is the overhead, pain and issues that come along with it. It's hard to manage and control downloads, usage, and the legal issue might be that any hint of licensing problem makes it 'no go' from a corporate perspective. So the gap between 'Free Beer and Speech' and 50-cent Beer and Speech is enormous.

sneak 5y ago
If it's free as in freedom then the first downloader to pay $1 can just mirror it and allow free downloads. Free as in freedom always necessarily denotes free as in beer as well. It's not an accident or side effect.
- progval 5y ago
  But the mirror may be less convenient. This works for OsmAnd+ for example: it's FOSS, free (as in beer) on FDroid, but costs 25$ on Google Play.
  - sneak 5y ago
    Yeah, the Blink ssh/mosh client for iOS is GPL3 but costs $19.99 in the App Store. I'm about to pay someone with a developer account a few hundred bucks just to publish a free renamed build of it to the App Store, because that's ridiculous. https://blink.sh/ https://blink.sh/ https://github.com/blinksh/blink https://github.com/blinksh/blink https://apps.apple.com/app/id1156707581 https://apps.apple.com/app/id1156707581
    - jollybean 5y ago
      I think you're missing the point here. People's time is valuable, especially expert developers. The 'Code' only part of the issue with respect to input cost. Someone has to maintain that dev. account, maintain their skills, stay on top of distribution policies, probably take on some legal risk, keep the build kind of up to day. That takes skill. We mostly want it that way so that distribution is clean and clear and reasonable for those involved. If it's a niche product, then $20 is not going to add up to a lot of money. If it's a professional product, then $20 is basically $0 for all intents and purposes, it's the cost of a stapler on which case cost should not be a problem. The AppStore is generally an open market, if $20 price is too high and someone is raking in big profits, someone can publish the same thing. In the end, what we want to achieve is a price point that matches the material value creation involved in the 'maintenance of the build and distribution aspects'. That's actually efficient, and what we want. There's no such thing as 'free' - it's all time and labour and there are number of issues involved. FOSS should be considered 'volunteer labour' which makes the underlying costs more apparent, the code and licensing is a distraction from that.

icambron 5y ago

I don't think OSS is broken either, but I don't get the complaint here. People and companies use things because it's advantageous to them to do so. When you release software that's free (as in beer), people and companies are going to use it for free. It doesn't matter whether it's "hypercapitalism" or not. You simply can't eschew all of the systems available for extracting value from your labor and then complain that you're unable to extract value from your labor. In particular, this doesn't make any sense: > While I believe that it is unethical for large for-profit corporations to not support FOSS projects from which they derive (extract?) immense amounts of value, it is not illegal, thanks to the system. It's been made specifically, intensionally legal by the people creating it. So of course it's legal, and it's weird to say, "I went out of my way to make this free, but it's unethical for you to actually use it for free". In capitalism, you have the right to set your own price for your labor and property, and there are lots of mechanisms for charging people for stuff. That's what all these software vendors are doing! In contrast, the MIT and Apache licenses say "I made this but do whatever you want". We choose this license when making things because we want everyone to do what they want. We can't be angry when they do.

IceDane 5y ago

Did this guy really just write a rebuttal to an article that he didn't bother to read well enough to understand? They are literally arguing the same things. The article he is arguing against is not trying to shit on open source. It's trying to explain how insane it is that so much open source development is so critical but so massively underfunded. The original article isn't saying that the idea of open source is fundamentally broken. It's the consumers of open source software whose morals are fundamentally broken. Please, for the love of all that is holy, just spend like 5 extra minutes reading what you are arguing against next time. This is so embarrassing that I'm feeling the second-hand embarrassment.

sidlls 5y ago

Open source is most certainly broken, and not just due to the various financial, freedom and security issues these two articles focus on. My biggest peeve: documentation is often minimal (e.g. API docs only) or filled with useless toy examples that are effectively just rephrasing of API docs. The entire underpinning of free and open source software is silly: software in this context isn't an academic pursuit producing knowledge that should be freely shared to our collective advancement as a civilization. It's a hammer, a wrench, a table: in short, a product. That fundamental category error made by our community is the source of all the problems with F/OSS, financial and otherwise.

loic-sharma 5y ago
I agree with what you say, but FYI docs is one of the easiest yet most valuable thing a person can contribute. As a maintainer, I wish I had more feedback and contributions to the docs!
- rdpintqogeogsaa 5y ago
  As someone who wrote large parts of the docs for a project: The reason that I imagine few people do it is because if you get involved with the documentation, you will be on the hook for tracking the library closely and keeping the documentation up to date; there will be an implicit, external pressure that the documentation continues working. That becomes a lot of work very quickly, so I tend to only get involved in libraries that will quickly hit some kind of stable maintenance mode or in which I have personal stake and thus just need to polish up my own notes for how to get off the ground.
  - danenania 5y ago
    Updating docs should be part of the responsibility of adding a new feature, just like adding tests and making sure no existing tests are failing.
throwaway984393 5y ago
You know, one of those terrible aspects of open source is that if you see a lack of documentation, you can just contribute it yourself. Good luck contributing new docs to literally any proprietary product.

candiddevmike 5y ago

I recently looked into open sourcing Homechart (https://homechart.app https://homechart.app). It's free to use already (for self hosting), but some users wanted it to be open source (almost entirely for auditing purposes, but I doubt they'd even read the code). I don't want anyone using it for commercial purposes, and I found a few licenses that would prevent this-- namely Commons Clause, but at the end of the day I didn't see a benefit to having it OSS aside from appeasing some OSS purists. The app is already free, and I don't need the added burden of responding to issues and pull requests (and supporting the code they add). EDIT: I also don't want folks redistributing custom builds or effectively reselling it somehow. I'm a solo dev, I don't have the resources to litigate and enforce any kind of restrictive license.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
If you want to allow audits but don't care about Open Source, just do a source available / shared source license like tarsnap.
- candiddevmike 5y ago
  Sure, but then I can't prevent forks or folks distributing custom builds unless I start doing DRM notices and litigation. It's infinitely easier to keep it closed source.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
    Legally you can, and practically do you really think people can't reverse engineer your stuff if they want? Alternatively: it sounded like you just didn't want to support it or deal with pull requests; do you care about unofficial unsupported builds? Edit: And yes, just distributing binaries and not worrying is the least work; I just wanted to point out that you can have it both ways if you ignore "Open Source".

sneak 5y ago

> FOSS is free as in freedom and not free as in beer (cost). Actually, and critically, it is both! You can't have free as in freedom without being free as in beer first.

icy 5y ago
You certainly can. You can charge for the software, and release its source under a free license. The user can choose to download the source and build it themselves, or pay for the built software (or the service).
carapace 5y ago
You can give away the code (and the right to use it) but still charge for development, maintenance, and auditing.

mrweasel 5y ago

It feels like we moved from a world where open source software was develop by a community, to one where most of us are just consumers of the code. I don't know if where actually more contributors 20 years ago, relatively speaking, but much of the code was also less complex. Open source is still remarkably successful and the only reason why the whole Log4J RCE is such a big deal, is because the library is hugely successful. The failing isn't in the work of the author(s), but those of us who been consuming the code. We don't need to fund the main developers, what we need is for the project, and projects like it, to be true communities. That mean that all the companies who have been relying on open source need to allocate time to community work. We pay for open source software by helping build it and that goes beyond creating an issue on Github or complaining about missing features and poor documentation. We all part of the open source community, but we seem to have forgotten how it works. Now we believe that we can throw money at the problem, but that still leaves a single developer with the responsibility for a massive code base. OpenBSD was right: "Show us the code or shut up".

newaccount74 5y ago
I think you are absolutely correct. The best way to contribute to Open Source software is to literally contribute to it. We don't need to turn OS maintainers into service providers that sell support contracts to enterprises. Enterprises could just contribute to projects in kind, eg. by auditing a library, by fixing a bug, or by writing some docs.
einpoklum 5y ago
> It feels like we moved from a world where open source software was develop by a community, to one where most of us are just consumers of the code. Are you sure that's even a contradiction? I mean, if you start with a developer community, and add a lot of people who simply had not been exposed to / using the software, you get to the situation of "most of us being just consumers of the code". Now, you could argue that communities have been fraying/weakening over the past few decades, but that would be almost an orthogonal argument. > That mean that all the companies who have been relying on open source need to allocate time to community work. We need to funnel some social resources into building and maintaining such communities. If companies were to do that, then great, or rather, not great but sort-of-ok. The thing is, they aren't doing it, as they are fundamentally motivated not to: It hurts their profitability (except perhaps for vague extra-long-term concerns). So, it's not useful to say that "companies should do it".

bshipp 5y ago

I feel like we should at least reference some companies who "do FOSS right" by releasing internal projects to the ecosystem. in the data science realm, for example, I've made heavy use of Superset and Airflow from Airbnb as well as the Plotly tools (Dash, etc) and numerous others. In many ways FOSS is thriving and on the cutting edge, and in others (especially project maintenance) it seems to be struggling. But let's at least recognize some of the good actors in that space.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

I didn't get that the original article was bashing the concept of open source; more like it was bashing the "on the ground reality" of today's open source. I think that there's a great deal of "brokenness" in the way that the software development community works, in general. Because OS is so ubiquitous, and because, as the author mentions, so many people make money on it, we think of OS as the problem. I think the general quality level of software is catastrophically bad, in many instances. This is because people rush to do "big things," and they aren't actually ready to manage these "big things." One example is overengineered design. This is something that we're all guilty of. Indeed, today, I am in the process of completely rewriting a view controller that I designed, that has that whole "Lucy and the Chocolate Factory"[0] thing going for it. The only solution was to take off, and nuke it from orbit. When I create an overengineered design, it becomes brittle, and difficult to maintain or extend. What triggered my rewriting this, was because I needed to modify the way that the layout was done, and found it to be a complete bitch to figure out. Fortunately, I am very experienced, and also wrote the original (messy) code. It would be another matter, entirely, if it was a "black box" dependency. I probably would have avoided modifying the layout, which would have resulted in a much lower quality of UX for my app. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkQ58I53mjk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkQ58I53mjk

einpoklum 5y ago

> Then why is it that millions of FOSS developers, despite knowing that their work may be consumed by for-profit corporations for nothing in return Well, that in itself is already some kind of return. Widespread use - even in a commercial setting - means widespread interest in your work and possibly in you. That might not directly translate into $$$ in the bank, but it is quite useful psychologically, technologically (think: issue reports and triage, testing of new functionality, input on future design) and even financially, in a roundabout way. Still, the main reason - for many of us anyway - is that we wrote, and write, based on _need_: We needed the software, or our friends/coworkers needed it, or maybe we perceived a public need; we wanted to satisfy this need, and there you have it. ---- Nitpick: > A world without Wikipedia. Wikipedia could have functioned just fine on some commercial equivalent of a Wiki. Wikipedia editing does not involve working on MediaWiki source code. So, not a good example IMHO.

pjmlp 5y ago
We would just keep using Encarta.

phkahler 5y ago

The core "problem" stems from software having zero production/replication cost, and we live in a world where nobody is used to funding development. Even software companies are charging rent for what already exists, and using some of that to develop their next version or new product. The zero cost reproduction enables the free collaboration, but doesnt fit our existing ideas around paying for things. I think that notion that all commercial software is rented needs to be widely understood.

quadrangle 5y ago
Yes to everything you're saying. I'd highlight your points in a different priority order. The fact that our society lacks effective concepts for supporting and sustaining anything abundant is the KEY issue. Your "doesnt fit our existing ideas around paying for things" point. Our whole capitalist system has no means to encourage us to leave nature alone where it happens to provide us immense value. Our system just destroys it (and eventually itself in the process). That we even allow monopolies on products that are basically just ideas is a grotesque aberration. Although we need to fund development, a lot of it could happen without funding if we simply supported healthy natural systems and didn't have legally-supported monopolies. The challenge that open-source projects have basically amount whether the developers can live okay enough and not have to deal with competition and exploitation from large-capitalized monopolists.
trixie_ 5y ago
Replace 'rent' with 'support. If a commercial company builds on top of software with a license that says 'use at your own risk' then the buck stops with them. That's why companies buy libraries from other companies that are supported - as in the liability can be passed down the line.
- DarylZero 5y ago
  All of the commercial software companies also say "use at your own risk." The buck stops with the consumer of the software.
- phkahler 5y ago

throwaway984393 5y ago

Nerd Sniping is HN's official sport at this point

rob_c 5y ago

Note to author you're arguing with a bronie, so not exactly a cognitively unbiased crowd... But seriously, this is that businesses are broken and grab a free thing and use it. If businesses were gassing employees because they got free ammonia to clean their buildings we wouldn't be blaming the ammonia producers. Please, stop blaming tools for the axe wielding by morons users. I'd say educate the users, but we all know thats not gonna change any time soon...

rob_c 5y ago
I didn't realise there were so many people hating on the open source model here, well at least now I know for the future...

preommr 5y ago

I feel like this is more an issue of people talking past each other rather than having actual differences in opinion.

tw04 5y ago

>If FOSS was broken, the internet as we know it today wouldn’t exist; the countless marvels of technology that we take for granted and techno-economies that thrive on them wouldn’t exist; I guess I just vehemently disagree. Nearly all of the early open-source software that made the internet possible was produced in universities. The only reason it was sustainable was because it was professors being paid by the university, or students doing it for free. Implying that means it's viable for all these other projects that were created and maintained outside of a university setting is just not accurate. There's also this fallacy of: it worked this long so it will continue working forever. For me the long and short of it is: the only way I can foresee open source working in the way the purists want is if there is a universal basic income. SOMEONE has to pay the bills, and as we've seen time and again, hoping to feed your family on donations is a fool's errand. With UBI, artists of all kinds (including developers) can pursue things that would otherwise be impossible. Without it, we're left with the constant push and pull of people either burning out maintaining stuff in their spare time, or hoping a given corporate maintainer wants the same features and functionality as the community.

gutitout 5y ago
I just feel like we can do something better than a this model. If there’s UBI than the next steps is also owning the production. That is a slippery slope. Consolidated power is not very Open Source.
netizen-936824 5y ago
In my opinion, corporations and govt entities should switch to a model in which they don't purchase software but instead have internal staff work on the FOSS that's used in the group. This could help the FOSS ecosystem while removing the profit incentives that people have to make shitty pointless web apps. Although I'm sure some shitty pointless web apps will still get made, I think this could shift the dynamic of the software production ecosystem for the better.
chasd00 5y ago
> …the only way I can foresee open source working in the way the purists want… Well the point of open source is it works however the person opening the work wants. There’s a license compatible with every philosophy out there. Take your pick. Open source isn’t broken because it can’t really break at all. For something to break it would have to have a concrete form to begin with.

orblivion 5y ago

A half baked idea, curious what people think: Would it be possible to create an insurance policy against these major FOSS vulnerabilities? The insurance company would then require audits of your tech stack, and fund security research. This is analogous to what car insurance companies already do. And then companies who are not insured are viewed as suspect, etc etc. There's apparently a misalignment of incentives because there's a break in the chain of responsibility. The idea here is to close that loop.

convolvatron 5y ago
car insurance companies hires actuaries that correlate driving speed to payout and adjust rates accordingly. if you think that software quality and risk can be so easily quantified then you clearly dont have your hands in software.
- orblivion 5y ago
  What about insurance companies that need to predict weather disasters? Is that also more predictable than software? If it's something harder to predict, is there a way you could put error bars around it? Granted premiums could get high as a result.
  - atq2119 5y ago
    The key is establishing a market for this kind of insurance policy. That can only happen if companies are made liable. That needs to happen at some point, though it's not clear how to do it without getting unpleasant unintended side effects.
    - orblivion 5y ago
      Companies already don't like to deal with this stuff right? However much liability already exists, they're already having a bad day trying to patch all this stuff. So maybe they'd want to know they'll get compensated for the resources spent on that.

squarefoot 5y ago

The problem is not in Open Source itself but in the environment it lives in. So many big corporations benefit from FOSS without giving anything in return? Well, then tax them. I mean lightly, say take .01% of the biggest 100 annual profit, then distribute part of it to the 100 more important FOSS projects and part to other FOSS projects whose developers are either unemployed or in financial difficulties, important projects with too few or no maintainers, that is, where it is necessary. It doesn't seem that hard to me, but I'm sure neither FAANG nor any other giants would take this step if it doesn't become law somehow. To become law, however, it may need some changes in our definition of healthy capitalism, which to me is the hardest part.

Starlevel001 5y ago

The most obvious sign that "Open source" is broken is that everyone uses that term and not Free Software.

bityard 5y ago
"Free Software" generally refers specifically to GPL-licensed software, which one of many popular "open source" licenses. (GNU claims that their use of the word "Free" refers to freedom, not price.) This (IMO, weird) debate seems to be around all kinds of open source projects.
- DarylZero 5y ago
  >"Free Software" generally refers specifically to GPL-licensed software, That is very incorrect. See https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    Oh, come now. It may be in principle incorrect... But in practice, not very.
carapace 5y ago
You zing, but there's a grain of truth there, isn't it? "Free" software began when RMS wanted to fix his printer and got locked out by Xerox. "Open" software was an attempt to woo business to use free software but (arguably) threw the baby out with the bathwater by eliminating the "virality" of the GPL et. al., which was kind of the whole point (of "Free" ethos.) The whole Free vs. Open issue is effectively moot anyway since everybody uses proprietary closed systems. Even the FOSS folks use GitHub.

rhdxmr 5y ago

Oh my goodness.. if open source had not existed in the world, the world must not be as good as today. The world w/o OSS must fall behind the world w/ OSS. If open source is broken, it must be repaired. I have contributed to OSS for over 2 years and it makes me feel fun and feel a sense of achievement. And I feel so grateful towards who had contributed to open source and had cultivated open source culture. I received help a lot from OSS and lots of open knowledge from the internet. And now I want to give it back to open source culture and I think I am making the world better a little bit.

kklisura 5y ago

The great thing about open source is that anyone can participate for free and for whatever reason: some for the feeling of giving back, some for creating something useful for others, some like it as challenge, some for the street cred., etc. and most people don't expect to be paid. The idea of paying for OS cannot exist in such environment until everyone is on board with that idea. If you create something and demand to be paid, someone will most definitely create something similar and release it for free.

jbirer 5y ago

My philosophy (albeit it might not be shared by many) is that if you are going to do a job, either do it well and all the way through or don't do it. I see many half-assed (for the lack of a better term) open source jobs where the developers do not respond to criticism and feedback in other words than "you should be grateful we did X and Y after all", with an air of arrogance and saintliness for even doing anything. I would analogize it with me going to a charity and giving them my food leftovers and getting mad when they do not like it.

deleted 5y ago
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trixie_ 5y ago
It's not a job, it's a hobby someone shared online with you. They owe you nothing.
atq2119 5y ago
The corresponding analogy to your comment is going to the charity that gives out food and getting mad at them because you don't like the food. If you don't like it, just leave or don't go there in the first place. Certainly don't harass the volunteers.

1970-01-01 5y ago

>Whose fault is it then? I believe that it is the society’s fault, the system’s fault, no matter how abstract or vague that sounds. C'mon, man! Your argument is that its all society's fault, and FOSS isn't broken! That's the weakest argument I've ever heard for keeping it!

Exendroinient 5y ago

In general, society has problems with monetization of valuable things. It's not only the case with FOSS, it's also holds true with science and a long term not quarterly counted products development. Sadly vile entertainment and advertising is perfectly monetized.

trixie_ 5y ago
If you choose to monetize then you probably will end up accepting liability for it as well if it goes wrong. For a lot of open source developers putting a 'use at your own risk' license on the software is easier. Let another company sell/support it if they want. Or build a company around it yourself to offer support.
- TheCoelacanth 5y ago
  I don't think that's the case at all. Most commercial software comes with a 'use at your own risk' license, or if you're really lucky, will cap liability at the amount you paid.
  - trixie_ 5y ago
    If you're a company buying software from a vendor for network management, security, business operations, etc.. and it goes wrong, yes they are very very liable. It's the whole reason why many companies avoid building anything on unsupported technology in the first place.
    - DarylZero 5y ago
      Most commercial software comes with a 'use at your own risk' license

frizzle112 5y ago

Author describes a classic tragedy of the commons situation - many reap the benefits but there's little incentive to invest in OSS. Analysis from there is weak. The incentives I think fairly clearly lead to major underinvestment in open source relative to the ideal level because of the incentive problems Even if there is some investment and some significant success if there was investment of time and money order proportional to usage of major OSS components.

bluefox 5y ago

Solutions involving companies paying directly to the people whose code they use miss the point. The reason is that software shared with the world is often shared out of passion and idealism. If only code that's useful to some companies is paid for, the world of free (as in beer or otherwise) software as we know and love is still unsustainable, and not just because fledgling projects tend to be inferior in many ways to everything that came before. Some software is written simply for the fun of it. Future Crew were kids writing demos and putting them out (by the way, an executable for a program that's written in assembly is not so far removed from its source code; so whether they put out the source code or not is immaterial, here the point is "free as in beer"). These demos were unlikely to be directly useful to companies, but we were still amazed by them and some of us got into programming because of them. Do you want to live in a world where only people who produce software that's useful to some company can sustain themselves? Their parents provided them with food and shelter, so they didn't have to think too hard about writing and releasing it. People in this thread claim that they don't feel exploited, probably for similar reasons. They probably have an income or enough money to make them feel comfortable giving something away. What happens when circumstances don't go your way, though? Then, while you live off your savings, see them shrink day by day, you realize that society doesn't give you the basic stuff that's needed for living, so why the hell should you give anything away? If you already gave stuff away while you were fat and healthy, and this stuff is being used profitably by others, the resentment can only grow.

trixie_ 5y ago
It's easy to write code and release it with a 'use at your own risk' license on it. Offering support and accepting liability for problems with your code isn't fun or easy.
- DarylZero 5y ago
  No one accepts liability for software problems. Not free software developers, not Microsoft, not Google, not Oracle. Mostly only OEMs of non-computer equipment, such as Boeing, warranty physical products that include software. For code that doesn't run in planes or cars or other machines -- there is no warranty.

betwixthewires 5y ago

> While I believe that it is unethical for large for-profit corporations to not support FOSS projects from which they derive (extract?) immense amounts of value, it is not illegal, thanks to the system. While I very much agree with the article on it's core topic, this is incorrect. It is not illegal thanks to the license. The FOSS world created the licenses, it is made legal by choice, it isn't due to the system. "The system" very much allows for this problem to be entirely avoided. If you're happy making free software but you don't want anyone to profit from your work without cutting you in on the success you contribute to, consider a dual license. Maybe the free software world should consider addressing this problem in some license scheme, a couple of options being royalties paid if the software is used in profit generating endeavors, or even something more restrictive, like requiring all derivative works and works being supported by licensed software to release their source as well. Imagine if Android were licensed in this way, google would not get to marry proprietary crap to it, as just one example.

jack_pp 5y ago

is it not possible to have a licence that says if you want to use this code to sell a service for a profit you must contact the owner and negociate a deal? this way if you are developing in the open source bubble you get to use software for free. if you want to build a service you get to test the software for free and if your company takes off then you must pay for your foundation.

trixie_ 5y ago
It's totally possible and many unpopular open source projects out there do just that.

assbuttbuttass 5y ago

> Whose fault is it then? I believe that it is the society’s fault, the system’s fault, no matter how abstract or vague that sounds. I find it interesting that the author wasn't willing to call out Capitalism by name.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

roca 5y ago

Blaming "society" is a nothingburger. It doesn't point towards any solution. Ditto "capitalism" (although the OP doesn't go there) --- people pursue desires and respond to incentives; you can call those effects "capitalism" if you like but you'll struggle with them under any kind of economic arrangements. My self-diagnosis as an unpaid open source maintainer (rr) is that we like to share, the marginal cost of sharing with potentially everyone is close to zero (at least early in a project), so throwing code on Github with a liberal license feels good. It also benefits the project to some extent because some improvements may come back. But then we see rr creating huge value for people, some of whom are very well paid for their work, and none of that is coming back to us, and that seems unfair even though we did technically agree to it --- sure, you don't have to give back, but it would be the nice thing to do. But in software it's very easy to extract a ton of value from dependencies without really noticing, and very hard to give back systematically. So it's the same old story --- perfectly good human instincts aren't a 100% fit for our modern environment. What if we made it easier to identify the value we're all extracting and contribute back systematically? If we did, maybe we could build social norms around that. E.g. imagine we had tools that monitor your software development workflow, identify the tools and libraries you use, and quantify your usage via some heuristics. Then imagine you integrate something like Github Sponsors so you can allocate $X to support all your dependencies and make that happen at the press of a button. Then imagine we advocate for professional software developers to allocate 1% of their income that way, and agitate for Big Tech companies to make that a policy.

okareaman 5y ago

I learned from the actix-web debacle that I don't want to ever do libre or open source software. If people want to complain to me about my code and call me a lousy programmer, then they have to pay me for the right. A sad day for Rust https://steveklabnik.com/writing/a-sad-day-for-rust https://steveklabnik.com/writing/a-sad-day-for-rust

mcguire 5y ago

As an anecdote, all of my work on open source (and I've been working on and with open source software for the better part of 30 years) has been because I had something that needed to be done and writing, adapting, or fixing open source packages was the fastest, easiest, and cheapest way of doing that. My employers paid me to get things done, not to write software. Writing, adapting, or fixing software is the means, not the end.

jrm4 5y ago

The thing is, the answers for this are all here and old. I'm just kind of waiting for people to figure it out. If you're creating cool stuff and giving it away, great! No obligation. If, however, you're creating a paid product or service -- there already exists a ton of law and precedent and ideas about obligations. We just need to remember these and start using them again. These ideas and law generally point to: If you put a product out there, and make claims about what it can and cannot do (either explicitly or implicitly) then you must be held responsible for the harm if people reasonably rely on it and you screw up. That's it. That's the entirety of it. FOSS is one of your inputs, could be seen as something like gasoline or trucks or whatever. It's your job as a company to handle those safely and make sure they don't goop out and cause harm, and if you don't get this right, you should be sued. Edit -- and of course, sometimes the companies are too slow to make this happen and so we need regulation. We perhaps need an EPA or FDA for software.

mraza007 5y ago

I have huge respect for Open Source Devs. Developer Ecosystem wouldn’t be same without them. I truly appreciate their efforts to make amazing software in there free time and it means a lot to me. As a developer I owe a lot to open source thats why If I can’t contribute to their software I always try to personally thank them when using their software.

phendrenad2 5y ago

I see two sides arguing past each other. One side says "FOSS isn't broken, because X", the other side says "FOSS IS broken, because Y!". Neither side tries to refute X or Y. We all have our personal goalposts. Why argue over a headline? Why not argue with the other side on common terms? It's like if I say "fruitcake is terrible" and someone says "I like fruitcake, I use it as a paperweight and a doorstopper" as a rebuttal.