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>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 thr

by 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.
- secondcoming 5y ago
  This is great if you have the financial resources to find and legally pursue licence violators.
  - cube00 5y ago
    Especially internationally
  - fartcannon 5y ago
    Even if the licenses are abused, there will still be free and open source software. It's a beautiful idea that won't die as long as there are tinkerers in the world.
- mwfunk 5y ago
  Agreed. It's only broken if there were some ideal Utopian open source world that we were falling short of, where if only everyone can work out some issues, then that world will come into existence. When people are growing up it's easy to get swept up in ideas like, "if only everyone saw things the way I did, everything would be perfect and so much better than it is right now". There will always be lots of conflicting ideas about how software should be developed and distributed and so far none of them have proven so effective that all of the others have fallen by the wayside. IMO the best anyone can do is advocate for whatever makes the most sense to them, but not make the mistake of thinking that anyone has all the answers.
ren_engineer 5y ago
>professors paid by the university universities were being paid by the military, who get their money from the taxpayers.
- ChrisLomont 5y ago
  Far more private money went into open source than the military put it via professors. Almost of the big successful projects would be viable without significant private investment into them.
k__ 5y ago
This. OSS is broken, but I'd even go so far and say that most of software is, because money is often an after thought.
- megous 5y ago
  And by broken, you mean what?
  - sidlls 5y ago
    Can’t speak for the GP, but from my perspective: misaligned incentives (financial and technical), poor documentation, buggy important edge cases, toxic attitudes, egos, and so on. In short: it’s broken the same way any other development is, except it also includes the extreme end of economic exploitation.
    - megous 5y ago
      That all sounds like project specific issues. A lot of FOSS projects are exceptionally well documented. The same with the attitude, some are wrose, some better. It doesn't seem like this is specific to FOSS licensing.
      - xchaotic 5y ago
        I work with a company that contributes to some open source but most of the code is closed-source. I feel that the reason many enterprises pay for the software is that when there's an exotic bug that only happens with LDAP with a certain cypher being used, they know it will get fixed (because it's funded by support/maintenance fees). While there may be exceptions, I just don't see OSS contributors going out of their way to fix such edge cases. So perhaps the solution for some open source project issues might be to not-opensource it.
        megous 5y ago
        Point of FOSS is that you can fix exotic issues yourself, at your timeline and perhaps share your fixes with the original project, if you also want other people to distrute the fix for you via some standard Linux distro. That's the main freedom you get from FOSS. FOSS != free support. It's empowering.
em-bee 5y ago
universities are going to continue to exist and students will be attending them. what exactly suggests that this will not continue forever? of course FOSS has always depended on people who had the resources to work on it. in the beginning this was only universities and as FOSS got more popular more funding sources appeared. the problem that we are facing is not one of funding. there is plenty of funding available. the problem is a generational shift of that funding. people who used to be able to afford working on FOSS no longer can because their life changed. they are no longer students, they have a family and so on. FOSS development will continue. the fallacy is to believe that an individual contributor will always be able to keep contributing for the rest of their life. we need to acknowledge that unpaid FOSS contributions are limited to a few years of an individuals life. and after that they need to move on. and most do. those that didn't move on but continued contributing were those who managed to find additional funding sources. the problem and the difficulty is that we get more and more software that is not new but needs to be maintained. most of those using their own funds will want to work on their own new software and not maintain someone elses. so the questions is not how do we fund FOSS development, but rather how do we fund FOSS maintenance. that is the new thing that we didn't have to deal with a few decades ago
- juststeve 5y ago
  agree with this. the whole situation is just bonkers.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
einpoklum 5y ago
> 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. Not that I entirely reject the ghist of your claim, but what about: * Older, retired people? * Spouse working for-pay supports spouse working on FOSS? * Part-time for-pay work, rest of time FOSS (like myself...)? In those situations you pay the bills without donations.
evandwight 5y ago
Ubi won't touch tech salaries. People don't need to maximize income. I volunteer because I have enough and money isn't the only objective. Open source doesn't need to pay faang salaries to exist.
- SQueeeeeL 5y ago
  There are a lot of people who are very good at coding who don't care for high salaries. Despite mainstream pop being the most profitable, many musicians pursue niche genres.
  - wutbrodo 5y ago
    This still doesn't make UBI relevant to this discussion. It's already fairly trivial for a talented SWE to make UBI-level income working 10 hours a week by picking up software contracts here and there. Eng already have access to the levels of income that UBI would provide, with plenty of time left over to dedicate to open source, and yet this path is relatively untrodden. Plenty of engineers (myself included) already leverage the flexibility and surplus pay of the industry to opt out of the "40 years of 40 hours" ratrace. But they do so to varying degrees, and evidently aren't spending enough of that surplus on OSS to fix the problem we're discussing. I don't see what UBI would materially contribute to this dynamic.
    - dmitriid 5y ago
      > It's already fairly trivial for a talented SWE to make UBI-level income working 10 hours a week by picking up software contracts here and there. What about less talented ones that can still contribute, but need to work 20 hours a week? Or 30 hours a week? Or gasp 40 hours a week? > Eng already have access to the levels of income that UBI would provide, with plenty of time left over No. There isn't plenty of time left over. Moreover, why wouldn't I want to work on something full time, and not in my "left over time"? > Plenty of engineers Which means: not even the majority of engineers. > I don't see what UBI would materially contribute to this dynamic. "I don't see how giving all engineers, and not some percent of engineers, the option to pursue projects they like would materially contribute to this dynamic". Do also read this short article, "Software below the poverty line", https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html
ajross 5y ago
> Nearly all of the early open-source software that made the internet possible was produced in universities. Well... BSD unix was. Unix itself was Bell Labs, the original TCP/IP spec was done by DARPA contractors (mostly BBN). HTTP was CERN but the breakthrough "browser" product was venture funded. GNU was a private organization, though RMS's office was provided by MIT for years and years. Linux obviously was an established community effort long before anyone with deep pockets showed up. Post-90's "corporate" open source has emerged basically everywhere, with Google and Intel being big early players (Facebook and Microsoft have been late to the game but done very well for themselves too). I think if anything what this proves is that "Open Source" is going to pop up basically anywhere it's allowed to, and that any pronouncements about where it "really" came from are probably not informative.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  UNIX was only free beer because AT&T wasn't allowed to sell it initially, the lawsuit against BSD and forbidding the Lion's commentary came rather fast as soon as they were allowed to take commercial advantage of their research work.
  - ajross 5y ago
    Sure sure, but my point was really that all nitpicking aside, Open Source is everywhere. Given the opportunity, engineers everywhere will share their work with others and build on that shared work to do more stuff, then share it. An argument from a frame of "Open Source only succeeded because ..." just seems obviously wrong to me. If not ITS then Unix. If not BSD then Linux. If not Mosaic then Chrome. If not gcc then clang. On and on. Opportunities for success are everywhere, nowhere is a critical path. Take any hero out of equation and there's someone else standing behind her to repeat the work.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      Linux only evolved beyond a hobby project, because IBM, Oracle, Compaq, Sun decided to cut down costs on their own UNIX (thus we are back again into corporations and their relation with FOSS), and yet many still have to reverse engineer hardware capabilities despite the big names involved in it. clang is the more recent example, it is becoming visible how it is lagging behind other compilers in C++20 support, not everything is landing upstream as it used to.
indymike 5y ago
> Nearly all of the early open-source software that made the internet possible was produced in universities. Yes, and released with the BSD license, then copied.
c-smile 5y ago
> the only way I can foresee open source working in the way the purists want is if there is a universal basic income. Essentially honest FOSS will be available when we evolve to "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs"[1] type of society. Human race is clearly on asymptotical track to that. But not yet. [1] (C) 1875, Karl Marx.
- smitty1e 5y ago
  Moltke seems more credible than Marx: “No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy’s main strength.” http://connect2amc.com/118-strategic-planning-moltke-the-elder-dwight-eisenhower-winston-churchill-and-just-a-little-mike-tyson http://connect2amc.com/118-strategic-planning-moltke-the-eld...
  - c-smile 5y ago
    That citation appears as irrelevant completely to the topic. If you want more relevant citation then this: "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step" (C) Lao Tzu For that matter I would say that first major step to real FOSS was made in 1917. But it was too early and shouldn't that brutally enforced. Evolution is the only reasonable way to get anywhere in such complex systems. Relevant fact: all hardware and software in USSR was Open Source. Any non-trivial product must be and was accompanied by full schematics. Software sources must be printed out, etc. By law.
    - hutzlibu 5y ago
      "That citation appears as irrelevant completely to the topic." The point was, that marxism as a theory is only a plan - and that plan did not really worked out in reality so far. And if you want to paint the USSR in a golden FOSS picture, well I would suggest talking with people who actually lived there and were not in a privileged party position. And it would be news to me, that the USSR published their tank, aircraft or rockets schematics.
      - 5y ago
jandrewrogers 5y ago
For some types of software, we really do not want students doing it, for free or otherwise. There are whole classes of software, like database engines, that are non-obvious and require many years of real-world domain experience before it is plausible that someone will design a competent, scalable architecture and implementation. If open source is going to run critical infrastructure, we don't want naive and inefficient software design but that is frequently what we get; this isn't a criticism of the people that create many of these projects, more the process in practice and our expectations of it. UBI is not a solution because it would, at best, pay poverty wages. People with the skills to be effective core contributors also have the skills to be paid much, much more for their time. Few people, and definitely not enough, are going to sacrifice the living standards of themselves or their family for some ideal of OSS. There are strong adverse incentives that make it improbable that the people designing and building OSS are who we as users of OSS would want to be in that role in an ideal world. This has been getting worse with time. The risk for OSS is that those adverse incentives are never addressed.
- berkeley39 5y ago
  > For some types of software, we really do not want students doing it, for free or otherwise. There are whole classes of software, like database engines, that are non-obvious and require many years of real-world domain experience before it is plausible that someone will design a competent, scalable architecture and implementation. Of course as with all things the situation is more nuanced than this. Since you mention database engines we should keep in mind that without Stonebraker and 39 of his students[1] there would be no Postgres. Yet without incentives and many years of contributions from professionals (and students who would become professionals) we would not have PostgreSQL. A healthy system has a place for contributors of all levels of experience. 1- https://momjian.us/main/blogs/pgblog/2020.html#September_21_2020 https://momjian.us/main/blogs/pgblog/2020.html#September_21_...
  - jandrewrogers 5y ago
    Database development has changed quite a lot since then. When I first started working on databases in the 1990s, two things were true that made it much easier for relatively inexperienced developers (like myself at the time) to produce a reasonably good result. First, the state-of-the-art implementations at the time were incredibly well-documented in an accessible way and the academic literature also reflected those designs. Second, the implementations were relatively simple and straightforward; you did not need esoteric systems knowledge and design theory to write code that was competitive with other implementations. The most complicated thing you had to worry about was lock structures and concurrency control. Not only were there relatively simple examples to copy and study, the gap between those examples and the state-of-the-art was pretty small. Neither of these is true today. The design of state-of-the-art implementations are often poorly documented; the computer science has evolved radically since the 1990s with significant gaps in the literature; competitive implementations require real expertise in silicon architecture and Linux kernel internals, you can't just write something obvious in C and expect a good result. And that's without even getting into difficult topics like distributed execution, parallel orchestration, scheduler design, etc that we didn't have to worry about back then. I'm not sure I'd be able to bootstrap the necessary expertise to build database engines today like I did back then.
riquito 5y ago
> 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. I'm surprised no one mentioned that there was no personal computer. Where else would you get a computer to develop free software back then?
thoraway66 5y ago
> SOMEONE has to pay the bills Aren’t we paying the bill by doing the work to provide these things? Finance was the old information network for distributing need. It was easily hacked/corrupted. Isn’t the internet the replacement? Do the work to have the stuff. Why the old money network too? Open source is pretty strong evidence social doing just to do cool/useful shit just happens. People grow food to eat, not because a boss said we need to produce N tons of corn this quarter.
deleted 5y ago
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twelvechairs 5y ago
In rebuttal I'll paraphrase a little from Paul Ramsey (maintainer of 20-year open source project PostGIS)[0] His basic view is that Open Source is the dominant model today, but tension comes as very little of the value produced comes back to the community that creates this value. He argues this will always be 'the bare minimum' by virtue of economics, but that if something important slows down too much someone will put some money in it. But this is a model that operates and works. It is borne out by his history in postgis, which is maintained by a small number of people mostly in moderately-profitable service companies, in the red-hat mould. He's concerned about value being captured by cloud companies though who frequently don't employ open-source maintainers however. Some of this is further expounded in another talk by him here [1] (slides at [2]) on the future of open-source where he is very bullish. [0] from about 19:00 onwards here https://thegeomob.com/podcast/episode-88 https://thegeomob.com/podcast/episode-88 [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQ5_NnrBHjo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQ5_NnrBHjo [2] https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1-PAgIk9--nedCdfMGEwhcnqxqy1fGYUXwWhxzMfqJZg/edit#slide=id.p https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1-PAgIk9--nedCdfMGEwh...
- darksaints 5y ago
  This personally rings true for me. My company is getting literally billions of dollars worth of value from a couple of applications (one of which I created and maintain) built upon the foundation of Postgres and PostGIS. And we benefit immensely from active development of it: PostGIS version 3.1 released a new more efficient overlay algorithm which probably saves us $5k a year in compute costs alone, and untold thousands with the ability to deprecate a hacked house of cards that was ready to crumble. And yet every time I have mentioned to my management that it would be great if we could take 1% of our consulting budget and funnel it towards PostGIS, they respond almost bewildered...why willingly pay for something that we already get for free? It's frustrating and I have no idea how to remedy it.
  - sircastor 5y ago
    I can’t speak to this directly, as I haven’t had to deal with this at the management level. My thought though is that this is preventative care. This is going to the Doctor regularly so you don’t get surprised when something goes awry. Likewise, making sure the OSS project you’re totally dependent on doesn’t suffer a catastrophic failure or abandonment is a worthy investment.
sangnoir 5y ago
> 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. I suspect I'm a "purist" by your measure, and I disagree completely. University professors, students and volunteer contributors/maintainers will continue to exist going forward. Nothing has to change. The problem is that this doesn't "scale" at the rate demanded by corporations, and corporate engineers[1]. The problem is not with FOSS - it is on the voracious consumption side. I suspect the volunteer vs corp usage will follow the Predator-Prey cycle, with volunteers being the prey. When the predator population grows too large, it will set off events that will lead to its population collapsing to a sustainable level. The onus is on startups/medium & large corps to help scale FOSS - not UBI or the like where the corps continue to freeride (which is fine, to a point) 1. Disclosure: I'm also one, in addition to being a volunteer contributor. I volunteer as a way to give back to an amazing project, and I earn a salary that meets all my needs.
rob_c 5y ago
Having worked with people in industry who understand the point and value of giving back this is a little naive I would argue. A fraction of some talented persons time from say HP is probably worth 100x first year developers who aren't paid to understand the tools the company is using. To turn your argument on its head how much would every company have to invest to build a modern website from complete scratch in isolation? Then think why do that when you can effectively spread the cost? Both approaches have ups and downs but I'm not sure the "someone always picks up the cost" isn't anything other than a statement of realism. It is a good reason to explain why nobody just works on a project in their basement for free and do nothing else, but doesn't role out being able to do this if responsible companies pick up a fraction of the tab they should be paying via donations. As others have said a huge amount of the value comes from support, community and the contributions from many people, be they working on the same tools for a product they sell, to make a product or service they plan to sell or to scratch that itch on that project in their spare time they're playing with.
watwut 5y ago
I dont understand how exactly is open source supposed to be broken. It is accepted and respected these days. There is tons of it too. If does not produces flawless miracles, but commercial software is not flawless either. The log4j bug has impact it has literally because open source was successful.
jrm4 5y ago
You're simply wrong in a way I can't succinctly summarize historically; you really have to get to know the spirit of the people who made this stuff. But FOSS is the difference between the VERY free and open (at least optionally, if not in practice, but like, basically anyone can put up a website and do anything on it) internet we have vs. what would have happened, which probably would have been slight incremental improvements in phone and TV. More" on demand," but damn sure no Youtube.

by tw04 5y ago

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.

secondcoming 5y ago
This is great if you have the financial resources to find and legally pursue licence violators.
- cube00 5y ago
  Especially internationally
- fartcannon 5y ago
  Even if the licenses are abused, there will still be free and open source software. It's a beautiful idea that won't die as long as there are tinkerers in the world.
mwfunk 5y ago
Agreed. It's only broken if there were some ideal Utopian open source world that we were falling short of, where if only everyone can work out some issues, then that world will come into existence. When people are growing up it's easy to get swept up in ideas like, "if only everyone saw things the way I did, everything would be perfect and so much better than it is right now". There will always be lots of conflicting ideas about how software should be developed and distributed and so far none of them have proven so effective that all of the others have fallen by the wayside. IMO the best anyone can do is advocate for whatever makes the most sense to them, but not make the mistake of thinking that anyone has all the answers.

ren_engineer 5y ago

>professors paid by the university universities were being paid by the military, who get their money from the taxpayers.

ChrisLomont 5y ago
Far more private money went into open source than the military put it via professors. Almost of the big successful projects would be viable without significant private investment into them.

k__ 5y ago

This. OSS is broken, but I'd even go so far and say that most of software is, because money is often an after thought.

megous 5y ago
And by broken, you mean what?
- sidlls 5y ago
  Can’t speak for the GP, but from my perspective: misaligned incentives (financial and technical), poor documentation, buggy important edge cases, toxic attitudes, egos, and so on. In short: it’s broken the same way any other development is, except it also includes the extreme end of economic exploitation.
  - megous 5y ago
    That all sounds like project specific issues. A lot of FOSS projects are exceptionally well documented. The same with the attitude, some are wrose, some better. It doesn't seem like this is specific to FOSS licensing.
    - xchaotic 5y ago
      I work with a company that contributes to some open source but most of the code is closed-source. I feel that the reason many enterprises pay for the software is that when there's an exotic bug that only happens with LDAP with a certain cypher being used, they know it will get fixed (because it's funded by support/maintenance fees). While there may be exceptions, I just don't see OSS contributors going out of their way to fix such edge cases. So perhaps the solution for some open source project issues might be to not-opensource it.
      - megous 5y ago
        Point of FOSS is that you can fix exotic issues yourself, at your timeline and perhaps share your fixes with the original project, if you also want other people to distrute the fix for you via some standard Linux distro. That's the main freedom you get from FOSS. FOSS != free support. It's empowering.

em-bee 5y ago

universities are going to continue to exist and students will be attending them. what exactly suggests that this will not continue forever? of course FOSS has always depended on people who had the resources to work on it. in the beginning this was only universities and as FOSS got more popular more funding sources appeared. the problem that we are facing is not one of funding. there is plenty of funding available. the problem is a generational shift of that funding. people who used to be able to afford working on FOSS no longer can because their life changed. they are no longer students, they have a family and so on. FOSS development will continue. the fallacy is to believe that an individual contributor will always be able to keep contributing for the rest of their life. we need to acknowledge that unpaid FOSS contributions are limited to a few years of an individuals life. and after that they need to move on. and most do. those that didn't move on but continued contributing were those who managed to find additional funding sources. the problem and the difficulty is that we get more and more software that is not new but needs to be maintained. most of those using their own funds will want to work on their own new software and not maintain someone elses. so the questions is not how do we fund FOSS development, but rather how do we fund FOSS maintenance. that is the new thing that we didn't have to deal with a few decades ago

juststeve 5y ago
agree with this. the whole situation is just bonkers.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

einpoklum 5y ago

> 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. Not that I entirely reject the ghist of your claim, but what about: * Older, retired people? * Spouse working for-pay supports spouse working on FOSS? * Part-time for-pay work, rest of time FOSS (like myself...)? In those situations you pay the bills without donations.

evandwight 5y ago

Ubi won't touch tech salaries. People don't need to maximize income. I volunteer because I have enough and money isn't the only objective. Open source doesn't need to pay faang salaries to exist.

SQueeeeeL 5y ago
There are a lot of people who are very good at coding who don't care for high salaries. Despite mainstream pop being the most profitable, many musicians pursue niche genres.
- wutbrodo 5y ago
  This still doesn't make UBI relevant to this discussion. It's already fairly trivial for a talented SWE to make UBI-level income working 10 hours a week by picking up software contracts here and there. Eng already have access to the levels of income that UBI would provide, with plenty of time left over to dedicate to open source, and yet this path is relatively untrodden. Plenty of engineers (myself included) already leverage the flexibility and surplus pay of the industry to opt out of the "40 years of 40 hours" ratrace. But they do so to varying degrees, and evidently aren't spending enough of that surplus on OSS to fix the problem we're discussing. I don't see what UBI would materially contribute to this dynamic.
  - dmitriid 5y ago
    > It's already fairly trivial for a talented SWE to make UBI-level income working 10 hours a week by picking up software contracts here and there. What about less talented ones that can still contribute, but need to work 20 hours a week? Or 30 hours a week? Or gasp 40 hours a week? > Eng already have access to the levels of income that UBI would provide, with plenty of time left over No. There isn't plenty of time left over. Moreover, why wouldn't I want to work on something full time, and not in my "left over time"? > Plenty of engineers Which means: not even the majority of engineers. > I don't see what UBI would materially contribute to this dynamic. "I don't see how giving all engineers, and not some percent of engineers, the option to pursue projects they like would materially contribute to this dynamic". Do also read this short article, "Software below the poverty line", https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html

ajross 5y ago

> Nearly all of the early open-source software that made the internet possible was produced in universities. Well... BSD unix was. Unix itself was Bell Labs, the original TCP/IP spec was done by DARPA contractors (mostly BBN). HTTP was CERN but the breakthrough "browser" product was venture funded. GNU was a private organization, though RMS's office was provided by MIT for years and years. Linux obviously was an established community effort long before anyone with deep pockets showed up. Post-90's "corporate" open source has emerged basically everywhere, with Google and Intel being big early players (Facebook and Microsoft have been late to the game but done very well for themselves too). I think if anything what this proves is that "Open Source" is going to pop up basically anywhere it's allowed to, and that any pronouncements about where it "really" came from are probably not informative.

pjmlp 5y ago
UNIX was only free beer because AT&T wasn't allowed to sell it initially, the lawsuit against BSD and forbidding the Lion's commentary came rather fast as soon as they were allowed to take commercial advantage of their research work.
- ajross 5y ago
  Sure sure, but my point was really that all nitpicking aside, Open Source is everywhere. Given the opportunity, engineers everywhere will share their work with others and build on that shared work to do more stuff, then share it. An argument from a frame of "Open Source only succeeded because ..." just seems obviously wrong to me. If not ITS then Unix. If not BSD then Linux. If not Mosaic then Chrome. If not gcc then clang. On and on. Opportunities for success are everywhere, nowhere is a critical path. Take any hero out of equation and there's someone else standing behind her to repeat the work.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Linux only evolved beyond a hobby project, because IBM, Oracle, Compaq, Sun decided to cut down costs on their own UNIX (thus we are back again into corporations and their relation with FOSS), and yet many still have to reverse engineer hardware capabilities despite the big names involved in it. clang is the more recent example, it is becoming visible how it is lagging behind other compilers in C++20 support, not everything is landing upstream as it used to.

indymike 5y ago

> Nearly all of the early open-source software that made the internet possible was produced in universities. Yes, and released with the BSD license, then copied.

c-smile 5y ago

> the only way I can foresee open source working in the way the purists want is if there is a universal basic income. Essentially honest FOSS will be available when we evolve to "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs"[1] type of society. Human race is clearly on asymptotical track to that. But not yet. [1] (C) 1875, Karl Marx.

smitty1e 5y ago
Moltke seems more credible than Marx: “No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy’s main strength.” http://connect2amc.com/118-strategic-planning-moltke-the-elder-dwight-eisenhower-winston-churchill-and-just-a-little-mike-tyson http://connect2amc.com/118-strategic-planning-moltke-the-eld...
- c-smile 5y ago
  That citation appears as irrelevant completely to the topic. If you want more relevant citation then this: "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step" (C) Lao Tzu For that matter I would say that first major step to real FOSS was made in 1917. But it was too early and shouldn't that brutally enforced. Evolution is the only reasonable way to get anywhere in such complex systems. Relevant fact: all hardware and software in USSR was Open Source. Any non-trivial product must be and was accompanied by full schematics. Software sources must be printed out, etc. By law.
  - hutzlibu 5y ago
    "That citation appears as irrelevant completely to the topic." The point was, that marxism as a theory is only a plan - and that plan did not really worked out in reality so far. And if you want to paint the USSR in a golden FOSS picture, well I would suggest talking with people who actually lived there and were not in a privileged party position. And it would be news to me, that the USSR published their tank, aircraft or rockets schematics.
    - 5y ago

jandrewrogers 5y ago

For some types of software, we really do not want students doing it, for free or otherwise. There are whole classes of software, like database engines, that are non-obvious and require many years of real-world domain experience before it is plausible that someone will design a competent, scalable architecture and implementation. If open source is going to run critical infrastructure, we don't want naive and inefficient software design but that is frequently what we get; this isn't a criticism of the people that create many of these projects, more the process in practice and our expectations of it. UBI is not a solution because it would, at best, pay poverty wages. People with the skills to be effective core contributors also have the skills to be paid much, much more for their time. Few people, and definitely not enough, are going to sacrifice the living standards of themselves or their family for some ideal of OSS. There are strong adverse incentives that make it improbable that the people designing and building OSS are who we as users of OSS would want to be in that role in an ideal world. This has been getting worse with time. The risk for OSS is that those adverse incentives are never addressed.

berkeley39 5y ago
> For some types of software, we really do not want students doing it, for free or otherwise. There are whole classes of software, like database engines, that are non-obvious and require many years of real-world domain experience before it is plausible that someone will design a competent, scalable architecture and implementation. Of course as with all things the situation is more nuanced than this. Since you mention database engines we should keep in mind that without Stonebraker and 39 of his students[1] there would be no Postgres. Yet without incentives and many years of contributions from professionals (and students who would become professionals) we would not have PostgreSQL. A healthy system has a place for contributors of all levels of experience. 1- https://momjian.us/main/blogs/pgblog/2020.html#September_21_2020 https://momjian.us/main/blogs/pgblog/2020.html#September_21_...
- jandrewrogers 5y ago
  Database development has changed quite a lot since then. When I first started working on databases in the 1990s, two things were true that made it much easier for relatively inexperienced developers (like myself at the time) to produce a reasonably good result. First, the state-of-the-art implementations at the time were incredibly well-documented in an accessible way and the academic literature also reflected those designs. Second, the implementations were relatively simple and straightforward; you did not need esoteric systems knowledge and design theory to write code that was competitive with other implementations. The most complicated thing you had to worry about was lock structures and concurrency control. Not only were there relatively simple examples to copy and study, the gap between those examples and the state-of-the-art was pretty small. Neither of these is true today. The design of state-of-the-art implementations are often poorly documented; the computer science has evolved radically since the 1990s with significant gaps in the literature; competitive implementations require real expertise in silicon architecture and Linux kernel internals, you can't just write something obvious in C and expect a good result. And that's without even getting into difficult topics like distributed execution, parallel orchestration, scheduler design, etc that we didn't have to worry about back then. I'm not sure I'd be able to bootstrap the necessary expertise to build database engines today like I did back then.

riquito 5y ago

> 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. I'm surprised no one mentioned that there was no personal computer. Where else would you get a computer to develop free software back then?

thoraway66 5y ago

> SOMEONE has to pay the bills Aren’t we paying the bill by doing the work to provide these things? Finance was the old information network for distributing need. It was easily hacked/corrupted. Isn’t the internet the replacement? Do the work to have the stuff. Why the old money network too? Open source is pretty strong evidence social doing just to do cool/useful shit just happens. People grow food to eat, not because a boss said we need to produce N tons of corn this quarter.

deleted 5y ago

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twelvechairs 5y ago

In rebuttal I'll paraphrase a little from Paul Ramsey (maintainer of 20-year open source project PostGIS)[0] His basic view is that Open Source is the dominant model today, but tension comes as very little of the value produced comes back to the community that creates this value. He argues this will always be 'the bare minimum' by virtue of economics, but that if something important slows down too much someone will put some money in it. But this is a model that operates and works. It is borne out by his history in postgis, which is maintained by a small number of people mostly in moderately-profitable service companies, in the red-hat mould. He's concerned about value being captured by cloud companies though who frequently don't employ open-source maintainers however. Some of this is further expounded in another talk by him here [1] (slides at [2]) on the future of open-source where he is very bullish. [0] from about 19:00 onwards here https://thegeomob.com/podcast/episode-88 https://thegeomob.com/podcast/episode-88 [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQ5_NnrBHjo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQ5_NnrBHjo [2] https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1-PAgIk9--nedCdfMGEwhcnqxqy1fGYUXwWhxzMfqJZg/edit#slide=id.p https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1-PAgIk9--nedCdfMGEwh...

darksaints 5y ago
This personally rings true for me. My company is getting literally billions of dollars worth of value from a couple of applications (one of which I created and maintain) built upon the foundation of Postgres and PostGIS. And we benefit immensely from active development of it: PostGIS version 3.1 released a new more efficient overlay algorithm which probably saves us $5k a year in compute costs alone, and untold thousands with the ability to deprecate a hacked house of cards that was ready to crumble. And yet every time I have mentioned to my management that it would be great if we could take 1% of our consulting budget and funnel it towards PostGIS, they respond almost bewildered...why willingly pay for something that we already get for free? It's frustrating and I have no idea how to remedy it.
- sircastor 5y ago
  I can’t speak to this directly, as I haven’t had to deal with this at the management level. My thought though is that this is preventative care. This is going to the Doctor regularly so you don’t get surprised when something goes awry. Likewise, making sure the OSS project you’re totally dependent on doesn’t suffer a catastrophic failure or abandonment is a worthy investment.

sangnoir 5y ago

> 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. I suspect I'm a "purist" by your measure, and I disagree completely. University professors, students and volunteer contributors/maintainers will continue to exist going forward. Nothing has to change. The problem is that this doesn't "scale" at the rate demanded by corporations, and corporate engineers[1]. The problem is not with FOSS - it is on the voracious consumption side. I suspect the volunteer vs corp usage will follow the Predator-Prey cycle, with volunteers being the prey. When the predator population grows too large, it will set off events that will lead to its population collapsing to a sustainable level. The onus is on startups/medium & large corps to help scale FOSS - not UBI or the like where the corps continue to freeride (which is fine, to a point) 1. Disclosure: I'm also one, in addition to being a volunteer contributor. I volunteer as a way to give back to an amazing project, and I earn a salary that meets all my needs.

rob_c 5y ago

Having worked with people in industry who understand the point and value of giving back this is a little naive I would argue. A fraction of some talented persons time from say HP is probably worth 100x first year developers who aren't paid to understand the tools the company is using. To turn your argument on its head how much would every company have to invest to build a modern website from complete scratch in isolation? Then think why do that when you can effectively spread the cost? Both approaches have ups and downs but I'm not sure the "someone always picks up the cost" isn't anything other than a statement of realism. It is a good reason to explain why nobody just works on a project in their basement for free and do nothing else, but doesn't role out being able to do this if responsible companies pick up a fraction of the tab they should be paying via donations. As others have said a huge amount of the value comes from support, community and the contributions from many people, be they working on the same tools for a product they sell, to make a product or service they plan to sell or to scratch that itch on that project in their spare time they're playing with.

watwut 5y ago

I dont understand how exactly is open source supposed to be broken. It is accepted and respected these days. There is tons of it too. If does not produces flawless miracles, but commercial software is not flawless either. The log4j bug has impact it has literally because open source was successful.

jrm4 5y ago

You're simply wrong in a way I can't succinctly summarize historically; you really have to get to know the spirit of the people who made this stuff. But FOSS is the difference between the VERY free and open (at least optionally, if not in practice, but like, basically anyone can put up a website and do anything on it) internet we have vs. what would have happened, which probably would have been slight incremental improvements in phone and TV. More" on demand," but damn sure no Youtube.