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The difference is far more fundamental, and I cannot do justice to it in a drive-by comment; but in short: FOSS projects are typically grounded in the idea of a

The difference is far more fundamental, and I cannot do justice to it in a drive-by comment; but in short: FOSS projects are typically grounded in the idea of a gift economy, while business users are grounded in a market economy. The motivations in these two frameworks are as different as chalk and cheese... you can't "incentivize" people to give the gifts you want -- then it wouldn't be a gift anymore, and you've irreparably changed the nature of the transaction. Further, unlike gifting inside relationships, the motivation of gift givers (FOSS creators) is not to please some specific receiver(s), but to share with the world what they can envision and create... with the chance that it might brighten some random person's day being a pleasant bonus. They might occasionally be amenable to feedback, but they are simply not in the business of servicing clients. So why would/should they care eg. about security? Some of them very well might; all I'm saying is that you shouldn't be surprised when they have their own priorities. If businesses seek the "accountability" of a software vendor, they can try to find a supporting entity to enter into a business relationship with. Or hire developers so they can solve bespoke problems in the preferred manner. They could even try to upstream patches (depending on how receptive the maintainers are), but the only thing they have a right to do is to fork the codebase (complying with the license) and maintain their own version to satisfy their needs. That's just how gifts work. If they manage that, they are of course most welcome to organize together with like-minded users and set up maintenance teams, foundations, etc to support the project. It's possible the license (eg: GPL) means that this entity needs to continue operating in the gift economy. Entities in the market economy need to figure out how to do that, if they wish to use OSS inputs as an advantage in the market setting.

freeqaz 5y ago
Wow, thank you very much for the detailed comment! What you're saying here makes a ton of sense, and I really appreciate the words you chose to describe the philosophy behind Open Source. "Gift" is very apt. That is exactly what many projects are to authors. It's just icing on the cake for them when a project takes off or they help people. One area that I'd say comes to mind for me is: Many devs aren't even able to accept money for maintenance because their job prohibits it. Like at Google or other bigger tech companies. You just can't receive money and then you're already busy because you're working... why go do more grunt work for free when you could apply that effort to making more "gifts" to give to people? It's an interesting dilemma to ponder about. What you said about the "market economy" is absolutely right when it comes to thinking about SaaS or other traditional proprietary licensing models. They're solving for the market economy exclusively and not for the Open Source one. It feels like a fools errand to attempt to convince somebody working at Google to care about patching one of their side projects for free. I'm going to give that some more thought. Maybe some kind of package registry that allowed updates to a package by separate maintainers, even if the author goes MIA?

freeqaz 5y ago

Wow, thank you very much for the detailed comment! What you're saying here makes a ton of sense, and I really appreciate the words you chose to describe the philosophy behind Open Source. "Gift" is very apt. That is exactly what many projects are to authors. It's just icing on the cake for them when a project takes off or they help people. One area that I'd say comes to mind for me is: Many devs aren't even able to accept money for maintenance because their job prohibits it. Like at Google or other bigger tech companies. You just can't receive money and then you're already busy because you're working... why go do more grunt work for free when you could apply that effort to making more "gifts" to give to people? It's an interesting dilemma to ponder about. What you said about the "market economy" is absolutely right when it comes to thinking about SaaS or other traditional proprietary licensing models. They're solving for the market economy exclusively and not for the Open Source one. It feels like a fools errand to attempt to convince somebody working at Google to care about patching one of their side projects for free. I'm going to give that some more thought. Maybe some kind of package registry that allowed updates to a package by separate maintainers, even if the author goes MIA?