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I've always been conflicted about competing open source projects that do the same thing. Why not just join forces and improve one project? But on reflection, t

I've always been conflicted about competing open source projects that do the same thing. Why not just join forces and improve one project? But on reflection, the reason why open source has been successful is all the duplicate projects. You pick the one closest to your needs and get your thing done. The ones that survive were simply meant to survive, for all sorts of reasons, but the least of them being cooperation for its own sake. Most successful open source is just somebody scratching their own itch. So I'm wondering now about how you could encourage more of these one-off pet projects. What if all open source projects required a one-time lifetime license fee? The first time you use some open source project, you pay $1, and you have a license for life. You can adjust it for inflation, salary, cost of living, etc. But just imagine if every project were implicitly funded by everyone that used it. That would encourage more projects to appear, and incentivize them to be easier or better for the user. Plus the projects that are really popular yet have no funding, would finally have some. Imagine if that idea grew to the point that a majority of software in the world were written by people who just got paid to write open source all day. A global economy of open source software. More software would become implicitly compatible, in order to deal with the deluge of competing software. And so less expertise would be needed to combine different software into "a product". Companies would no longer need to spend as much time or money building up world-class engineering organizations just to kick out a CRUD app and take payments. Instead, companies could hire "integrators" to basically connect the unlimited array of "new apps" via "new pipes". A lack of expertise needed to make new products a reality would enable faster building of products, more reliably, with less expense. Obviously, the more software that is used, the more we'd be paying for licensing. To deal with that, programmers would begin to merge their source trees together, to build more complete solutions, to lower licensing fees for users. More turn-key software, supported by more devs, that does more, for less money. Making it easier still to adopt the software and turn it into new products. In the end, programmers join forces to improve one product. But maybe that's just me scratching my own itch (˙ᵕ˙)

yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
> So I'm wondering now about how you could encourage more of these one-off pet projects. I think all we need is low barriers to entry; existing code bases virtually never manage to be all things to all people, so we want it to be easy to say, "the existing options don't do what I want; time to write something better!" (And then to do it)
matheusmoreira 4y ago
Is this really a pet project? It's been merged into the kernel tree. A pet project would be the liblinux project I started years ago which was more or less the same thing as nolibc. Stopped working on it because I discovered nolibc and decided it didn't make sense to duplicate that effort. Honestly compilers should straight up offer support for a Linux system call builtin that just generates the code in those stubs. They have support for insane calling conventions, there's no reason not to support something simple like that.
jmillikin 4y ago
I don't want to be paid for my open-source code because that introduces expectations of support that I'm not interested in providing. The whole point of open-source is that I can just toss that stuff out onto the internet, and if someone else wants to adjust it to their needs then the only thing they need is a text editor. Also, at $1 per user, your projects would need 15,000 new users per year just to match USA minimum wage. There's a reason commercial software has high price points (e.g. $50 for video games) or operates on a subscription model. You'd need marketing for that kind of userbase growth, which implies (1) overhead and (2) annihilation of forums like HN under a tidal wave of spam. Finally, as a developer, there's no way I'd pay $1 per open-source project because nearly all open-source code is crap. I'm willing to pay high prices for good software, which is why the niche of commercial software is saturated and any developer with a pulse can get $100,000 per year at a cubicle farm in San Jose.

yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago

> So I'm wondering now about how you could encourage more of these one-off pet projects. I think all we need is low barriers to entry; existing code bases virtually never manage to be all things to all people, so we want it to be easy to say, "the existing options don't do what I want; time to write something better!" (And then to do it)

matheusmoreira 4y ago

Is this really a pet project? It's been merged into the kernel tree. A pet project would be the liblinux project I started years ago which was more or less the same thing as nolibc. Stopped working on it because I discovered nolibc and decided it didn't make sense to duplicate that effort. Honestly compilers should straight up offer support for a Linux system call builtin that just generates the code in those stubs. They have support for insane calling conventions, there's no reason not to support something simple like that.

jmillikin 4y ago

I don't want to be paid for my open-source code because that introduces expectations of support that I'm not interested in providing. The whole point of open-source is that I can just toss that stuff out onto the internet, and if someone else wants to adjust it to their needs then the only thing they need is a text editor. Also, at $1 per user, your projects would need 15,000 new users per year just to match USA minimum wage. There's a reason commercial software has high price points (e.g. $50 for video games) or operates on a subscription model. You'd need marketing for that kind of userbase growth, which implies (1) overhead and (2) annihilation of forums like HN under a tidal wave of spam. Finally, as a developer, there's no way I'd pay $1 per open-source project because nearly all open-source code is crap. I'm willing to pay high prices for good software, which is why the niche of commercial software is saturated and any developer with a pulse can get $100,000 per year at a cubicle farm in San Jose.