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Free and open source software projects are in transition
- version_five 3y agoThere's an "open core" VC fund I've seen blog posts from on here, I'd be interested to hear their take. I agree that open source is in trouble as it's basically shifted to branding, as a way, like the author says to extract maximal value from the "community" while giving nothing back. It's like moving into one of the sub-optimal prisoners dilemma quadrants where somebody rats. That said, I don't agree with the dig at LLMs, it seems tacked on and more just an ideological complain, which is odd in the context of open source.
- chriskrycho 3y agoI largely do agree with it, but agree that it's somewhat secondary to the specifics of the pice. In context of reading his stuff more generally, it makes sense: he's been writing extensively on that subject (including a self-published book on the subject) for many months, so if you are a regular reader, it fits. The challenge of writing for your existing audience vs. the inherent context collapse of an individual post online!
- yesimahuman 3y agoIn many cases these open core companies are not “giving nothing back”, but are funding engineer salaries on the order of millions of dollars per year to invest in the OSS project that they use as customer acquisition for a commercial cloud and enterprise offering on top. Companies like Vercel and Ionic both employ this model. I think people often forget how much these companies invest and “give back” to the community in terms of raw dollar investment
- User23 3y agoAs usual when it comes to computing freedom, RMS was right[1]. "Open Source" was conceived as a way to market to corporate executives. It's unsurprising then that corporate executives took it for exactly what they were sold it as, a way to get developers' work without paying for it. [1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....
- canucyc 3y ago[flagged]
- canucyc 3y ago[flagged]
- spankalee 3y agoI personally get paid to work on open source, which is the opposite of what you're claiming here.
- pessimizer 3y agoRather, it's unsurprising that corporate executives took Open Source for exactly what it was designed as. It's left the anti-copyleft guys babbling about plunder and The Spirit of Open Source™. I'm honestly shocked that I don't hear them calling companies that get rich off OSS "settler colonialists."
- dspillett 3y ago> That said, I don't agree with the dig at LLMs, ... [it] is odd in the context of open source. I don't see it that way, if talking about the stricter end of OSS licensing. There is an argument for training a model with AGPL code meaning that the resulting model should be released in full to its users as a derivative work, for instance. Being an ideological complaint doesn't make it an invalid one, even if you consider that ideology to be rather dogmatic.
- sytse 3y agoI assume you mean my VC fund, Open Core Ventures https://opencoreventures.com/ https://opencoreventures.com/ that starts new companies around existing open source projects. We believe that open core companies need to give back and the open source code base should be better off because the open core company exists. Features that appeal most to individual contributors should be open source https://opencoreventures.com/blog/2023-01-open-core-standard-pricing-model/ https://opencoreventures.com/blog/2023-01-open-core-standard... The article mentions the recent move of RedHat to no longer share their source code. I think RedHat is a special case because they didn't have any proprietary code https://opencoreventures.com/blog/2023-04-red-hat-model-only-worked-red-hat/ https://opencoreventures.com/blog/2023-04-red-hat-model-only... Open core can be done right and wrong (not giving back, etc.), for some more thoughts on how to do it right please see https://opencoreventures.com/blog/2023-07-open-core-is-misunderstood-business-model/ https://opencoreventures.com/blog/2023-07-open-core-is-misun... We're figuring all of this our as we do it, suggestions are welcome.
- version_five 3y agoThanks for replying. I hope you and others can find a way to make open source more sustainable without compromising the projects. Like I alluded to with my prisoners dilemma comment above, I think there is an optimum for everyone where companies try and make the open source project itself as valuable as possible instead of extracting value from it, and I'm happy hear about businesses that are legitimately trying to get us there.
- sytse 3y agoThanks for your response, I appreciate it. One thing that is a big risk to the optimum is open core companies relicensing the open source code after the project becomes popular, to prevent this some of our companies are set up as public benefit companies https://opencoreventures.com/blog/2022-11-introducing-authentik-security/ https://opencoreventures.com/blog/2022-11-introducing-authen...
- dtaht 3y ago
- ksimukka 3y agoI want to purchase a license (take my money!) to self host Posthog. The core is OSS and also has Enterprise features (that is also open source). However, they insist I should move to their cloud solution.
- abeppu 3y ago> A majority of the value created by modern software ultimately comes from free and open source software. > From this perspective most VC investments aren’t about creating value but about strip-mining FLOSS projects and communities. The scale is for extraction. As with so many things, I find this analysis suffers for using metaphors about the physical world with software. Strip-mining is a loaded term because it uses destructive means to acquire exclusive access to physical resources, in a way which leaves literally less than there was before, and which can be literally lethal to a literal biological ecosystem and literally toxic to physically proximal human communities. "Extraction" in the literal sense of pulling something out, when dealing with physical material means that others cannot have what you've pulled out; it's gone. A company (VC-backed or otherwise) that starts from OSS tools (operating system, languages, build tools, application frameworks, etc) to build their own offering doesn't (need to) remove that value in a way which excludes anyone else from enjoying it. To the contrary, building off the OSS ecosystem can make it healthier, if for no other reason than they are cultivating more engineers that know how to use these tools. "Extraction" is not the right metaphor. The issue of adding proprietary features to OSS projects I think we should acknowledge as diluting value, not subtracting it. If the choice is between project development being discontinued at time T with core feature set F, vs continued through time T+K with extended feature set F + G + H where H is proprietary, but G is not, users who won't use the proprietary features may still benefit from G, and are still better off with continued development -- but we must acknowledge that it's at a slower rate than if H had not been added. Communities should evaluate whether diluted support is worthwhile, or at what point it should be considered abusive, or at least separated into distinct companion projects.
- version_five 3y agoI think strip mining is a good analogy. Like google has strip mined the internet and left a toxic pit behind, if companies have their way they'll do the same to any captive open source project, turing any public parts into nothing but minimum viable bait to try and get people to pay for something.
- infogulch 3y ago> left a toxic pit behind Nonsense. If google scrapes your site, your site is not affected. Where is the toxic pit, exactly?
- carapace 3y agoHere's my $0.02 (again. Apologies to those who've heard it already.) First, let me proclaim by bias: I'm a Free software fanatic. I do not ever want to run software that I can't read and, if I want to, modify. I just won't do it. Open Source doesn't make sense to me and never has, becasuse you have always been able to give away your code. The entire point of Free software is to avoid or even prevent closed proprietary software. That's why the GPL is "viral", eh? That's the whole point. Free software started when RMS wanted to fix his printer and Xerox said, "No." Now we have companies like John Deere that use computers to lock out their own customers from fixing their own tractors. We have car companies charging to unlock heated seats and extra acceleration. Printers that lie to you about how much ink they have left, and brick themselves if you try to use cheaper unofficial ink. Etc. You can be in charge of your computer, or you can be a peasant in someone else's fief.
- Vox_Leone 3y ago>First, let me proclaim by bias: I'm a Free software fanatic. I do not ever want to run software that I can't read and, if I want to, modify. I just won't do it. I can relate to that. I guess you're are also having problems developing AI, because it is next to impossible to set up a full FLOSS AI stack [then I have to use proprietary stuff - conflicts of conscience ensue] >Free software started when RMS wanted to fix his printer and Xerox said, "No." Is there an AI stack that RMS would approve/use?
- carapace 3y ago> you're are also having problems developing AI I have no interest in talking computers. cf. James Mickens' USENIX Security '18-Q keynote speech: "Why Do Keynote Speakers Keep Suggesting That Improving Security Is Possible?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajGX7odA87k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajGX7odA87k Anyway, they're just a pile of linear algebra and a massive pile of Other People's Data, eh? (And piles and piles of hype, my god, so much hype. Even in the "academic" papers!) The difficulty would lie in amassing that data, not in developing software. You would have to solve that "conflict of conscience" first, no? But more to the point: none of my goals can be advanced by talking computers. - - - - > Is there an AI stack that RMS would approve/use? I have no idea. You could ask him if you're really interested.
- canucyc 3y ago[flagged]
- louthy 3y agoThe irony
- fidotron 3y agoThe big change of the last decade has really been the cloud explosion and with it a serious bias towards valuing deployment and operations over development, to the degree that if you're doing development which is not about deployment and operations then you're a sucker. The emergence of the LLMs etc makes the classic open source business model of relying on incomprehensible documentation to drive people to pay you as a consultant fall apart as they will get answers on demand. You just have to look at things like Docker to see how hard it is to turn even wildly successful projects into viable companies even before all this.
- radisb 3y agoYou reap what you saw
- sesm 3y agoI was thinking about the essence of open source recently, and I came to the following conclusion: open source is when you treat people as developers, not as users. Which means: it should be trivial to build and run from source, debug, add extra logs and apply patches. Moreover, creating and applying your own patches should be encouraged, anything that can be easily patched shouldn't be a configuration option. Most corporate "open source" fails this test, they treat people as users, create marketing websites while publishing zero developer documentation. What's interesting, JS ecosystem accidentally has this property, thanks to packages being distributed as source, standard logging system (console.log) and widespread use of `patch-package` tool.
- bee_rider 3y agoNot everyone can code in a way that is useful for development, but one way of looking at it could be: actually treating people like a community, rather than users. Unfortunately the phrase “community” has been degraded a bit by companies who want a more in-group-feeling-inducing way of describing their users. But, in a real community, people support each other and try to push projects forward, contributing in the fashion that best suits their skills, and toward goals that best fit their interests.
- J_Shelby_J 3y agoIn the age of LLMs everyone is a dev. What's the next iteration of SaaS then?
- majewsky 3y agoMost uses of LLMs for development that I've seen are for writing code, when the majority of dev time is spent reading code. What offerings exist to read through an existing codebase and ask questions of it? Do contemporary LLMs have enough lookbehind for that?
- J_Shelby_J 3y agoWe are years from way from the average user being able to replace X SaaS tool with available open source software they run themselves. Even now, the average person could have GPT walk them through replacing WIX with their own self hosted website. When I say "dev," I probably misspoke. I meant more in the sense that the average person will be able to implement existing software in a way that was previously unreachable.
- BSEdlMMldESB 3y agothe free software movement and its close companion movement of open source are in need of a renewal I think we should call it "liberty minded software"... software which cares and caters to the liberties of the users and makers of the software.
- blibble 3y agodue to the OpenAI strip-mining I've simply stopped publishing all my open source code once the courts rule this isn't fair use I'll resume, otherwise I'm done for good I see no need to train my replacement, especially not for free
- kykeonaut 3y agoOr you can start publishing extremely poor code ;)
- dtaht 3y agoThat's what I do!
- paulddraper 3y agoBeen doing it for years....you're welcome.
- justincredible 3y ago[dead]
- pier25 3y agoIn the LAMP + jQuery days, it was harder to build very sophisticated apps but the big advantage is the stack was very simple. Not only simple to build with but also to maintain. We basically lived in the AK47 era. These days the stack is super complex with lots of moving parts which means it requires exponentially more effort to maintain. Eg: What will happen to React and Svelte if Vercel crashes and burns?
- troyvit 3y agoI feel like that puts us in the F-35 days.
- OJFord 3y agoIt amuses me that a thread or two above we've got complaints that 'strip-mining' and 'extraction' are forced metaphors, taking it too far, and here we are - afaict pretty seriously - talking about software as AK47s & F-35s.
- troyvit 3y agoAnalogies are useful, even when they're not serious. Yeah I didn't mine that strip mining one too much. This one's fun because it targets complexity and power, both of which have shot through the roof since the early days.
- peter_l_downs 3y agoPretty good overview from Baldur — I don't always agree with everything he writes but this seems relatively correct. One question I'd ask him (and anyone else reading) is: what are some other options for monetization? Over the last few weeks I had three different VCs reach out to me about some of the open source projects I've been releasing, and ask me if I'd thought about making a business out of them. I told them that no, based on the problem the software was solving, I didn't see how I could adopt open-core or companion-saas business models, and I wasn't sure how else it could be done while keeping the code open source. Can anyone suggest a viable business model that would allow: * Code remains at least source available, ideally open source for non-commercial use. * I can charge for commercial use. * Actually doing the licensing is reasonable, ie no spyware or phoning home from the tool. Wouldn't need to be perfect, I understand that if the code is open source a company could easily fork and use it without paying me. The idea would be to make it zero-headache to pay me for a license if the code is being used by a funded team. The projects: * https://github.com/peterldowns/localias https://github.com/peterldowns/localias * https://github.com/peterldowns/pgmigrate https://github.com/peterldowns/pgmigrate
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- peter_l_downs 3y agoI asked this question in a discord for this kind of stuff and the answer I got was "not possible." I also spoke with the developer of OrbStack, and they suggested just not being open source and charging for it, which is what they're going to do. When it comes to dev tools (particularly those that are involved in operations/sre flows like pgmigrate) I consider open source a huge benefit, and I'm sad to think that there is no way to get paid for an open source project without shoehorning in a bad experience or unnecessary features (like Baldur points out)
- bckmn 3y agoI think an alternative is to fund _individuals' maintenance of the projects_, as opposed to the project itself. Filippo Valsorda has written about this recently: https://words.filippo.io/full-time-maintainer https://words.filippo.io/full-time-maintainer
- neolefty 3y agoI think it's natural for new tools to be Propietary, while Free alternatives of the basics work their way up the chain: Most of the cost of software development isn't in writing software — it's in the exploration of the solution space. Once you have settled on a good design, re-implementation is vastly cheaper and more streamlined than the original fumbling around in the dark. And sometimes it's better because you can jettison the legacy that comes from all that exploration. So IBM employed Ted Codd and an army of engineers and salespeople, but now we all get to use Postgres. What is being built today commercially that will be distilled into architectural principles and re-implemented as Free in the future? It's hard to know, but in hindsight it may seem obvious. The article points out categories that were once proprietary — OSes, compilers, runtimes, clients, data stores. For example: DB2, System V, PCC, Internet Explorer. They were built at great cost — and remember they all had proprietary siblings that have since been abandoned, that also had to be paid for: OS/2, Itanium, Hypercard, DBase, various compilers, IDEs. And then the few survivors were copied by open equivalents. System V gave way to Linux, DB2 to Postgres, IE to Chrome. A few never had proprietary equivalents AFAIK — I don't think there is a closed ancestor of Redis. And sometimes the Free version hasn't fully arrived yet (x86), or it's just free (Google Docs), or it's doomed to remain not nearly as good as the proprietary tools (GIMP, desktop Linux). Or it's rocky (Linux vs SCO) or chaotic (BitKeeper to git). (And it's no surprise that tools used mainly by programmers are more likely to have high quality Free equivalents than tools with a wider audience — after all, their users are capable of improving them directly.)
- syntheweave 3y agoThis is true - proprietary tends to lead - albeit it doesn't address the societal concern here: Are these really the only roles a software developer can have? On one end, acting as a mercenary for platform monopolies doing the new stuff, and on the other, reproducing those designs without the same kind of paycheck? I guess there is the third option of bilking investors by saying you'll definitely be a monopoly any day now and then open sourcing the whole thing. My sense of it is that this particular phenomenon - the entire "hacker" arc from Unix in 1970 through the formation of the FSF to the present - was of an era, and the era is finishing up. Before that, there wasn't a software business to speak of, and after, the era of individual programs and proprietors is likely superseded by the needs of specific communication networks, which, like the Internet generally, everyone ends up standardized on, but no-one owns. Part of why software is in a cynical state now is because the convergent network goal is ethically desirable, but the only way in which we seem to be capable of framing it societally is "someone owns this", so we have proceeded down a path of toxic corporate ownership, while everything else is a weird thing deserving of mockery.
- Karellen 3y agoI saw an interesting comment a few weeks ago, but can't remember where now, so I am unable to properly credit the original author. There's probably an irony there somewhere. Anyway, the gist of it was: In the '90s, FOSS devs mostly volunteered their labour to build things for each other - for other FOSS devs. In the '00s, FOSS devs mostly volunteered their labour to build things for users. In the '10s, FOSS devs mostly volunteered their labour to build things out of habit, which kinda ended up unintentionally being for the benefit of FAANG/Microsoft/VCs. No-one's quite sure how that happened, or where we go from here.
- tracker1 3y agoI think it comes down to first and foremost scratching one's own itch in things. Most are just creating/updating things they need. This can be a company's contribution (AMD/Intel) to support their products, or it can be an individual fixing a bug or implementing a needed feature. It can also be company devs contributing to something that is adjacent to their own needs. Where the FAANGs/Clouds leach a bit is when they offer a service monetizing what the creator of that service/software is using to monetize themselves. Can they do it, sure... should they, maybe not. I think, for example AWS could have made an offer for a more limited licensing agreement to Elastic, offered direct funding, or developer support, or buying them outright. Instead they forked, offer their own SaaS for the product, and carry on. Leaving Elastic to develop/support the core product.
- TillE 3y agoThe latter really only applies to a handful of huge FOSS projects; there's a long tail of open source which is irrelevant to large-scale web infrastructure companies. I would hope that very few people are actually volunteering to contribute more than minor fixes to those huge projects. They're largely full-time employees, or at least supported by corporate sponsorships.
- cosinetau 3y ago> to build things out of habit That answer seems to lack self awareness. A lot of people saw how a few VC-back companies using open source software could get them rich, and then they executed. Why else would we be on this particular website? Why else are do many folks find it absolutely necessary to post their product announcements on places like this?
- dirteater_ 3y agoI work on a relatively large OSS project. There are parties that are successfully putting a lot of complexity in that provides minimal or zero OSS gain to enable monetization on their side. I think this is destructive. It makes things more fragile and increases the barrier to entry for new contributors.
- s0l1dsnak3123 3y agoIn many categories, it seems that FOSS also outlasts proprietary equivalents as volunteers undermine their feature-sets. Long may that continue.
- hosh 3y agoThe Thunderbird project is a good example of community-supported software. By that, I mean that the project figured out how to raise funds directly from the community using it. This includes reporting on what they intend to do with the community as a whole, and where the money is being spent. The incentives between users and developers are aligned, and the project can be stewarded for the benefit of the community as a whole. It is also a project large enough, visible enough, and used enough to pull that off.
- fsckboy 3y agono shade on Thunderbird, can't argue with success, but I feel like I should be in the target market for Thunderbird, but they went wobbly on me a long time ago. So long now I can't even remember what made them so distasteful but it definitely sums up as "eliminated too much UI, added too much UX" for a good old fashioned MUA that's web aware without being overkill: Seamonkey all the way! and it's also got a nice little (yes, very old school) HTML editor (that I use for deconstructing pages, not building them)
- someguy7250 3y agoWhen I learnt programming as a hobby, before I went to college, before my jobs, I was hoping the future is that we build highly specialized, and customizable tools through open source code, not too small that they are just another programming language, and not too large that they cannot be connected to each other to create more values. And I was hoping we'd stop joining big companies, and instead open up local consulting firms to help people configure existing open source components for their specific needs. And the work (the configurations) should be done once per project and never reused.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago"The incestuous startup ecosystem that largely consisted of over-funded bullshit companies buying services from each other is done." Bravo. Rarely do I see this mentioned. Much of the B2B sales by so-called "tech" companies are to other so-called "tech" companies. It's also possible that many but certainly not all of computer users that spend significant amounts of money on goofy intangibles like subscriptions and "cryptocurrency" are in fact people working for so-called "tech" companies. Not representative of the general public. "From this perspective most VC investments aren't about creating value but about strip-mining FLOSS projects and communities. The scale is for extraction." Even a small rise in interest rates sent these VC into panic mode. Without free money (zero interest debt), the strip mining operation comes to a screeching halt. The US economy has been recovering nicely now that the brake has been put on this nonsense.
- ShadowBanThis01 3y agoWhat key/value thing is "baked into" Deno?
- quaxar 3y agoMore fundamentally opensource software essentially demolishes capturable value on the OS/stack/browser layers and prevents new challengers to the space from challenging the incumbents, who rose to the top in the age of proprietary software. On the flip side the basic software stack is now absurdly cheap and available for startups to play ontop of. This is where the feeling of "looting" came from, the capturable value is not in the OSS layer, but on the addons. A similar dynamic is happening now on the AI side with LLMs.
- pjmlp 3y agoWe are back to the public domain and shareware days, because it turns out one needs to make a living somehow, and doing software development for free/gratis only works out when there is another source of income. Meanwhile legions of developers using such tools, are quite happy earning money while using such tools. Yes big corporations also have a role to play, yet this quite tragic in the computing industry versus other professions. So no wonder that SaaS and fremium models got born, building paywals.
- g3ger1ub 3y agoBjarnason's call for the FLOSS community to embrace "openness with boundaries" is a thought-provoking notion. Striking the right balance between openness and practicality can help preserve the core values of FLOSS while addressing the challenges posed by today's rapidly evolving tech landscape.
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