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I love this talk for a lot of reasons. Mostly because it crystalizes a lot of feelings I have been having about "Open Source" as a general concept. His conclusi

I love this talk for a lot of reasons. Mostly because it crystalizes a lot of feelings I have been having about "Open Source" as a general concept. His conclusion that Open Source is for big companies and not small developers is a really compelling conclusion (IMO). The fact that a lot of open source projects support massive corporate rent-seeking (directly or indirectly) is a great example. My spiciest take for 2023 is that the development community is going to start waking up to the realities of asymmetry between the kind of open source models made possible by the largess of massive billion dollar corporations and the kind of open source made possible by individual developers working on passion projects. It probably helps that I am aligned with what Evan is saying in some meta sense. We really need to zoom out from the viewpoint of being the benefactors of seemingly "open" projects like Chrome. I even see in these comments some pot-shots at the Elm community and leadership for being extremely protective of their project when faced with unwanted and undesirable intrusions. It is also interesting that this comes not long after I ran into Golang debating an updated json library for its stdlib [1]. What I want to say about that is, there is almost no universe I would be willing to put up with that community feedback. Any human with the stamina to respond to aggressive and persistent haranguing and nitpicking has more patience than I will ever have. So if the majority of criticism of Elm is that they exclude those kinds of people from their community then I totally understand it. Even if you paid me a 300k TOC FAANG salary there is no way I'm dealing with those kind of people, forget about it for a project of my own passion. Thank you for your interest, but please take your "help" anywhere else. His conclusion is bleak and a bigger warning than most realize. How many people have amazing ideas on their laptops in a proof-of-concept state right now but they don't know what to do? One on hand is the specter of entitled expectation from a legion of idiots who have been conditioned on the open source models made possible by huge corporations. On the other are the corporations salivating at Apache, MIT and BSD licensed free software they can host for almost no cost. And as he points out - the current alternatives for funding are totally inadequate. 1. https://github.com/golang/go/discussions/63397 https://github.com/golang/go/discussions/63397

pcstl 3y ago
I don't think it's very charitable of you to assume that the massive amount of people who have left the Elm community are all, and I quote: "a legion of idiots who have been conditioned on the open source models made possible by huge corporations". I get the point you're trying to make here, and I agree that funding from big corporations has fundamentally distorted the open-source landscape in ways that might not be the most desirable, but we can acknowledge that without invalidating people who believe that the Elm project has been mismanaged by just assigning them to some "those kinds of people" bin.
- zoogeny 3y ago
  I'm not above using inflammatory language when I want to and I don't subscribe to tone-policing in general. But in the context of the paragraph you quoted, "a legion of idiots" refers explicitly to a specter in the mind of any person with code written that’s considering releasing it open source. It does not refer to any specific individual, situation, project, etc. It is a fear of the mob and of the dog-piling we so often see in open source communities. But to continue on the topic you brought up - I am also not interested in calling out people who decide a project is not for them and decide to walk away. I am calling out people who jump into discussions about the core fundamentals of projects that they are not currently contributing to and turn those discussions in a hostile direction. Once they realize that their technical contributions are not wanted they turn to character and reputation attacks against the project owners and core contributors. Even if one out of one hundred users matches this description, you end up with a situation most sane individuals want to avoid at all costs. So there is no invalidation of people who believe Elm went in the wrong direction. There isn't invalidation of people who wish to express that opinion publicly and even on project hosted forums, chats, bug-lists, etc. It is against those who go the "extra mile" and persistently push for changes even after they have been rejected and who resort to attacks on a person's character or reputation when they fail to get their way. And it is against those who defend such behavior by invoking some unspoken rules of open source development.
  - pcstl 3y ago
    That is fair enough. And sorry if I seemed like I was policing your tone, I was actually just disagreeing with a certain characterization of the situation.
    - otteromkram 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - pcstl 3y ago
        Are these "woke SJWs" in the room with us right now?
skybrian 3y ago
A more optimistic take would be that open source is one way that big companies indirectly and somewhat inadvertently support small ones. This means the code might be tackling problems that small companies don't have, though. It might be more complicated than you need. Maybe it's bleak if you care about control issues (governance) or you want to make money off open source? But as a source of free, possibly useful stuff, it's pretty good.
pjmlp 3y ago
Recently someone made a quote on twitter asserting that trying to live from open source without a proper business plan, is like hoping people listening for free music radio will actually buy the record. Or as I like to point out, living as street artist. Sure one does get some money out of it, yet on its own its isn't going to pay all the bills.
- waveBidder 3y ago
  both of these people are making non-exclusionary public goods, so yeah, the parallel is valid. Lots of non-physical goods fit in the same category (when we haven't hamfistedly tried to make them exclusionary), our mechanisms for getting creators rewarded for their efforts suck.
  - aksss 3y ago
    We often think the critical skill is being able to create something of value, but unless it's charity (which has value, dgmw) the critical skill is being able to create something of value to others and then to protect the potential returns. Specifically, this means protecting it from thieves, absconders, seizures, penalties, etc. It's like people saying that good ideas are a dime a dozen, the important thing is execution. Well, one level beyond that is that "execution/schmexecution" - the important thing is capturing a return. To that end, it's worth asking why our "mechanisms for getting creators rewarded for their efforts suck". Is it because copyright is too weak/too strong? Is it because patent process is overly burdensome/costly/a joke? I don't know, but I empathize with your points entirely and think it's worth thinking about. Personally, I think there's room for more nuance in the commercial/non-commercial licensing dichotomy. Specifically, instead of using that as a breakpoint for charging licensing fees, maybe having some revenue threshold after which payments need to be made. I was about to say into a general fund to support open-source developers generally, but that would be ripe for corruption, rent-seeking, and self-dealing (like union administration). Better to go straight back to sponsor the project, IMO. Some products do this - free for organizations with less than x revenue. I've not really seen it much in open source though. Some tooling to make this "10 times easier" could be the next github. But this problem has plagued inventors/creators of all eras. It does seem like we have better tools than ever to deal with it - telemetry, micropayments, etc.

pcstl 3y ago

I don't think it's very charitable of you to assume that the massive amount of people who have left the Elm community are all, and I quote: "a legion of idiots who have been conditioned on the open source models made possible by huge corporations". I get the point you're trying to make here, and I agree that funding from big corporations has fundamentally distorted the open-source landscape in ways that might not be the most desirable, but we can acknowledge that without invalidating people who believe that the Elm project has been mismanaged by just assigning them to some "those kinds of people" bin.

zoogeny 3y ago
I'm not above using inflammatory language when I want to and I don't subscribe to tone-policing in general. But in the context of the paragraph you quoted, "a legion of idiots" refers explicitly to a specter in the mind of any person with code written that’s considering releasing it open source. It does not refer to any specific individual, situation, project, etc. It is a fear of the mob and of the dog-piling we so often see in open source communities. But to continue on the topic you brought up - I am also not interested in calling out people who decide a project is not for them and decide to walk away. I am calling out people who jump into discussions about the core fundamentals of projects that they are not currently contributing to and turn those discussions in a hostile direction. Once they realize that their technical contributions are not wanted they turn to character and reputation attacks against the project owners and core contributors. Even if one out of one hundred users matches this description, you end up with a situation most sane individuals want to avoid at all costs. So there is no invalidation of people who believe Elm went in the wrong direction. There isn't invalidation of people who wish to express that opinion publicly and even on project hosted forums, chats, bug-lists, etc. It is against those who go the "extra mile" and persistently push for changes even after they have been rejected and who resort to attacks on a person's character or reputation when they fail to get their way. And it is against those who defend such behavior by invoking some unspoken rules of open source development.
- pcstl 3y ago
  That is fair enough. And sorry if I seemed like I was policing your tone, I was actually just disagreeing with a certain characterization of the situation.
  - otteromkram 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - pcstl 3y ago
      Are these "woke SJWs" in the room with us right now?

skybrian 3y ago

A more optimistic take would be that open source is one way that big companies indirectly and somewhat inadvertently support small ones. This means the code might be tackling problems that small companies don't have, though. It might be more complicated than you need. Maybe it's bleak if you care about control issues (governance) or you want to make money off open source? But as a source of free, possibly useful stuff, it's pretty good.

pjmlp 3y ago

Recently someone made a quote on twitter asserting that trying to live from open source without a proper business plan, is like hoping people listening for free music radio will actually buy the record. Or as I like to point out, living as street artist. Sure one does get some money out of it, yet on its own its isn't going to pay all the bills.

waveBidder 3y ago
both of these people are making non-exclusionary public goods, so yeah, the parallel is valid. Lots of non-physical goods fit in the same category (when we haven't hamfistedly tried to make them exclusionary), our mechanisms for getting creators rewarded for their efforts suck.
- aksss 3y ago
  We often think the critical skill is being able to create something of value, but unless it's charity (which has value, dgmw) the critical skill is being able to create something of value to others and then to protect the potential returns. Specifically, this means protecting it from thieves, absconders, seizures, penalties, etc. It's like people saying that good ideas are a dime a dozen, the important thing is execution. Well, one level beyond that is that "execution/schmexecution" - the important thing is capturing a return. To that end, it's worth asking why our "mechanisms for getting creators rewarded for their efforts suck". Is it because copyright is too weak/too strong? Is it because patent process is overly burdensome/costly/a joke? I don't know, but I empathize with your points entirely and think it's worth thinking about. Personally, I think there's room for more nuance in the commercial/non-commercial licensing dichotomy. Specifically, instead of using that as a breakpoint for charging licensing fees, maybe having some revenue threshold after which payments need to be made. I was about to say into a general fund to support open-source developers generally, but that would be ripe for corruption, rent-seeking, and self-dealing (like union administration). Better to go straight back to sponsor the project, IMO. Some products do this - free for organizations with less than x revenue. I've not really seen it much in open source though. Some tooling to make this "10 times easier" could be the next github. But this problem has plagued inventors/creators of all eras. It does seem like we have better tools than ever to deal with it - telemetry, micropayments, etc.