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It's pretty rare to see a post that I agree on so wholeheartedly. The big question is though, how do you make business work in FOSS context. I'm glad that Sour
by zokier 2y ago
It's pretty rare to see a post that I agree on so wholeheartedly.
The big question is though, how do you make business work in FOSS context. I'm glad that SourceHut is doing well, but I suspect it thrives partially due being small niche software. On the other end of scale you have FAANG style megacorps that do a lot of FOSS work too. But the middle-ground between these two extremes seems really difficult. Yet it feels desireable that non-niche FOSS development wouldn't end up being solely in the hands of megacorps.
- zokier 2y agoI do see a connection here to how companies have been increasingly becoming hyperfocused on specializing what they perceive as their core domain, and outsourcing absolutely everything else. It used to be that companies owned, and were proud of, their own headquarters, employed all the support functions personnel and so on. Contrasting janitors to CEOs is common trope, but who employs janitors anymore? While this change has been economically incredibly profitable, I suspect there might be some long-term issues that crop up. How does this relate to FOSS? In a sense software maintenance is lot like janitoring, and I do think one way of making the ecosystem healthier would be if companies would have larger in-house software divisions. So for example instead of the likes of Ford or Walmart paying to MS (or IBM) for stuff like Office suite, they would just have in-house teams working on LibreOffice.