4 ms·

I think it’d be interesting to see what happens in a few decades if the population of open source maintainers continue to dwindle. Will companies step up to mai

by _lvbh 2y ago

I think it’d be interesting to see what happens in a few decades if the population of open source maintainers continue to dwindle. Will companies step up to maintain libraries in a sort of cooperative manner? Will everything become closed source and bespoke? Now this probably won’t happen but it’s still interesting to think about.

squigz 2y ago
To answer the question of the future of open source, I think it's important to consider why open source has existed for so long. Is it a matter of cost to develop closed-source systems? Or is it about the quality and efficiency enabled by open source development?
- binary_slinger 2y ago
  From my experience it’s about cost and efficiency. By cost I mean my cost to them for my time coding. Customers don’t factor in the hidden costs of open source. I preferred developing minimal-dependency software but my customers demand fast good-enough results. The only way to deliver that is to glue together open source dependencies.
  - a_bonobo 2y ago
    My experience is that the 0% interest on credit time for large companies enabled open source to thrive: open source maintainers were flush with cash and time. Large companies with ample cash let their staff do anything to keep them happy (and away from their competitors!), including allocated time for OSS contributions. Now that 0% interest has ended 'regular' people like me are not flush with cash. Any time I have I need to spend on activities that will bring in money. Why would I waste that on open source? (Another aspect is the McKinsey-ification of the work place in the last ~10 years or so. Managers are making decisions in tech now, not tech people. all my life I was told that OSS contributions will look great on my CV. So far nobody who has made a decision to hire me has had the background, interest, or knowledge to judge, or even care, for my OSS contributions.)
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  It hasn't existed for so long! Jeez, kids these days. As a movement it's really only about 30 years old, and that in two separate phases: 1. The GPL/GNU period. The software is mostly called "free software-as-in-freedom". The community is small, volunteer driven, highly ideological and focused primarily on cloning UNIX for commodity PC hardware. Most developers aren't using this stuff at all and work with entirely commercial toolchains. 2. The Apache 2 period. The software is mostly called "open source". The community is huge, frequently driven by corporate donations, not particularly ideological anymore and focused on developer tools / libraries rather than operating systems and desktop apps. Developers now regularly incorporate open source libraries into their commercial programs. The transition was slow but I'd pick 2008-2010 as the crossing over point. Before that time if someone said they wrote open source software you'd make a weak assumption that they worked somehow on Linux related projects in their evenings/weekends. After that time you'd probably assume they were writing some library and had even odds it was their job. It's important to remember that 2008+ is ZIRP territory. Money was "free" for investors, so investment piled into a lot of stuff that often wasn't revenue generating because there was nowhere else for it to go. This era was also shaped by a historical aberration - a handful of hyper successful advertising companies whose founders were able to remain in control whilst still selling much of their stock thanks to dual voting classes. Modern developer's understanding of the open source ecosystem, along with their expectation that powerful tools are all free, is very much shaped by the combination of Fed policy and a handful of super rich patron companies that weren't under any pressure to return capital to shareholders. Thing is none of these factors (ideology, free money, stock with dual voting classes) is historically normal or arguably sustainable over the long run, whereas ordinary capitalism is. So we might well see a reversion to the mean where things like compilers, libraries, operating systems etc become commercial again as relatively high interest rates pull funds out of tech and the supply of Stallmanists devoted to the cause of desktop GNU/Linux continues to dwindle. The recent death of a man who reverse engineered a lot of networking hardware for Linux is an example of this - how many 25 year old hackers want to do that sort of thing any more? They're all writing JS frameworks that only work on AWS these days. If that does happen though it'll be quite slow. I think the industry would need a kind of Steam for libraries to emerge first, and it's pretty unclear what the next equilibrium phase looks like.
  - 2y ago
pjmlp 2y ago
As it became common during the last years, public domain and shareware return under other marketing names like open core.
wedernoch 2y ago
I think germany is already doing something great with the Sovereign Tech Fund [0]. The support(ed) a lot of OSS projects so far.[1] [0] https://www.sovereigntechfund.de https://www.sovereigntechfund.de [1] https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/tech https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/tech
- account42 2y ago
  > https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/tech https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/tech Funding "American" GNOME instead of KDE? Weird choice.
  - wedernoch 2y ago
    It's not about subsidizing, but about support for projects they deem important. Gnome is just one of many projects. And they have to apply for funding. It's not simply given to some projects. I'm from germany and use Gnome. So supporting Gnome is a good thing from my point of view.
lionkor 2y ago
I wont stop doing open source work, and neither will anyone I know. We're all under 30. I think the next decades will be fine.

by _lvbh 2y ago

squigz 2y ago

To answer the question of the future of open source, I think it's important to consider why open source has existed for so long. Is it a matter of cost to develop closed-source systems? Or is it about the quality and efficiency enabled by open source development?

binary_slinger 2y ago
From my experience it’s about cost and efficiency. By cost I mean my cost to them for my time coding. Customers don’t factor in the hidden costs of open source. I preferred developing minimal-dependency software but my customers demand fast good-enough results. The only way to deliver that is to glue together open source dependencies.
- a_bonobo 2y ago
  My experience is that the 0% interest on credit time for large companies enabled open source to thrive: open source maintainers were flush with cash and time. Large companies with ample cash let their staff do anything to keep them happy (and away from their competitors!), including allocated time for OSS contributions. Now that 0% interest has ended 'regular' people like me are not flush with cash. Any time I have I need to spend on activities that will bring in money. Why would I waste that on open source? (Another aspect is the McKinsey-ification of the work place in the last ~10 years or so. Managers are making decisions in tech now, not tech people. all my life I was told that OSS contributions will look great on my CV. So far nobody who has made a decision to hire me has had the background, interest, or knowledge to judge, or even care, for my OSS contributions.)
mike_hearn 2y ago
It hasn't existed for so long! Jeez, kids these days. As a movement it's really only about 30 years old, and that in two separate phases: 1. The GPL/GNU period. The software is mostly called "free software-as-in-freedom". The community is small, volunteer driven, highly ideological and focused primarily on cloning UNIX for commodity PC hardware. Most developers aren't using this stuff at all and work with entirely commercial toolchains. 2. The Apache 2 period. The software is mostly called "open source". The community is huge, frequently driven by corporate donations, not particularly ideological anymore and focused on developer tools / libraries rather than operating systems and desktop apps. Developers now regularly incorporate open source libraries into their commercial programs. The transition was slow but I'd pick 2008-2010 as the crossing over point. Before that time if someone said they wrote open source software you'd make a weak assumption that they worked somehow on Linux related projects in their evenings/weekends. After that time you'd probably assume they were writing some library and had even odds it was their job. It's important to remember that 2008+ is ZIRP territory. Money was "free" for investors, so investment piled into a lot of stuff that often wasn't revenue generating because there was nowhere else for it to go. This era was also shaped by a historical aberration - a handful of hyper successful advertising companies whose founders were able to remain in control whilst still selling much of their stock thanks to dual voting classes. Modern developer's understanding of the open source ecosystem, along with their expectation that powerful tools are all free, is very much shaped by the combination of Fed policy and a handful of super rich patron companies that weren't under any pressure to return capital to shareholders. Thing is none of these factors (ideology, free money, stock with dual voting classes) is historically normal or arguably sustainable over the long run, whereas ordinary capitalism is. So we might well see a reversion to the mean where things like compilers, libraries, operating systems etc become commercial again as relatively high interest rates pull funds out of tech and the supply of Stallmanists devoted to the cause of desktop GNU/Linux continues to dwindle. The recent death of a man who reverse engineered a lot of networking hardware for Linux is an example of this - how many 25 year old hackers want to do that sort of thing any more? They're all writing JS frameworks that only work on AWS these days. If that does happen though it'll be quite slow. I think the industry would need a kind of Steam for libraries to emerge first, and it's pretty unclear what the next equilibrium phase looks like.
- 2y ago

pjmlp 2y ago

As it became common during the last years, public domain and shareware return under other marketing names like open core.

wedernoch 2y ago

I think germany is already doing something great with the Sovereign Tech Fund [0]. The support(ed) a lot of OSS projects so far.[1] [0] https://www.sovereigntechfund.de https://www.sovereigntechfund.de [1] https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/tech https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/tech

account42 2y ago
> https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/tech https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/tech Funding "American" GNOME instead of KDE? Weird choice.
- wedernoch 2y ago
  It's not about subsidizing, but about support for projects they deem important. Gnome is just one of many projects. And they have to apply for funding. It's not simply given to some projects. I'm from germany and use Gnome. So supporting Gnome is a good thing from my point of view.

lionkor 2y ago

I wont stop doing open source work, and neither will anyone I know. We're all under 30. I think the next decades will be fine.