7 ms·

Your second paragraph is explaining perfectly why open source doesn't work and how its economics don't add up. I would also add that it indirectly kills the va

Your second paragraph is explaining perfectly why open source doesn't work and how its economics don't add up. I would also add that it indirectly kills the vast majority of programming jobs - nobody is ever going to get paid to create a JPEG decoder as everyone can just use libjpeg. Nobody is ever get paid to write a new kernel as everyone can just use Linux. Very few people are going to get paid to work on a new database as you can just use Postgres... Once there's a good enough open source solution in a field, in the long run it will out-compete commercial offerings, even it's overall a worse package, as it's some guy's free time project and is created on a $0 budget. Programmers work for free, end users get a worse product, companies make trillions.

tredre3 2y ago
> Nobody is ever get paid to write a new kernel as everyone can just use Linux Not that it negates your point in any way, but lots of people are paid lots of money to write Zircon (Google Fuschia's kernel) which is intended to replace Linux in many scenarios.
- LtWorf 2y ago
  So they are paid to write a useless toy. While people who write the useful code are not paid.
  - surajrmal 2y ago
    If people didn't do the work for free in open source, then companies who need that functionality would in fact be forced to pay for it, although it may not necessarily be open source in turn. It's hard to complain about the state of open source because people choose to put themselves in these predicaments. If you need money to sustain the project, asking for donations is not really an adequate plan.
    - LtWorf 2y ago
      Why do companies prefer to waste money on useless projects rather than donate to projects they actually depend on?
- pjmlp 2y ago
  Sadly it went nowhere, it remains to be seen how long it will take to join Android Things, Tango, and other Google OS related projects. Yes I am aware it is shipping on Nest Hub.
  - surajrmal 2y ago
    It's open source and you can track how active it is by commits per week. It's still a very active project. It's a bit disheartening to see people make random armchair judgements.
    - pjmlp 2y ago
      Very active keeping Google engineers busy, that is certainly indeed. What matters after almost 15 years, with a couple of major rewrites, is when it will ship on anything else besides Nest Hub.
- surajrmal 2y ago
  I will note that the number of people who actually work on the Zircon kernel directly is relatively small. Zircon is a small fraction of Fuchsia's codebase. However if you widen your view to include things that are not in the kernel but would be in Linux the math lines up better.
mmooss 2y ago
> open source doesn't work What could you mean by that? It's an extremely successful model organizationally and technically. > it indirectly kills the vast majority of programming jobs All software kills the vast majority of jobs - think of all the jobs there would be if we had no software. Anyway, are we short of programming jobs? Efficiencies create new, higher-value possibilities than, for example, JPEG decoders.
- alexvitkov 2y ago
  > It's an extremely successful model organizationally and technically. There are technically impressive open source projects - e.g. Linux, and most of them have people paid to work on them full time. Those are the exception, not the rule. Most open source projects are some guy's hobby, done for free in their free time. Hobbyists solve problems they find interesting, and often ignore a lot of the "gruntwork" required to make a technically sound package. > Anyway, are we short of programming jobs? Yes. Especially good ones. > Efficiencies create new, higher-value possibilities than, for example, JPEG decoders. I don't see it - a large portion of programming jobs have devolved to gluing together a bunch of open-source libraries, doing the boring gruntwork to actually make them work, and dealing with the inevitable hell, caused by using 500 components that were never designed to work together.
  - otherme123 2y ago
    > Hobbyists solve problems they find interesting, and often ignore a lot of the "gruntwork" required to make a technically sound package. OTOH some commercial software only solve problems that make money, and ignore the technically sound part unless it makes money. E.g. the enshittification of Google, Windows or Facebook, and friends, from a product that worked to a product that nobody asked for. All the technicality spent in tracking users, more ads, etc. These are a lot of commercial software that are not much more than a repackaging of open source software and a UI layer (ffmpeg, for example).
  - thayne 2y ago
    > Those are the exception, not the rule. Most open source projects are some guy's hobby, done for free in their free time. And most proprietary software becomes completely unavailable when the company making it goes out of business. At least with the open source software, if there is interest in it, someone else can pick it up, if the original creator stops maintaining it. > a large portion of programming jobs have devolved to gluing together a bunch of open-source libraries, doing the boring gruntwork to actually make them work, and dealing with the inevitable hell, caused by using 500 components that were never designed to work together. And you think that would be any different without open source? A large portion of programming would still be gluing together a bunch of components, but instead of open source libraries you would have proprietary libraries, where if the documentation is inadequate or wrong, you have no option of looking at the source code to see what it actually does. Or in-house libraries that were designed for some specific purpose that doesn't match yours at all, and are very low quality, because they were made under a tight deadline, and no one ever went back to pay the tech debt after the MVP was released. Or maybe instead of a library you make API calls to some SaaS with no SLA and barely any documentation.
dagi3d 2y ago
If we had to write every single piece of code over and over(or pay for them), computer science would have barely evolved and would not be so mainstream
- liamkearney 2y ago
  No, writing them over and over is literally what evolves computer science. Not having to write them over and over is what improves software. They’re different.
  - hulitu 2y ago
    > No, writing them over and over is literally what evolves computer science. If this is the way computer science evolves, it is safe to say that it evolves at the same pace as life.
- z3phyr 2y ago
  Computer science evolved during the time when most people did not have a computer. The concepts of compilers, operating systems, databases, file systems, computer graphics all evolved from the 60s to the early 90s. After that, it was mostly scaling.
  - int_19h 2y ago
    It is still true that people freely shared and copied sources for useful software in those days. It wasn't even called "open source" or any other kind of fancy term because it was the norm.
    - pjmlp 2y ago
      It was called Demos, Public Domain, Shareware, Beerware, Postalware,.... And the open core licenses of nowadays are nothing more than a rebranding of those kind of license models.
      - int_19h 2y ago
hulitu 2y ago
> Programmers work for free, end users get a worse product, companies make trillions. I bet you didn't use any Microsoft product. /s
- LtWorf 2y ago
  You think microsoft doesn't use libre software?
karparov 2y ago
> Your second paragraph is explaining perfectly why open source doesn't work > some guy's free time project and is created on a $0 budget. > Programmers work for free You seem to be completely out of touch with what FOSS is. The amount of relevant FOSS hacked by some teenager for free in moms basement is negligible. The largest contributors to the Linux kernel are IBM, Intel and Oracle. Nobody there works for free.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  Because it costs down their own development costs, doing more with less. How much upstream do you think BSD gets from Sony and Apple, besides a few crumbs? clang was sponsored exactly to allow Google and Apple to take a compiler and not be legally obliged to upstream their sauce. Nowadays clang has mostly replaced most proprietary compilers on surviving UNIXes, and embedded OSes, how much of those downstream changes land on upstream clang? It is mostly volunteer work improving ISO C and ISO C++ compliance, despite all the money being made by those folks.
  - tgma 2y ago
    > clang was sponsored exactly to allow Google and Apple to take a compiler and not be legally obliged to upstream their sauce. Sponsored is an understatement. It was pretty much entirely funded by those two, so if the goal was to leech on volunteers, that would be a pretty bad move by those companies.
    - pjmlp 2y ago
      The goal was not to give anything back as expected by GCC and GPL, especially the at the time relatively new GPL3. Which is exactly what happened after clang got mature enough, GCC was expunged from their platforms. Apple first, followed by Google about a year later. Note that nowadays, Apple clang has its own column on cppreference, Google is focused on Carbon/Rust/Go, and both cases most of the contributions are on LLVM side, not clang and ISO compliance.
      - 2y ago
thayne 2y ago
> I would also add that it indirectly kills the vast majority of programming jobs - nobody is ever going to get paid to create a JPEG decoder as everyone can just use libjpeg Looked at another way, open source means that instead of a bunch of programmers getting paid to write multiple implementations of the same thing over and over, so the programmers that otherwise would be doing that can instead work on new innovative things. In an ideal world, all software would be open source, and programmers would spend all their time improving said software for everyone. The problem is I don't know how those programmers would be compensated for their work. In many ways, open source software is a public good, since anyone can benefit from it[1], so an argument could be made that OSS should be publicly funded (i.e. paid for by government grants). However, I am doubtful that the government could do a good job of allocating resources to open source projects. Then again, I don't think the private sector is doing a great job of that either. Just look at how many resources are put into showing people ads. [1]: And it has the interesting property, that unlike most public goods, the cost does not scale with the number of people who use it, or have a limit on the number of people who use it.
- autopoiesis 2y ago
  Isn't the solution to have much shorter copyright terms? Software could be closed source at first, its implementation costs recouped, then opened by default when its copyright term lapses. New releases could still be closed, so income could continue. Set the term at 5-10 years, rather than >70.
  - dpassens 2y ago
    This doesn't really work for projects that want to be closed source, as they can just not publish the source. After the 10 years, people can copy the binary, but that doesn't really give you a whole lot of benefit. And if a project does want to be open source eventually, they can already license their code that way.
    - autopoiesis 2y ago
      Couple it with a generalized right to repair: source code is what's needed in order to be able to repair the software that you use. If beyond the support period or the copyright term (whichever is least), the materials needed to repair the product must be released.
AAAAaccountAAAA 2y ago
I wouldn't be a good way to spend money and resources to rewrite things like jpeg decoders again and again. It would not help to make the final product any better, but just siphon the money off from more worthwhile purposes. Companies make billions? Good. It's time to tax them and use the money for the benefit of everyone.
szundi 2y ago
[dead]
exe34 2y ago
> nobody is ever going to get paid to create a JPEG decoder as everyone can just use libjpeg. if there's no technical reason why libjpeg isn't suitable, I'd consider it a huge waste of human life to create another. if there is a good technical reason to build a new one, then somebody will do it for free or somebody will pay for it to be made. I think the system is working.
InsideOutSanta 2y ago
As a generic rule, it's true that open source software increases the supply of software, which means that the value of software goes down. The reason this doesn't really matter in a truly noticeable way, and why I'm also not really concerned about AI taking programming jobs, is that demand for software is so much higher than supply. You can go to any random local small business, and within five minutes, you will identify software demand that is not being met adequately, or at all. They use Excel for their inventory and constantly have problems with it that need to be manually resolved. Their website doesn't work right and nobody knows how to fix the broken links. They have somebody who does paychecks by hand. One person is in charge of scheduling holidays in a shared calendar. And so on. These companies would pay developers to fix their issues if they could afford them. As programmers become more productive, whether that is by using open-source software instead of writing things manually, by using LLMs, or by other means, there is a downward pressure on salaries. But that doesn't mean that jobs disappear; it just means that more companies now have access to developers they could previously not afford. We make less money doing some in-house processes for a small, local business than writing a database for a multinational corporation. But on the upside, we improve the lives of people who actually matter, rather than making some billionaire even richer.
agumonkey 2y ago
And I ironically think that if you want to fix the open source you end up creating a good old economy.. where people don't give, but negotiate an exchange apriori so they know they won't be disappointed after the fact.
matt-p 2y ago
I think killing software jobs is a bit of a silly argument, it's not a better world that we've got 1,000 closed source jpeg decoders rather than one excellent open source one. What I do find massively problematic is that the developers of the open source ones often aren't paid. That should be impossible, companies are profiting off of free labour and that's wrong. If anything open source developers should get paid more per accepted PR, they provide more value and probably better quality code.
nickpsecurity 2y ago
"nobody is ever going to get paid to create a JPEG decoder as everyone can just use libjpeg. Nobody is ever get paid to write a new kernel as everyone can just use Linux. Very few people are going to get paid to work on a new database as you can just use Postgres..." There's still many paid offerings for databases, operating systems (esp RTOS's), and image processing. That includes libraries. The companies are usually profitable with some making a fortune on the products. Quite opposite of what you said. The question you should ask is: why? Next question: how do I use those lessons to sell and give away something like OpenBSD?
flossDaily 2y ago
Seems like the economics works better than 99% of our society does. The point of the economy is not to produce jobs, it's to circulate goods and services. Open source does this more efficiently in the long term. The American (or globalized) economy is mostly inefficient and irrational outside the perspective of shareholders and investors. Unfortunately, those same people will make us commit mass suicide before allowing the basis of resource management to change.
LeFantome 2y ago
Nobody is ever going to pay somebody to shovel holes when they can just use a back-hoe. So, let’s outlaw industrial machinery. Open Source achieves the exact opposite of what you say. It allows people to direct their talent and effort to solving high-value problems instead of low-value ones. Instead of writing a JPEG decoder, you can create a professional photography workflow or a pre-press pipeline. Instead of writing the low-level bits of a database, you can create an enterprise SaaS. Yes, Open Source infrastructure is hard to compete with. However, it is super easy to out-compete companies that are wasting their engineering resources re-inventing the wheel. Of course, there is always the option of doing the basic stuff better of course and being rewarded for it. Some will. And, while this reply is already too long to get into it, the majority of Open Source is written by people being paid to do it. So, wrong there too.

tredre3 2y ago

> Nobody is ever get paid to write a new kernel as everyone can just use Linux Not that it negates your point in any way, but lots of people are paid lots of money to write Zircon (Google Fuschia's kernel) which is intended to replace Linux in many scenarios.

LtWorf 2y ago
So they are paid to write a useless toy. While people who write the useful code are not paid.
- surajrmal 2y ago
  If people didn't do the work for free in open source, then companies who need that functionality would in fact be forced to pay for it, although it may not necessarily be open source in turn. It's hard to complain about the state of open source because people choose to put themselves in these predicaments. If you need money to sustain the project, asking for donations is not really an adequate plan.
  - LtWorf 2y ago
    Why do companies prefer to waste money on useless projects rather than donate to projects they actually depend on?
pjmlp 2y ago
Sadly it went nowhere, it remains to be seen how long it will take to join Android Things, Tango, and other Google OS related projects. Yes I am aware it is shipping on Nest Hub.
- surajrmal 2y ago
  It's open source and you can track how active it is by commits per week. It's still a very active project. It's a bit disheartening to see people make random armchair judgements.
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    Very active keeping Google engineers busy, that is certainly indeed. What matters after almost 15 years, with a couple of major rewrites, is when it will ship on anything else besides Nest Hub.
surajrmal 2y ago
I will note that the number of people who actually work on the Zircon kernel directly is relatively small. Zircon is a small fraction of Fuchsia's codebase. However if you widen your view to include things that are not in the kernel but would be in Linux the math lines up better.

mmooss 2y ago

> open source doesn't work What could you mean by that? It's an extremely successful model organizationally and technically. > it indirectly kills the vast majority of programming jobs All software kills the vast majority of jobs - think of all the jobs there would be if we had no software. Anyway, are we short of programming jobs? Efficiencies create new, higher-value possibilities than, for example, JPEG decoders.

alexvitkov 2y ago
> It's an extremely successful model organizationally and technically. There are technically impressive open source projects - e.g. Linux, and most of them have people paid to work on them full time. Those are the exception, not the rule. Most open source projects are some guy's hobby, done for free in their free time. Hobbyists solve problems they find interesting, and often ignore a lot of the "gruntwork" required to make a technically sound package. > Anyway, are we short of programming jobs? Yes. Especially good ones. > Efficiencies create new, higher-value possibilities than, for example, JPEG decoders. I don't see it - a large portion of programming jobs have devolved to gluing together a bunch of open-source libraries, doing the boring gruntwork to actually make them work, and dealing with the inevitable hell, caused by using 500 components that were never designed to work together.
- otherme123 2y ago
  > Hobbyists solve problems they find interesting, and often ignore a lot of the "gruntwork" required to make a technically sound package. OTOH some commercial software only solve problems that make money, and ignore the technically sound part unless it makes money. E.g. the enshittification of Google, Windows or Facebook, and friends, from a product that worked to a product that nobody asked for. All the technicality spent in tracking users, more ads, etc. These are a lot of commercial software that are not much more than a repackaging of open source software and a UI layer (ffmpeg, for example).
- thayne 2y ago
  > Those are the exception, not the rule. Most open source projects are some guy's hobby, done for free in their free time. And most proprietary software becomes completely unavailable when the company making it goes out of business. At least with the open source software, if there is interest in it, someone else can pick it up, if the original creator stops maintaining it. > a large portion of programming jobs have devolved to gluing together a bunch of open-source libraries, doing the boring gruntwork to actually make them work, and dealing with the inevitable hell, caused by using 500 components that were never designed to work together. And you think that would be any different without open source? A large portion of programming would still be gluing together a bunch of components, but instead of open source libraries you would have proprietary libraries, where if the documentation is inadequate or wrong, you have no option of looking at the source code to see what it actually does. Or in-house libraries that were designed for some specific purpose that doesn't match yours at all, and are very low quality, because they were made under a tight deadline, and no one ever went back to pay the tech debt after the MVP was released. Or maybe instead of a library you make API calls to some SaaS with no SLA and barely any documentation.

dagi3d 2y ago

If we had to write every single piece of code over and over(or pay for them), computer science would have barely evolved and would not be so mainstream

liamkearney 2y ago
No, writing them over and over is literally what evolves computer science. Not having to write them over and over is what improves software. They’re different.
- hulitu 2y ago
  > No, writing them over and over is literally what evolves computer science. If this is the way computer science evolves, it is safe to say that it evolves at the same pace as life.
z3phyr 2y ago
Computer science evolved during the time when most people did not have a computer. The concepts of compilers, operating systems, databases, file systems, computer graphics all evolved from the 60s to the early 90s. After that, it was mostly scaling.
- int_19h 2y ago
  It is still true that people freely shared and copied sources for useful software in those days. It wasn't even called "open source" or any other kind of fancy term because it was the norm.
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    It was called Demos, Public Domain, Shareware, Beerware, Postalware,.... And the open core licenses of nowadays are nothing more than a rebranding of those kind of license models.
    - int_19h 2y ago

hulitu 2y ago

> Programmers work for free, end users get a worse product, companies make trillions. I bet you didn't use any Microsoft product. /s

LtWorf 2y ago
You think microsoft doesn't use libre software?

karparov 2y ago

> Your second paragraph is explaining perfectly why open source doesn't work > some guy's free time project and is created on a $0 budget. > Programmers work for free You seem to be completely out of touch with what FOSS is. The amount of relevant FOSS hacked by some teenager for free in moms basement is negligible. The largest contributors to the Linux kernel are IBM, Intel and Oracle. Nobody there works for free.

pjmlp 2y ago
Because it costs down their own development costs, doing more with less. How much upstream do you think BSD gets from Sony and Apple, besides a few crumbs? clang was sponsored exactly to allow Google and Apple to take a compiler and not be legally obliged to upstream their sauce. Nowadays clang has mostly replaced most proprietary compilers on surviving UNIXes, and embedded OSes, how much of those downstream changes land on upstream clang? It is mostly volunteer work improving ISO C and ISO C++ compliance, despite all the money being made by those folks.
- tgma 2y ago
  > clang was sponsored exactly to allow Google and Apple to take a compiler and not be legally obliged to upstream their sauce. Sponsored is an understatement. It was pretty much entirely funded by those two, so if the goal was to leech on volunteers, that would be a pretty bad move by those companies.
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    The goal was not to give anything back as expected by GCC and GPL, especially the at the time relatively new GPL3. Which is exactly what happened after clang got mature enough, GCC was expunged from their platforms. Apple first, followed by Google about a year later. Note that nowadays, Apple clang has its own column on cppreference, Google is focused on Carbon/Rust/Go, and both cases most of the contributions are on LLVM side, not clang and ISO compliance.
    - 2y ago

thayne 2y ago

> I would also add that it indirectly kills the vast majority of programming jobs - nobody is ever going to get paid to create a JPEG decoder as everyone can just use libjpeg Looked at another way, open source means that instead of a bunch of programmers getting paid to write multiple implementations of the same thing over and over, so the programmers that otherwise would be doing that can instead work on new innovative things. In an ideal world, all software would be open source, and programmers would spend all their time improving said software for everyone. The problem is I don't know how those programmers would be compensated for their work. In many ways, open source software is a public good, since anyone can benefit from it[1], so an argument could be made that OSS should be publicly funded (i.e. paid for by government grants). However, I am doubtful that the government could do a good job of allocating resources to open source projects. Then again, I don't think the private sector is doing a great job of that either. Just look at how many resources are put into showing people ads. [1]: And it has the interesting property, that unlike most public goods, the cost does not scale with the number of people who use it, or have a limit on the number of people who use it.

autopoiesis 2y ago
Isn't the solution to have much shorter copyright terms? Software could be closed source at first, its implementation costs recouped, then opened by default when its copyright term lapses. New releases could still be closed, so income could continue. Set the term at 5-10 years, rather than >70.
- dpassens 2y ago
  This doesn't really work for projects that want to be closed source, as they can just not publish the source. After the 10 years, people can copy the binary, but that doesn't really give you a whole lot of benefit. And if a project does want to be open source eventually, they can already license their code that way.
  - autopoiesis 2y ago
    Couple it with a generalized right to repair: source code is what's needed in order to be able to repair the software that you use. If beyond the support period or the copyright term (whichever is least), the materials needed to repair the product must be released.

AAAAaccountAAAA 2y ago

I wouldn't be a good way to spend money and resources to rewrite things like jpeg decoders again and again. It would not help to make the final product any better, but just siphon the money off from more worthwhile purposes. Companies make billions? Good. It's time to tax them and use the money for the benefit of everyone.

szundi 2y ago

[dead]

exe34 2y ago

> nobody is ever going to get paid to create a JPEG decoder as everyone can just use libjpeg. if there's no technical reason why libjpeg isn't suitable, I'd consider it a huge waste of human life to create another. if there is a good technical reason to build a new one, then somebody will do it for free or somebody will pay for it to be made. I think the system is working.

InsideOutSanta 2y ago

As a generic rule, it's true that open source software increases the supply of software, which means that the value of software goes down. The reason this doesn't really matter in a truly noticeable way, and why I'm also not really concerned about AI taking programming jobs, is that demand for software is so much higher than supply. You can go to any random local small business, and within five minutes, you will identify software demand that is not being met adequately, or at all. They use Excel for their inventory and constantly have problems with it that need to be manually resolved. Their website doesn't work right and nobody knows how to fix the broken links. They have somebody who does paychecks by hand. One person is in charge of scheduling holidays in a shared calendar. And so on. These companies would pay developers to fix their issues if they could afford them. As programmers become more productive, whether that is by using open-source software instead of writing things manually, by using LLMs, or by other means, there is a downward pressure on salaries. But that doesn't mean that jobs disappear; it just means that more companies now have access to developers they could previously not afford. We make less money doing some in-house processes for a small, local business than writing a database for a multinational corporation. But on the upside, we improve the lives of people who actually matter, rather than making some billionaire even richer.

agumonkey 2y ago

And I ironically think that if you want to fix the open source you end up creating a good old economy.. where people don't give, but negotiate an exchange apriori so they know they won't be disappointed after the fact.

matt-p 2y ago

I think killing software jobs is a bit of a silly argument, it's not a better world that we've got 1,000 closed source jpeg decoders rather than one excellent open source one. What I do find massively problematic is that the developers of the open source ones often aren't paid. That should be impossible, companies are profiting off of free labour and that's wrong. If anything open source developers should get paid more per accepted PR, they provide more value and probably better quality code.

nickpsecurity 2y ago

"nobody is ever going to get paid to create a JPEG decoder as everyone can just use libjpeg. Nobody is ever get paid to write a new kernel as everyone can just use Linux. Very few people are going to get paid to work on a new database as you can just use Postgres..." There's still many paid offerings for databases, operating systems (esp RTOS's), and image processing. That includes libraries. The companies are usually profitable with some making a fortune on the products. Quite opposite of what you said. The question you should ask is: why? Next question: how do I use those lessons to sell and give away something like OpenBSD?

flossDaily 2y ago

Seems like the economics works better than 99% of our society does. The point of the economy is not to produce jobs, it's to circulate goods and services. Open source does this more efficiently in the long term. The American (or globalized) economy is mostly inefficient and irrational outside the perspective of shareholders and investors. Unfortunately, those same people will make us commit mass suicide before allowing the basis of resource management to change.

LeFantome 2y ago

Nobody is ever going to pay somebody to shovel holes when they can just use a back-hoe. So, let’s outlaw industrial machinery. Open Source achieves the exact opposite of what you say. It allows people to direct their talent and effort to solving high-value problems instead of low-value ones. Instead of writing a JPEG decoder, you can create a professional photography workflow or a pre-press pipeline. Instead of writing the low-level bits of a database, you can create an enterprise SaaS. Yes, Open Source infrastructure is hard to compete with. However, it is super easy to out-compete companies that are wasting their engineering resources re-inventing the wheel. Of course, there is always the option of doing the basic stuff better of course and being rewarded for it. Some will. And, while this reply is already too long to get into it, the majority of Open Source is written by people being paid to do it. So, wrong there too.