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To offer a contrary view: I think the economics of software commons has been stunningly successful. It's substantially lowered the bar of entry for a large cla

To offer a contrary view: I think the economics of software commons has been stunningly successful. It's substantially lowered the bar of entry for a large class of businesses and non-profit organisations. It's great that people are experimenting with financial reward systems that are between free and fully commercial. The more the better as it's not at all obvious which ones will stick. I think it has the propensity to increase the number of people actively involved in this work. Even better it may open up new types of activity e.g. independent open source software auditing. But I don't feel that Heartbleed etc demonstrate a systemic failure in economics. The seismic shifting in attitudes to privacy/security that have happened over the last few years appear to be largely orthogonal to the funding models.

rectang 12y ago
I find it rewarding to volunteer at one of the big open source software foundations because the time I put in working on project governance, licensing, policy and so on ripples out through hundreds of projects and into the broader FOSS ecosystem. We're way better at what we do than we were even a few years ago, and one result is that there are far more people getting paid to work on FOSS. Expertise on the administrative aspects of open source also makes me more valuable as an employee, because I can help my employer to consume and contribute to FOSS safely and efficiently. I recommend that anyone with the knack get involved.
quadrangle 12y ago
The software commons has succeeded for upstream / backend software for things that end up as user-subjugating proprietary downstream products. The economics are very poor in terms of providing freedom and openness to the best general-public software. In other words, today's business model still relies and obnoxious ads and artificial restrictions at the end of the day.

rectang 12y ago

I find it rewarding to volunteer at one of the big open source software foundations because the time I put in working on project governance, licensing, policy and so on ripples out through hundreds of projects and into the broader FOSS ecosystem. We're way better at what we do than we were even a few years ago, and one result is that there are far more people getting paid to work on FOSS. Expertise on the administrative aspects of open source also makes me more valuable as an employee, because I can help my employer to consume and contribute to FOSS safely and efficiently. I recommend that anyone with the knack get involved.

quadrangle 12y ago

The software commons has succeeded for upstream / backend software for things that end up as user-subjugating proprietary downstream products. The economics are very poor in terms of providing freedom and openness to the best general-public software. In other words, today's business model still relies and obnoxious ads and artificial restrictions at the end of the day.