Open Source Does Not Win by Being Cheaper

If you accept this premise that there is no tragedy of the commons – that open source software cannot be over-grazed by having more people use it – that freeloaders are free, and scarcity is not an applicable concept, then you’re forced to look skeptically at other assumptions we’ve been starting to make lately in the broader open source community.

Looking at the landscape of open source software today, I note two things. First, successful open source platforms tend to be partnered with caretaker organizations. Wikipedia has the Wikimedia Foundation, Linux has the constellation of organizations around the Linux Foundation, and Kubernetes has the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Second, open... See more

Perhaps in the end the open-source culture will triumph not because cooperation is morally right or software ``hoarding'' is morally wrong (assuming you believe the latter, which neither Linus nor I do), but simply because the closed-source world cannot win an evolutionary arms race with open-source communities that can put orders of magnitude more... See more

A number of monetisation models for open-source work have been put forward in the last decade, but none of them has been able to scale and solve the problem in a fundamental way. The reason being, open-source work is a microeconomic singularity — a paradox in capitalism that can’t be corrected with donations, cryptocurrencies, or freemium models. I... See more

In the end, the fragile balance of open source—that unlikely blend of personalities and incentives that has driven tech’s innovation engine throughout the 21st century—won’t be upset by the odd state actor, or by malicious spam, or whatever scary new thing The Register is up in arms about tomorrow. It can only be disrupted when the community comes ... See more

In other words, open-source protocols accelerate innovation by letting anyone build, so that with proper financial incentives for creators, they can quickly take the place of closed web2 protocols. That makes it hard for platforms to extract value, however, since open-source environments let anyone fork the platform and redeploy it with lower commi... See more