The threat to open source comes from within
Stuart Evans and added
"In a world where nearly all software relies on open source code, maintaining the resilience and health of the free and open source ecosystem is more important than ever. That's why we believe that dependence on centrally hosted platforms and corporations for the distribution of critical open source infrastructure is unsustainable. Reliance on such... See more
Mirror • Welcome to The Block Pro - The Block Pro
Jacob Borgeson added
Open systems – free speech, democracy, open content, open science – will sometimes produce results we do not like. That openness, of course, will be used by the powerful as well as the powerless. There will be cruel speech, bad democratic decisions and uses of openly licensed content with which we disagree. Thus, it is very easy to blame openness. ... See more
James Boyle • Misunderestimating openness – Open Future
madisen added
Open-source projects—not just commercial open source—have served as a critical driver for the improvement of products for decades. However, some software is going to remain closed source. It’s just the nature of first-mover advantage. But when transparency and extensibility are an issue, an open-source successor becomes a real threat.
github.com • Open Source Does Not Win by Being Cheaper
Darren LI added
Sarah Drinkwater added
I would argue that this is roughly the state of "open source" today. It is the modern software developer’s marmelade, with the OSI as our Konfitürenverordnung, continuing to aggressively enforce a phrase that has since evolved in the popular vernacular.
"open source" is not the logical negation of "closed source"
Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement.
Now that Open Source is heavily depended on by nearly every commercial company, we’re running into sustainability and maintainability problems. These are problems that really didn’t exist at scale before. A very famous recent example of this is the XZ Utils backdoor exploit, where an open source maintainer accepted a subtle but significant compromise from a bad actor, partially due to burnout and harassment of the maintainer.
However, I see this in nearly every maintainer that I talk to. It’s almost impossible to make money by writing and maintaining Open Source software, due to several factors. Everyone wants and expects free shit, and nobody feels that they need to support the people making this all possible.
The strange new truth is that most open source developers and maintainers are now patronized by large corporations.
What would be more ideal is to have not one company paying each developer, which is subject to the whims of corporate KPIs and management changes, but instead to have thousands of companies pay a very small amount to professional maintainers.
The main problem is that there is no good way to do this currently. There is little to no incentive for companies to do this and there are few ways to aggregate and disperse such funding.
The second growing problem in the Open Source ecosystem is the problem of the new generation of Commercial Open Source.
Developers have now been growing up for decades loving Open Source and open communities, and when they start companies and projects, by default they want them to be open. However, there are corporate sustainability issues with Open Source, just as there are with individual maintainer. Somewhat ironically, The Man is now using Open Source licenses to stick it to the developer!
When you think about it on a people level, this danger becomes clear. If those who have been willing to participate in peer production purely for the societal benefit are no longer interested given its financial nature, then we lose the people who are most likely to pursue impact over hype. But if we can do it in a way that allows more of those peo... See more
Joey DeBruin • Coase's Penguin is learning to fly: Building the Wikipedia of the future
sari added
Darren LI and added
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
Eric Steven Raymond • The Social Context of Open-Source Software
sari added