[HN Gopher] Free and open source software projects are in transi...
___________________________________________________________________
Free and open source software projects are in transition
Author : chriskrycho
Score : 160 points
Date : 2023-07-31 15:36 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.baldurbjarnason.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.baldurbjarnason.com)
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "The incestuous startup ecosystem that largely consisted of over-
| funded bullshit companies buying services from each other is
| done."
|
| Bravo. Rarely do I see this mentioned. Much of the B2B sales by
| so-called "tech" companies are to other so-called "tech"
| companies.
|
| It's also possible that many but certainly not all of computer
| users that spend significant amounts of money on goofy
| intangibles like subscriptions and "cryptocurrency" are in fact
| people working for so-called "tech" companies. Not representative
| of the general public.
|
| "From this perspective most VC investments aren't about creating
| value but about strip-mining FLOSS projects and communities. The
| scale is for extraction."
|
| Even a small rise in interest rates sent these VC into panic
| mode. Without free money (zero interest debt), the strip mining
| operation comes to a screeching halt.
|
| The US economy has been recovering nicely now that the brake has
| been put on this nonsense.
| hosh wrote:
| The Thunderbird project is a good example of community-supported
| software.
|
| By that, I mean that the project figured out how to raise funds
| directly from the community using it. This includes reporting on
| what they intend to do with the community as a whole, and where
| the money is being spent. The incentives between users and
| developers are aligned, and the project can be stewarded for the
| benefit of the community as a whole.
|
| It is also a project large enough, visible enough, and used
| enough to pull that off.
| s0l1dsnak3123 wrote:
| In many categories, it seems that FOSS also outlasts proprietary
| equivalents as volunteers undermine their feature-sets. Long may
| that continue.
| blibble wrote:
| due to the OpenAI strip-mining I've simply stopped publishing all
| my open source code
|
| once the courts rule this isn't fair use I'll resume, otherwise
| I'm done for good
|
| I see no need to train my replacement, especially not for free
| kykeonaut wrote:
| Or you can start publishing extremely poor code ;)
| dtaht wrote:
| That's what I do!
| paulddraper wrote:
| Been doing it for years....you're welcome.
| justincredible wrote:
| [dead]
| pier25 wrote:
| In the LAMP + jQuery days, it was harder to build very
| sophisticated apps but the big advantage is the stack was very
| simple. Not only simple to build with but also to maintain. We
| basically lived in the AK47 era.
|
| These days the stack is super complex with lots of moving parts
| which means it requires exponentially more effort to maintain.
| Eg: What will happen to React and Svelte if Vercel crashes and
| burns?
| troyvit wrote:
| I feel like that puts us in the F-35 days.
| OJFord wrote:
| It amuses me that a thread or two above we've got complaints
| that 'strip-mining' and 'extraction' are forced metaphors,
| taking it too far, and here we are - afaict pretty seriously
| - talking about software as AK47s & F-35s.
| troyvit wrote:
| Analogies are useful, even when they're not serious. Yeah I
| didn't mine that strip mining one too much. This one's fun
| because it targets complexity and power, both of which have
| shot through the roof since the early days.
| ksimukka wrote:
| I want to purchase a license (take my money!) to self host
| Posthog. The core is OSS and also has Enterprise features (that
| is also open source). However, they insist I should move to their
| cloud solution.
| dirteater_ wrote:
| I work on a relatively large OSS project. There are parties that
| are successfully putting a lot of complexity in that provides
| minimal or zero OSS gain to enable monetization on their side.
|
| I think this is destructive. It makes things more fragile and
| increases the barrier to entry for new contributors.
| abeppu wrote:
| > A majority of the value created by modern software ultimately
| comes from free and open source software.
|
| > From this perspective most VC investments aren't about creating
| value but about strip-mining FLOSS projects and communities. The
| scale is for extraction.
|
| As with so many things, I find this analysis suffers for using
| metaphors about the physical world with software. Strip-mining is
| a loaded term because it uses destructive means to acquire
| exclusive access to physical resources, in a way which leaves
| literally less than there was before, and which can be literally
| lethal to a literal biological ecosystem and literally toxic to
| physically proximal human communities. "Extraction" in the
| literal sense of pulling something out, when dealing with
| physical material means that others cannot have what you've
| pulled out; it's gone.
|
| A company (VC-backed or otherwise) that starts from OSS tools
| (operating system, languages, build tools, application
| frameworks, etc) to build their own offering doesn't (need to)
| remove that value in a way which excludes anyone else from
| enjoying it. To the contrary, building off the OSS ecosystem can
| make it healthier, if for no other reason than they are
| cultivating more engineers that know how to use these tools.
| "Extraction" is not the right metaphor.
|
| The issue of adding proprietary features to OSS projects I think
| we should acknowledge as diluting value, not subtracting it. If
| the choice is between project development being discontinued at
| time T with core feature set F, vs continued through time T+K
| with extended feature set F + G + H where H is proprietary, but G
| is not, users who won't use the proprietary features may still
| benefit from G, and are still better off with continued
| development -- but we must acknowledge that it's at a slower rate
| than if H had not been added. Communities should evaluate whether
| diluted support is worthwhile, or at what point it should be
| considered abusive, or at least separated into distinct companion
| projects.
| pseudocomposer wrote:
| Potential value extraction of OSS really depends on the
| license; the (A)GPL vs. MIT-style license debate has been going
| for decades now. There's a reason none of the big corporations
| touch anything GPL, aside from Linux distro subdivisions that
| are never their direct money makers. And when you compare what
| actually reaches consumers, like Qt vs. GTK for an ancient but
| ongoing example, or basically _every_ Android distro pre
| installed on a consumer phone, and the various modern MIT-
| licensed FE tools (React, Flutter, etc.)... the apparent levels
| of nefariousness /data mining/anti-competitiveness/price-
| gouging generally seem higher for the MIT-licensed (and
| especially corporate-controlled) products than (A)GPL products.
| (Yes, there is also definitely a trade off in terms of easy UX
| between these!)
| esafak wrote:
| Which FLOSS projects did pyTorch and Tensorflow -- the
| libraries behind the hottest companies today -- strip mine?
| Both come from venture-backed companies.
| behringer wrote:
| I think open source users need to get more serious about using
| a more pro consumer license like the gnu gpl. If you're using
| less restricting licensing you're working for Amazon for free.
| skrebbel wrote:
| I agree but this blog post is hardly about that. It's way less
| "companies bad, OSS good" as I expected it to be after reading
| your comment.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| I actually like the metaphor, although I agree it's flawed.
|
| > "Extraction" in the literal sense of pulling something out,
| when dealing with physical material means that others cannot
| have what you've pulled out; it's gone.
|
| For instance, look at the amount of brainpower wasted on using
| tech to steal our attention via adtech (and its supporting
| industries), large companies using OSS to increase their
| monopolies instead of giving back, small companies trying to
| build nothing of immediate value, but rather blitz-scale so
| they can get sold at valuations not reflecting their value.
| wpietri wrote:
| > To the contrary, building off the OSS ecosystem can make it
| healthier, if for no other reason than they are cultivating
| more engineers that know how to use these tools. "Extraction"
| is not the right metaphor.
|
| It can, but it often does the opposite. "Extraction" may not be
| a metaphor that's quite true to the material. But it's very
| true to the attitude with which many companies operate, and
| that's because a lot of business culture was developed in
| extractive contexts and then applied elsewhere.
| kdmccormick wrote:
| I work on one of those FLOSS projects that has several
| ostensibly-open-but-only-works-on-the-proprietary-instance sort
| of features baked into the core codebase. Some of them are
| dilutive, but some of them are actively subtractive, especially
| when they impact performance, become a blocking point during
| library upgrades, confuse our users, and generally make the
| codebase harder to reason about. This code is essentially dead
| code in the community offering, and we all know that dead code
| is not neutral, it's a liability.
|
| Fortunately, our project is moving in the opposite direction
| than the one that the article describes: we have an independent
| steering committee & well-funded core team now, and lately have
| been actively trying to boot proprietary features out of the
| core offering. But it's a lot of work, both technically and
| socially, and we'd have much more time to spend on new features
| if it weren't for the dead weight we have to deal with.
| dtaht wrote:
| I would be very interested in learning how to go about
| getting a well funded core team for an open source project
| (libreqos.io). We are increasingly popular, but still lack a
| business model. I too tend to reject most friction-creating
| and value-subtracting processes, but the top ramen is running
| low.
| specialist wrote:
| When you find out, please share. There's dozens of us.
|
| I've been slow walking my FOSS releases because I have no
| idea how to squeeze some ramen out of it. Though my (dare I
| suggest) paradigm/category busting project was really hard
| (for me) to figure out, the end result is simplicity
| itself. And so therefore trivial to clone, fork, run away.
|
| Possessing the business acumen of plankton, I've been
| swindled, plagiarized, and mooted a few times before. I
| don't need much more than ramen money. But not getting
| anything while others profit from my work, again, would
| really suck.
| kdmccormick wrote:
| Happy to share, although I don't know how applicable the
| journey is to most.
|
| The project started as nonprofit with both a business goal
| (sustain itself by selling online courses) and a
| philanthropic vision (essentially: increase education
| access by disrupting the degree market & also open sourcing
| the code).
|
| A decade later, the nonprofit sold the entire online course
| business, its brand, and most of its staffing to a for-
| profit company. It kept the copyright to the open source
| code, and the remaining staff now use the proceeds of the
| deal as an endowment to pusue the original philanthropic
| mission, which includes being a sort of core team for that
| open source code.
|
| Some details [0]. The online course business is edx.org,
| the buyer was 2U, the source code is Open edX [1] and the
| nonprofit started as edX Inc and was renamed to Axim [2]
| after the sale.
|
| 0. https://press.edx.org/2u-inc.-and-edx-complete-industry-
| rede...
|
| 1. http://github.com/openedx
|
| 2. http://axim.org
|
| TL;DR: Start off as a nonprofit, build a valuable product,
| sell the product, and then use the money to continue the
| nonprofit. YMMV ;)
|
| EDIT: Probably obvious, but I should note that this didn't
| all just "happen"--there were (and are) extremely
| passionate people on both sides of the sale _and_ in the
| project 's open source community who worked hard &
| advocated loudly for years, ensuring that both the
| nonprofit built a compelling product and the open source
| project thrived. Both of those were critical ingredients in
| the project getting to its current well-funded state.
| JJMcJ wrote:
| More than one FLOSS developer has written of huge companies
| with thousands of programmers working for them practically
| crying and begging to have a feature added to software that
| serves only the company's interest.
|
| Or even replying that they are busy with other things but if
| the company wants to pay for the change they can work on it,
| and company replying that that seems like "extortion", as if
| the developer is under moral obligation to fix Initrode's
| problems for free by the end of the week.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| > " _...huge companies with thousands of programmers
| working for them practically crying and begging to have a
| feature added to software..._ "
|
| One clueless employee, almost certainly without the
| knowledge of his cow-orkers or managers let alone any kind
| of authorization to represent their employer when
| communicating externally, writes a dumb email to a FOSS
| project and suddenly the tech commentariat is all abuzz
| about "$BIGCORP (the whole thing) is 'practically crying
| and begging' to $FOSS_PROJECT for a feature"? Surely there
| must be a name for this fallacy and, if not, there should
| be. The organizational hivemind fallacy perhaps?
| JJMcJ wrote:
| Many mega corps have a culture of bullying the vendors.
| That can easily spill over to a single interaction.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| Yeah but the point is that megacorps have dedicated teams
| of specialists to do that kind of bullying and they do it
| with organizational consensus and coordination between
| relevant departments. No random individual engineer is
| ever going to be authorized to do that.
| kdmccormick wrote:
| Yeah, our situation isn't quite that bad. The big company
| is happy to write the feature usually, but that doesn't
| mean the feature should be bolted into the main repo with
| its special dependencies dropped right into setup.py
| install_requires.
| gochi wrote:
| >A company (VC-backed or otherwise) that starts from OSS tools
| (operating system, languages, build tools, application
| frameworks, etc) to build their own offering doesn't (need to)
| remove that value in a way which excludes anyone else from
| enjoying it
|
| They don't _need_ to, until they realize people aren 't
| upgrading to the added layers of offerings and then start
| removing that value. This is required because the base value
| tends to be substantial enough to swiftly encourage people to
| use it, and VC loves the growth this comes with.
| monocasa wrote:
| Most company use of OSS isn't a freemium model, but instead
| them using it for their infrastructure in complements to
| their ultimate product. Think Google's use of Linux on their
| servers, or their use of gcc/clang to compile their search
| application.
| gochi wrote:
| Disagree on that. It is the freemium model that's used.
| Specifically enterprise tiers for the vast majority of OSS.
|
| There is a crucial subsection of OSS used within companies
| but those often come with support contracts and branding
| which is what you're referring to with Google, but a far
| cry from "most".
| monocasa wrote:
| No, like, how many companies are paying support contracts
| for Nginx, anything you npm install, anything their
| engineers 'brew install'. Some of these might have
| support contracts that you can buy, but that's not used
| in the vast majority of cases.
|
| I really do think you're not seeing the forest through
| the trees here.
| [deleted]
| keepamovin wrote:
| I'm launching something soon to try to reverse this and give
| back power to open source creators, around their earnings and,
| to bring a bit of order to an informal marketplace that really
| needs it. If you're interested, join the wait list / launch
| email list and you'll get to be among the first to use it:
| https://ash6wpkw.paperform.co/
| version_five wrote:
| I think strip mining is a good analogy. Like google has strip
| mined the internet and left a toxic pit behind, if companies
| have their way they'll do the same to any captive open source
| project, turing any public parts into nothing but minimum
| viable bait to try and get people to pay for something.
| infogulch wrote:
| > left a toxic pit behind
|
| Nonsense. If google scrapes your site, your site is not
| affected. Where is the toxic pit, exactly?
| _bohm wrote:
| By becoming the de facto entry point into the internet,
| Google's existence has spawned a horde of SEO spam sites
| that dilute and push down real content on the internet.
| orangeoxidation wrote:
| > Google's existence has spawned a horde of SEO spam
| sites that dilute and push down real content on the
| internet
|
| They don't push real content "down the internet" they
| push it down the google rankings.
|
| And while Google search is not as great as it was, it
| remains a strong contender for the best way to find stuff
| on the internet.
|
| I don't think the internet would be better off without
| it.
|
| You can however make good arguments for Google News,
| "Instant Answers" in Search, and other products, taking
| (impressions) from the internet.(And Chrome, Chrome
| worries me.)
| majewsky wrote:
| > They don't push real content "down the internet" they
| push it down the google rankings.
|
| From experience, many people can truly not tell the
| difference.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| You only see it if you use Google, and you are always
| free to not use it. They may be evil etc but this logic
| is like "I can't stop punching myself".
| version_five wrote:
| Not remotely true, you see it every time you go to a SEO
| optimized site, however you get there.
| abeppu wrote:
| > Like google has strip mines the internet and left a toxic
| pit behind
|
| Can you clarify what you mean? I think there's a sense in
| which sometimes people say that google ruined the internet
| b/c (a) their prominence and their algorithm induced the
| creation of awful content farms, and (b) they pulled ad
| revenue away from some businesses that create content leaving
| us with a more impoverished web experience.
|
| If you're making a different kind of assertion, please
| elaborate on it.
|
| Wrt (a), I think site owners that had useful content weren't
| for the most part pushed to remove it, but were often pushed
| to pad it to the point that it feels less valuable to users
| (like recipe sites where every recipe is 12 paragraphs of
| prose before the actual recipe, IIUC), so I think this still
| fits in with the "dilution" framing, rather than removing
| valuable material in a way that excludes others from its use.
|
| Wrt (b) I do think that when google displays content on the
| search page in a way that stops most users from continuing on
| to the page from which the information was sourced, that does
| seem effectively extractive. But I think that's distinct from
| the OSS project-capture problem.
|
| > if companies have their way they'll do the same to any
| captive open source project, turing any public parts into
| nothing but minimum viable bait to try and get people to pay
| for something.
|
| I actually think google is a good illustration of the full
| spectrum of OSS projects. They're definitely "getting their
| way" but:
|
| - gson, guice, protobuf, snappy, the go language are all
| examples of projects that are very useful and pretty separate
| from any revenue-generating google product
|
| - kubernetes, istio, etc are projects that can easily be used
| without touching any google revenue-generating project, but
| if you're using some of their revenue-generating projects,
| you may likely want something like this. Perhaps this is OSS
| but writing for your paying customer-base as a target
| audience?
|
| - android, chrome, tensorflow are all about building little
| googleverse of customers in their orbit
| freedomben wrote:
| I'm not GP and I personally think the strip-mining analogy
| is bad. But attempting to steelman GP's position based on
| other things I've read that I've pieced together:
|
| I think an example is LLMs like ChatGPT. Basically consider
| a website that has good info on it. The LLM scrapes the
| site and regurgitates it's content to their user, and the
| original site never get a visit or recognition. The end
| result is the death of the site (much like strip mining
| results in).
| throwaway290 wrote:
| > Like google has strip mined the internet and left a toxic
| pit behind
|
| Sorry, what?
| Arrath wrote:
| For a certain use-case, I'd say I agree. I would argue that
| the basic web browsing experience for the less technically
| minded is worse than it was in the past.
|
| For example, I am still working with my partner to get her
| to recognize and ignore the top level garbage: sponsored
| links and obvious SEO bait* when she blasts off a "Best
| <kitchen widget> 2023" search.
|
| *You know, those listicles offered up from a handful of
| different sites that tend to be a 'top ten' list of a
| selection of 15 or so different products that are mostly
| just 7 actual different products white labeled by some
| brand and sold on amazon through a referral link in the
| listicle.
| charcircuit wrote:
| SEO existed before Google.
| paulddraper wrote:
| Seriously, if there any organization that has done more to
| advance the web, IDK who it is.
| dtaht wrote:
| I think strip mining is a decent analogy as well, so long as
| you include the fate of the participants. Take diamond mining
| as an example. The miners themselves tend to be dirt poor,
| and searched for stuff of value on exiting the mine, yet the
| outcome is big money for the corp controlling the mine.
| dasil003 wrote:
| I disagree, the analogy is weak. Strip mining is about
| harvesting naturally occurring resources in the most invasive
| way. The internet is not a natural resource. It was created
| by and for humans, from zero to unfathomable scale in thirty
| quick years. It is a reflection of ourselves, our systems,
| and our social and financial incentives. Google definitely
| deserves some blame as they certainly have helped shape those
| incentives, but it's not like they came in and started
| dynamiting some pristine wilderness, do you remember what
| search was like before Google came along?
| paulddraper wrote:
| Often these open-source projects have their own commercial
| offerings to support development, e.g. Elasticstack, MongoDB.
| And then AWS destroys that, without offering any contributions
| themselves. So it's no longer commercially viable for the
| original organization, and development suffers.
|
| That's a net negative result.
| a13o wrote:
| The strip mining imagery landed for me when focusing on the
| trend of open source communities adjacent to cloud platforms.
| Citus, ElasticSearch, Kubernetes, etc all feel like corporate
| goliaths forked and outcompeted David. No analogy is perfect,
| but I can see facets of why one might liken this to strip
| mining.
| fidotron wrote:
| The big change of the last decade has really been the cloud
| explosion and with it a serious bias towards valuing deployment
| and operations over development, to the degree that if you're
| doing development which is not about deployment and operations
| then you're a sucker.
|
| The emergence of the LLMs etc makes the classic open source
| business model of relying on incomprehensible documentation to
| drive people to pay you as a consultant fall apart as they will
| get answers on demand. You just have to look at things like
| Docker to see how hard it is to turn even wildly successful
| projects into viable companies even before all this.
| peter_l_downs wrote:
| Pretty good overview from Baldur -- I don't always agree with
| everything he writes but this seems relatively correct.
|
| One question I'd ask him (and anyone else reading) is: what are
| some other options for monetization?
|
| Over the last few weeks I had three different VCs reach out to me
| about some of the open source projects I've been releasing, and
| ask me if I'd thought about making a business out of them. I told
| them that no, based on the problem the software was solving, I
| didn't see how I could adopt open-core or companion-saas business
| models, and I wasn't sure how else it could be done while keeping
| the code open source.
|
| Can anyone suggest a viable business model that would allow:
|
| * Code remains at least source available, ideally open source for
| non-commercial use.
|
| * I can charge for commercial use.
|
| * Actually doing the licensing is reasonable, ie no spyware or
| phoning home from the tool.
|
| Wouldn't need to be perfect, I understand that if the code is
| open source a company could easily fork and use it without paying
| me. The idea would be to make it zero-headache to pay me for a
| license if the code is being used by a funded team.
|
| The projects:
|
| * https://github.com/peterldowns/localias
|
| * https://github.com/peterldowns/pgmigrate
| paulddraper wrote:
| https://databaseci.com/ is similar.
|
| (Seems to be down though...not a good sign.)
| tracker1 wrote:
| I don't think "source available" is really that viable of a
| model. MS tried that with a lot of their developer offerings
| before more became truly FLOSS, specifically in the .Net space.
|
| In the end, I'm less likely to trust/use _ANY_ non-floss
| software /services that doesn't have a clear and clean exit
| path. I can use CockroachLabs (CockroachDB cloud) as I can exit
| pretty cleanly to self-hosted PostgreSQL with other models. I
| can abstract the usage of say DynamoDB to target other options
| relatively easily as well.
|
| That said, tethering deeply into rented services, or
| commercial+floss providers can only hook you in the end if
| things get too dicey. And you only need to look at Oracle and
| IBM/RedHat as examples of the hook you and reel you in
| approach. A lot of businesses are also pretty deeply tied into
| a given cloud platform. They all have nice to have, relatively
| easy to use features/services. If you don't have an exit
| strategy, you better have a fat wallet. It's not that it won't
| still be painful to exit, but without at least a strategy,
| you're trapped.
| [deleted]
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| License it as AGPL and offer alternative license for businesses
| for money.
| peter_l_downs wrote:
| I asked this question in a discord for this kind of stuff and
| the answer I got was "not possible." I also spoke with the
| developer of OrbStack, and they suggested just not being open
| source and charging for it, which is what they're going to do.
| When it comes to dev tools (particularly those that are
| involved in operations/sre flows like pgmigrate) I consider
| open source a huge benefit, and I'm sad to think that there is
| no way to get paid for an open source project without
| shoehorning in a bad experience or unnecessary features (like
| Baldur points out)
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Redis and Mongo have tried this - see
| https://redis.com/legal/licenses/
|
| Officially they are not OSI approved but they go straight to
| the heart of the issue :
|
| >>> has only two primary limitations. You may not:
|
| Commercialize the software or provide it to others as a managed
| service Remove or obscure any licensing, copyright, or other
| notices
| bckmn wrote:
| I think an alternative is to fund _individuals' maintenance of
| the projects_, as opposed to the project itself. Filippo
| Valsorda has written about this recently:
| https://words.filippo.io/full-time-maintainer
| peter_l_downs wrote:
| That's an interesting idea, thank you, I'll read through the
| post.
|
| EDIT: I found the post interesting but unfortunately these
| projects are in no way load-bearing. I'm happy to hear
| Filippo has made it work for himself but as he points out,
| the projects he works on are simply much better suited to
| sponsorship and retainer/consulting agreements. I wonder what
| he would recommend for newer or less-load-bearing projects.
| convolvatron wrote:
| sorry. what does that mean here - load bearing
| HappySweeney wrote:
| Maintenance takes up a lot of time.
| [deleted]
| cillian64 wrote:
| What ChibiOS does is release under GPL3 and then sell a
| commercial dual license. This is definitely open source and
| also means most non-open-source commercial use would need to
| pay for a license. It's probably also one reason why FreeRTOS
| is much more popular in business than ChibiOS.
|
| https://www.chibios.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=chibios:licensi...
| radisb wrote:
| You reap what you saw
| carapace wrote:
| Here's my $0.02 (again. Apologies to those who've heard it
| already.)
|
| First, let me proclaim by bias: I'm a Free software fanatic. I do
| not ever want to run software that I can't read and, if I want
| to, modify. I just won't do it.
|
| Open Source doesn't make sense to me and never has, becasuse you
| have always been able to give away your code.
|
| The entire point of Free software is to avoid or even prevent
| closed proprietary software. That's why the GPL is "viral", eh?
| That's the whole point. Free software started when RMS wanted to
| fix his printer and Xerox said, "No."
|
| Now we have companies like John Deere that use computers to lock
| out their own customers from fixing their own tractors. We have
| car companies charging to unlock heated seats and extra
| acceleration. Printers that lie to you about how much ink they
| have left, and brick themselves if you try to use cheaper
| unofficial ink. Etc.
|
| You can be in charge of your computer, or you can be a peasant in
| someone else's fief.
| mindslight wrote:
| I'd say this is the critical distinction that communities
| focused on "open source" are missing. We've had a whole crop of
| developers raised to focus on "open source", thinking it
| implies some be-all end-all, when it was really more of a
| corporate marketing term that emphasizes the mechanic rather
| than the goal of end-user computing freedom.
|
| Just because a piece of software has some trappings of libre
| software does not mean that it _is_ a fully fledged libre
| software. If most of the development energy comes from a single
| company, then that company can change its policies overnight
| and introduce terrible non-libre anti-features to that "open
| source" code base (see: the ongoing Chromium fiasco). Or in the
| case of most "web" software, when the main use of that software
| is from load-every-time distribution via centrally-controlled
| HTTP(s)/DNS, most of its use is decidedly non-free.
|
| Yes, it is _certainly_ a step up that such projects can be used
| as libre software - patched to remove the anti-features, or
| even hard forked and rebranded if the centralized maintainer
| gets too heavy handed etc. And this should not be taken for
| granted! However, we have to stop seeing the "open source"
| label as a synonym for libre software where user freedoms are
| first and foremost, when it's more like one bullet point in a
| "pros" column.
|
| (also just a nit. When you say " _I do not ever want to run
| software that I can 't read and, if I want to, modify. I just
| won't do it_", I doubt this hardline assertion is true! Even
| RMS rationalizes running proprietary software as long as
| someone else has written it to flash and doesn't talk about it
| too much. I use a more strict-but-pragmatic approach based
| around an assumption of a Libre/Secure core and then analyzing
| how specific proprietary bits actually compromise my freedom)
| carapace wrote:
| (> I doubt this hardline assertion... )
|
| (I'll cop to having an iPhone, but only because my sister got
| it as part of a package deal last time she renewed her phone
| contract. I only use it to communicate with her, and only
| because we have to coordinate closely on the care of our
| elderly mother. I have installed no apps, and I removed most
| of the ones that came with it. Other than that, yeah, I run
| all Libre/Open software. I rarely actually read it, of
| course, but in theory I could.)
|
| ([?]#-#) (Sardonic-"I'm so cool" self-deprecatory shades.)
| mindslight wrote:
| Got you! No seriously, I wasn't trying to call you out as
| some sort of purity inquisition. Rather my point is this
| binary "only Libre software" is the wrong way of looking at
| things, even for free software zealots (myself included).
|
| I was really just betting on you using at least one of the
| following - proprietary BIOS, non-free network
| switch/router, wifi, a run of the mill keyboard or mouse, a
| switching AC adapter, any modern appliance, or a webpage
| that runs javascript from a remote server you don't
| control. My point is that it's basically impossible to
| avoid proprietary software these days. So we're better off
| analyzing the use of proprietary software in terms of how
| it can specifically work against you within the context
| it's being used, rather than as some binary go/nogo thing.
|
| Like my main desktop is a KGPE-D16 running almost blobless
| coreboot ([?]#-#), apart from the CPU microcode, which I
| don't have much choice on besides to trust AMD at some
| point in time. Yet there are _numerous_ domains of
| proprietary software that support it, without which it
| could not run. However those domains don 't impinge upon my
| freedom within the CPU domain, as they are appropriately
| isolated. For example if I focus on my keyboard, its
| software's lack of freedom seriously destroys my ability to
| modify it. This is terrible, within that narrow context of
| modifying my keyboard. However it's not relevant to the
| larger scope, as the keyboard isn't really able to affect
| the freedom of the CPU domain.
| Vox_Leone wrote:
| >First, let me proclaim by bias: I'm a Free software fanatic. I
| do not ever want to run software that I can't read and, if I
| want to, modify. I just won't do it.
|
| I can relate to that. I guess you're are also having problems
| developing AI, because it is next to impossible to set up a
| full FLOSS AI stack [then I have to use proprietary stuff -
| conflicts of conscience ensue]
|
| >Free software started when RMS wanted to fix his printer and
| Xerox said, "No."
|
| Is there an AI stack that RMS would approve/use?
| carapace wrote:
| > you're are also having problems developing AI
|
| I have no interest in talking computers.
|
| cf. James Mickens' USENIX Security '18-Q keynote speech: "Why
| Do Keynote Speakers Keep Suggesting That Improving Security
| Is Possible?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajGX7odA87k
|
| Anyway, they're just a pile of linear algebra and a massive
| pile of Other People's Data, eh? (And piles and piles of
| hype, my god, so much hype. Even in the "academic" papers!)
|
| The difficulty would lie in amassing that data, not in
| developing software. You would have to solve that "conflict
| of conscience" first, no?
|
| But more to the point: none of my goals can be advanced by
| talking computers.
|
| - - - -
|
| > Is there an AI stack that RMS would approve/use?
|
| I have no idea. You could ask him if you're really
| interested.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I mostly agree... I'm not necessarily dogmatic about closed
| source software or services, but definitely in favor of always
| having an exit strategy, even if more painful.
| someguy7250 wrote:
| > Now we have companies like John Deere that use computers to
| lock out their own customers from fixing their own tractors. We
| have car companies charging to unlock heated seats and extra
| acceleration. Printers that lie to you about how much ink they
| have left, and brick themselves if you try to use cheaper
| unofficial ink. Etc.
|
| Exactly! I believe this issue is becoming a very political one
| because some companies even lock people out of developer tools
| with a paywall. And when we are forbidding people from learning
| that they are being suppressed, very bad things happen.
|
| I learnt programming by rooting my phone and then installing a
| compiler. Android 12 almost killed it alongwith Termux. Are you
| telling me that if I was born today, I'll simply give up?
| (Edit: To answer this quesiton myself, No. Today's kids are
| probably installing customized apk/ipa instead of rooting.
| Frida is also interesting. But if history repeats itself, even
| these tools will be banned (self signing dev packages, and
| using ptrace as a modding tool). And that affects more than
| just kids..)
|
| Honestly companies have too much control through DRM and
| copyright. The public needs a way to fight back. If the laws
| were to be changed, I hope that companies are not immune from
| lawsuits through TOS, and I hope to see a few class-action
| lawsuits causing a company to lose some of its copyrights to
| the public domain.
| neolefty wrote:
| I think it's natural for new tools to be Propietary, while Free
| alternatives of the basics work their way up the chain:
|
| Most of the cost of software development isn't in writing
| software -- it's in the exploration of the solution space. Once
| you have settled on a good design, re-implementation is vastly
| cheaper and more streamlined than the original fumbling around in
| the dark. And sometimes it's better because you can jettison the
| legacy that comes from all that exploration.
|
| So IBM employed Ted Codd and an army of engineers and
| salespeople, but now we all get to use Postgres.
|
| What is being built today commercially that will be distilled
| into architectural principles and re-implemented as Free in the
| future? It's hard to know, but in hindsight it may seem obvious.
|
| The article points out categories that were once proprietary --
| OSes, compilers, runtimes, clients, data stores. For example:
| DB2, System V, PCC, Internet Explorer. They were built at great
| cost -- and remember they all had proprietary siblings that have
| since been abandoned, that also had to be paid for: OS/2,
| Itanium, Hypercard, DBase, various compilers, IDEs.
|
| And then the few survivors were copied by open equivalents.
| System V gave way to Linux, DB2 to Postgres, IE to Chrome. A few
| never had proprietary equivalents AFAIK -- I don't think there is
| a closed ancestor of Redis.
|
| And sometimes the Free version hasn't fully arrived yet (x86), or
| it's just free (Google Docs), or it's doomed to remain not nearly
| as good as the proprietary tools (GIMP, desktop Linux). Or it's
| rocky (Linux vs SCO) or chaotic (BitKeeper to git).
|
| (And it's no surprise that tools used mainly by programmers are
| more likely to have high quality Free equivalents than tools with
| a wider audience -- after all, their users are capable of
| improving them directly.)
| syntheweave wrote:
| This is true - proprietary tends to lead - albeit it doesn't
| address the societal concern here: Are these really the only
| roles a software developer can have?
|
| On one end, acting as a mercenary for platform monopolies doing
| the new stuff, and on the other, reproducing those designs
| without the same kind of paycheck?
|
| I guess there is the third option of bilking investors by
| saying you'll definitely be a monopoly any day now and then
| open sourcing the whole thing.
|
| My sense of it is that this particular phenomenon - the entire
| "hacker" arc from Unix in 1970 through the formation of the FSF
| to the present - was of an era, and the era is finishing up.
| Before that, there wasn't a software business to speak of, and
| after, the era of individual programs and proprietors is likely
| superseded by the needs of specific communication networks,
| which, like the Internet generally, everyone ends up
| standardized on, but no-one owns.
|
| Part of why software is in a cynical state now is because the
| convergent network goal is ethically desirable, but the only
| way in which we seem to be capable of framing it societally is
| "someone owns this", so we have proceeded down a path of toxic
| corporate ownership, while everything else is a weird thing
| deserving of mockery.
| sesm wrote:
| I was thinking about the essence of open source recently, and I
| came to the following conclusion: open source is when you treat
| people as developers, not as users. Which means: it should be
| trivial to build and run from source, debug, add extra logs and
| apply patches. Moreover, creating and applying your own patches
| should be encouraged, anything that can be easily patched
| shouldn't be a configuration option.
|
| Most corporate "open source" fails this test, they treat people
| as users, create marketing websites while publishing zero
| developer documentation.
|
| What's interesting, JS ecosystem accidentally has this property,
| thanks to packages being distributed as source, standard logging
| system (console.log) and widespread use of `patch-package` tool.
| J_Shelby_J wrote:
| In the age of LLMs everyone is a dev.
|
| What's the next iteration of SaaS then?
| majewsky wrote:
| Most uses of LLMs for development that I've seen are for
| _writing code_ , when the majority of dev time is spent
| _reading code_. What offerings exist to read through an
| existing codebase and ask questions of it? Do contemporary
| LLMs have enough lookbehind for that?
| J_Shelby_J wrote:
| We are years from way from the average user being able to
| replace X SaaS tool with available open source software
| they run themselves.
|
| Even now, the average person could have GPT walk them
| through replacing WIX with their own self hosted website.
| When I say "dev," I probably misspoke. I meant more in the
| sense that the average person will be able to implement
| existing software in a way that was previously unreachable.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Not everyone can code in a way that is useful for development,
| but one way of looking at it could be: actually treating people
| like a community, rather than users.
|
| Unfortunately the phrase "community" has been degraded a bit by
| companies who want a more in-group-feeling-inducing way of
| describing their users. But, in a real community, people
| support each other and try to push projects forward,
| contributing in the fashion that best suits their skills, and
| toward goals that best fit their interests.
| canucyc wrote:
| [flagged]
| louthy wrote:
| The irony
| BSEdlMMldESB wrote:
| the free software movement and its close companion movement of
| open source are in need of a renewal
|
| I think we should call it "liberty minded software"... software
| which cares and caters to the liberties of the users and makers
| of the software.
| version_five wrote:
| There's an "open core" VC fund I've seen blog posts from on here,
| I'd be interested to hear their take. I agree that open source is
| in trouble as it's basically shifted to branding, as a way, like
| the author says to extract maximal value from the "community"
| while giving nothing back. It's like moving into one of the sub-
| optimal prisoners dilemma quadrants where somebody rats.
|
| That said, I don't agree with the dig at LLMs, it seems tacked on
| and more just an ideological complain, which is odd in the
| context of open source.
| chriskrycho wrote:
| I largely _do_ agree with it, but agree that it 's somewhat
| secondary to the specifics of the pice. In context of reading
| his stuff more generally, it makes sense: he's been writing
| extensively on that subject (including a self-published book on
| the subject) for many months, so if you are a regular reader,
| it fits. The challenge of writing for your existing audience
| vs. the inherent context collapse of an individual post online!
| dspillett wrote:
| _> That said, I don 't agree with the dig at LLMs, ... [it] is
| odd in the context of open source._
|
| I don't see it that way, if talking about the stricter end of
| OSS licensing. There is an argument for training a model with
| AGPL code meaning that the resulting model should be released
| in full to its users as a derivative work, for instance. Being
| an ideological complaint doesn't make it an invalid one, even
| if you consider that ideology to be rather dogmatic.
| yesimahuman wrote:
| In many cases these open core companies are not "giving nothing
| back", but are funding engineer salaries on the order of
| millions of dollars per year to invest in the OSS project that
| they use as customer acquisition for a commercial cloud and
| enterprise offering on top. Companies like Vercel and Ionic
| both employ this model. I think people often forget how much
| these companies invest and "give back" to the community in
| terms of raw dollar investment
| canucyc wrote:
| [flagged]
| mistrial9 wrote:
| [flagged]
| spankalee wrote:
| The fact is that I can go use, fork, derive from and
| contribute to Stencil or Capacitor - with are very valuable
| projects, and cost millions to develop - without paying
| Ionic a cent. How is that bullshit?
| lockhouse wrote:
| They're a Troll, please don't feed them. Just look at
| their other comments if you don't believe me.
| canucyc wrote:
| [flagged]
| sytse wrote:
| I assume you mean my VC fund, Open Core Ventures
| https://opencoreventures.com/ that starts new companies around
| existing open source projects.
|
| We believe that open core companies need to give back and the
| open source code base should be better off because the open
| core company exists. Features that appeal most to individual
| contributors should be open source
| https://opencoreventures.com/blog/2023-01-open-core-standard...
|
| The article mentions the recent move of RedHat to no longer
| share their source code. I think RedHat is a special case
| because they didn't have any proprietary code
| https://opencoreventures.com/blog/2023-04-red-hat-model-only...
|
| Open core can be done right and wrong (not giving back, etc.),
| for some more thoughts on how to do it right please see
| https://opencoreventures.com/blog/2023-07-open-core-is-misun...
| We're figuring all of this our as we do it, suggestions are
| welcome.
| version_five wrote:
| Thanks for replying. I hope you and others can find a way to
| make open source more sustainable without compromising the
| projects. Like I alluded to with my prisoners dilemma comment
| above, I think there is an optimum for everyone where
| companies try and make the open source project itself as
| valuable as possible instead of extracting value from it, and
| I'm happy hear about businesses that are legitimately trying
| to get us there.
| sytse wrote:
| Thanks for your response, I appreciate it. One thing that
| is a big risk to the optimum is open core companies
| relicensing the open source code after the project becomes
| popular, to prevent this some of our companies are set up
| as public benefit companies
| https://opencoreventures.com/blog/2022-11-introducing-
| authen...
| dtaht wrote:
| I lean towards a public benefit company for libreqos.io.
| I do wish more of the folk's business models we were
| actually helping (videoconferencing, gaming) would
| recognize their common interests with us, and chip in.
| User23 wrote:
| As usual when it comes to computing freedom, RMS was right[1].
| "Open Source" was conceived as a way to market to corporate
| executives. It's unsurprising then that corporate executives
| took it for exactly what they were sold it as, a way to get
| developers' work without paying for it.
|
| [1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-
| point....
| pessimizer wrote:
| Rather, it's unsurprising that corporate executives took Open
| Source for exactly what it was _designed_ as.
|
| It's left the anti-copyleft guys babbling about _plunder_ and
| _The Spirit of Open Source(tm)_. I 'm honestly shocked that I
| don't hear them calling companies that get rich off OSS
| "settler colonialists."
| canucyc wrote:
| [flagged]
| canucyc wrote:
| [flagged]
| spankalee wrote:
| I personally get paid to work on open source, which is the
| opposite of what you're claiming here.
| someguy7250 wrote:
| When I learnt programming as a hobby, before I went to college,
| before my jobs,
|
| I was hoping the future is that we build highly specialized, and
| customizable tools through open source code, not too small that
| they are just another programming language, and not too large
| that they cannot be connected to each other to create more
| values.
|
| And I was hoping we'd stop joining big companies, and instead
| open up local consulting firms to help people configure existing
| open source components for their specific needs. And the work
| (the configurations) should be done once per project and never
| reused.
| Karellen wrote:
| I saw an interesting comment a few weeks ago, but can't remember
| where now, so I am unable to properly credit the original author.
| There's probably an irony there somewhere. Anyway, the gist of it
| was:
|
| In the '90s, FOSS devs mostly volunteered their labour to build
| things for each other - for other FOSS devs.
|
| In the '00s, FOSS devs mostly volunteered their labour to build
| things for users.
|
| In the '10s, FOSS devs mostly volunteered their labour to build
| things out of habit, which kinda ended up unintentionally being
| for the benefit of FAANG/Microsoft/VCs. No-one's quite sure how
| that happened, or where we go from here.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I think it comes down to first and foremost scratching one's
| own itch in things. Most are just creating/updating things they
| need. This can be a company's contribution (AMD/Intel) to
| support their products, or it can be an individual fixing a bug
| or implementing a needed feature. It can also be company devs
| contributing to something that is adjacent to their own needs.
|
| Where the FAANGs/Clouds leach a bit is when they offer a
| service monetizing what the creator of that service/software is
| using to monetize themselves. Can they do it, sure... should
| they, maybe not. I think, for example AWS _could_ have made an
| offer for a more limited licensing agreement to Elastic,
| offered direct funding, or developer support, or buying them
| outright. Instead they forked, offer their own SaaS for the
| product, and carry on. Leaving Elastic to develop /support the
| core product.
| cosinetau wrote:
| > to build things out of habit
|
| That answer seems to lack self awareness. A lot of people saw
| how a few VC-back companies using open source software could
| get them rich, and then they executed.
|
| Why else would we be on this particular website?
|
| Why else are do many folks find it absolutely necessary to post
| their product announcements on places like this?
| TillE wrote:
| The latter really only applies to a handful of huge FOSS
| projects; there's a long tail of open source which is
| irrelevant to large-scale web infrastructure companies.
|
| I would hope that very few people are actually _volunteering_
| to contribute more than minor fixes to those huge projects.
| They 're largely full-time employees, or at least supported by
| corporate sponsorships.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-07-31 23:01 UTC)