What are your thoughts? Any counter-counter points to the author’s response to most concerns regarding open source?
I’m an open source developer who’s put thousands of hours of work into my open source projects.
- Amount of money I’ve made from writing and maintaining open source projects: $0
- Amount of money I’ve made from writing and maintaining closed source projects: idk exactly, but probably close to $1,000,000 (over ten years of working in big tech)
I get wanting to use open source software. I want to use open source software. I want to write open source software. I do write open source software. But please understand that I only do that because I enjoy it. I also need to pay the bills, and there’s not much money in writing open source software.
If you value an open source project, especially if it’s just a small development team that doesn’t sell anything, please donate to them.
Right now, I run an email service, https://port87.com/, and it is technically closed source. But it’s built on my open source projects, Svelte Material UI, Nymph.js, and Nephele. Probably about 70% of the code that makes up Port87 is open source, and if you use Port87, you’re helping me continue to develop those open source projects. So even if you don’t donate to open source projects, there are other ways to contribute. Support companies who support open source projects.
In some “ecosystems” everything being free is kinda how you are compensated, instead of money. You spend time making your thing for free, but so does everyone else so you don’t have to pay for those things either. The two main examples I’ve personally been involved with are game modding and 3d printing models, I use the free stuff other people make all the time, releasing the things I make for free is how I pay it back.
But yeah, if you use something you really like, throw them a buck or two for the work.
…although I’ve donated about as much as I’ve received as donations myself. Eh. No matter.Yup, I’m the same way. If I could work in FOSS, I’d be happy to take a pay cut, but FOSS doesn’t pay anywhere near good enough. So it’ll remain a hobby.
As such, I’m pretty reasonable about what needs to be open source, and what’s fine being proprietary. For example:
- OS - must be FOSS
- games - proprietary is fine, but no privileged access (e.g. kernel level anti-cheat)
- web browser - must be FOSS
- web services - proprietary is fine, provided they don’t collect a creepy amount of info about me
Basically, the more risk there is of a security issue, the more I expect it to be FOSS. And I’m willing to help out too. I’ve submitted patches to Lemmy and other FOSS projects I use, and I’ll donate something similar to what I’d pay for a proprietary app for certain projects.
This sort of thing can’t really be done in capitalism at all. Open Source (as it was advanced by Eric S. Raymond and the Mozilla Project back in the late 90s) was always stuck in a capitalist way of thinking.
In a society where everyone has their basic needs met and people are expected to contribute what they can, writing FOSS can be your contribution.
It"s a difficult viewpoint given where money flows. A better method shoupd be more government funded software, with a FOSS requirement since it’s tax dollars.
That being said, I’m very fortunate to be working for a company that releases software under MIT and/or SSPLv1, and we use almost exclusively Open Source for our infrastructure and back office (decisions I made, but had the strong, proactive backing of our CEO/Founders).
“I only eat food that’s free.”
I fully support open source software, but it’s not feasible under the current economic system to expect everyone to exclusively contribute to open source projects.
You are allowed to charge money for open source.
Its the recipe that makes the food you’re eating that would need to be publicly available and free to redistribute.
Yep, you sure are. You also can’t stop someone from forking it and giving it away for free. See: Red Hat Enterprise Linux and AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, etc.
Money in open source is one of the biggest hurdles to it becoming the norm. IMHO, governments should fund more open source projects and fund them at higher levels. We have art grants because art improves society, and we should have an equal or higher amount of open source grants because open source improves society too.
You’re allowed, but as long as anyone else can do it for free, you can’t build a business model on selling it. At most you can sell something else (support, cloud compute, some solution that makes using it easier etc.).
You can build a business model on selling it, but you can’t stop someone else doing the same.
Which means in the long run the cost will get down to 0.
The moment the code and redistribution rights are out in the open, anyone who tries to charge for it faces competition from people charging less — and eventually from people charging nothing. The economic pressure pushes the price down to the cost of copying, which in the digital world is effectively zero.
I don’t know why you’re getting downvoted. What you said is true.
It reminded me of an older writing about it:
Open source doesn’t make money because it isn’t designed to make money
Technically, according to the GPLv3 you don’t need to make the source code publically available. If you sell software with binaries then their source code must be included with it. If you’re Red Hat you can also add an additional ToS to the website that states if you buy the software you can’t freely distribute the source code you download from the website or you will be sued to oblivion.
No, they don’t say they will sue (they flat out can’t), but they say they will cut off your access to any updates.
Now one could (and I would) argue that sounds like a restriction on exercising your open source rights. However the counter argument seems to be those protections apply only to software acquired to date, and if you deny access to future binaries you can deny access to those sources.
In any event, all this subtlety around the licensing aside, it’s just a bigger hassle to use RedHat versus pretty much any other distribution, precisely because they kind of want IBM/Oracle style entitlement management where the user gets to have to do all the management work to look after their suppliers business needs.
You cannot make restrictions to the distribution of the source code under the GPL
Aren’t “consume” and “support” different concepts? The article is trash, so I’m not referring to that, but I could take this stance in broader terms.
- My voluntary time and money is limited, so if you keep your work proprietary, I’m not going to provide it to you any more than I absolutely need to in a basic, transactional sense.
If my boss says work on this project -I’ll do it because I’m paid to do that, for the amount of time I’m paid to do it, but no more. If my bank says use this closed source application, okay fine, but I’ll never recommend it to anyone or submit a bug report when it breaks. If my government or library is considering entering into some closed source ecosystem, I’ll go out of my way to recommend against it, but I’ll probably end up having to use it. If I feel like paying for Netflix, I’ll share passwords and use regional VPNs, cancel whenever I feel like it, or whatever and never feel guilty.
If your product is open source, pretty much the opposite of all of the above. That’s what I would consider as “support.”
Bitwarden and Cryptpad. Both open source and self hostable, yet I pay for both. paying for open source is possible.
i stopped paying for cryptpad when they stopped building their own software and started peddling the utter garbage that is onlyoffice.
i asked them a few years ago if they are planning to build something new and they just said why build when there are things like onlyoffice already available.
sigh.
He never said paying for open source projects is impossible, obviously we have the ability pay. It’s the expecting EVERYONE to drop money on every FOSS project that’s infeasible. That shit ads up.
It’s the same issue that PeerTube has, people making free content with no ads, but they aren’t guaranteed payment. I’m not about to pay $5 per month on Patreon for every creator that I like, cause that’s just not sustainable.
When I make this choice, I also change my expectations. The amount of money that is sloshing around in silicon valley is grotesque, and so of course they can throw whole towns worth of developers at just about any problem. The fit and finish of proprietary software is actually pretty bad considering the resources they have access to.
With FOSS software, a small project might be one or a few developers. But can it be good enough. I generally thing a lot of software has been good enough for a long time. A lot of computer applications are basically solved problems -text editing, search and reading, spreadsheets, forums, live chat, asynchronous mail, etc.
A proportion of FOSS users dropping a little money here and there will never give projects the kind of infinite growth expected in silicon valley, but it absolutely can fund small shops doing good, simple projects. Heck, it might even be more sustainable than the venture-capital-sell cycles that require every company to be perpetually exhibiting exponential growth or die. Yes, I’m aware that the bigger FOSS projects are only solvent because they make money from corporate customers. It is an issue that corporations seem to have nearly all the discretionary spending power, but thats for another discussion.
I don’t mind paying for software.
I want free as in freedom, not free as in beer. Though a free beer might not be the worst thing in the world
Sure, and I recognize that it’s not a great metaphor. But I’m thinking about it from the developer side. Open Source software is not motivated by profits, and profit motivates a lot of developers. Some of the best software projects were actualized by a few committed individuals who were passionate about the purpose. But then you have Microsoft which tries to tie bonuses to lines of code, and ends up with bloated garbage because peoples is peoples.
Open source is good, in the same way free lunches for school children are good. The benefits are innumerable. But it’s not feasible to expect every developer to commit to open source projects when their efforts might not be rewarded.
Heh. It’s a very software-centric view. Open source trivializes things that can run as software on readily available hardware, but if there’s a linear relationship between cost of hardware/manufacture and results you aren’t solving much of the gatekeeping. There’s plenty of open source availability for a lot of stuff, from email to LLMs, that nobody self-hosts. The problem isn’t the underlying reproduction rights.
I will say this, I don’t care about what the author or anybody else “supports”. If we should have learned something from the last decade or two is that “support” means jack shit.
I care about regulation. And just like I think education, transportation, medical patents, health care and other key resources should be fundamentally public by law, the same is true of other technologies.
I love the thought, but it the thinking behind it is very utopian. It doesn’t match the real world. In my experience, if a company can’t make all of the profit from a thing they invest in, they simply won’t invest. I wish that wasn’t the case, but it’s what I’ve seen. The C-Suite and management would rather make 100% profit from living in the dark ages compared to “just” 99% of the profit from pushing the world forward.
but it the thinking behind it is very utopian
I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Things don’t have to be realistic to be aspirational. It’s a bigger problem when people give up because improvement isn’t realistic or deemed necessary by comparison to some other factor.
Saw it a lot here. People would be all “sure our healthcare isn’t great but at least we’re not like the U.S.” as the rightwingers bit by bit enshittified the entire system.
A utopia is what we should aim for. What’s the point of anything less?
There’s a difference between being realistic and being pessimistic. The latter expects any attempt to fail, while the former seeks an attainable path to a goal.
One can not attain that utopian vision without setting realistic goals. Setting your eyes on the end game without ever focusing on the path to get there is dooming yourself to failure.
Counterpoint: “I support drone strikes in random developing countries as long as the drones are open source” doesn’t really sound that good lol
How about, if we must have military drones, they should be open source.
