What are your thoughts? Any counter-counter points to the author’s response to most concerns regarding open source?
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’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.
“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.
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.
