It's hard to take this seriously because it starts with false premises. Both the open source definition (from the open source initiative), which defines open source software, and the free software definition (from the free software foundation), which defines free software, include both protective (copyleft) licenses and permissive licenses. When the article starts with fundamental false assumptions, it's hard to take its conclusions very seriously.<p>See:
<a href="https://opensource.org/osd" rel="nofollow">https://opensource.org/osd</a>
<a href="https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html</a>
An odd take on history. Evidently history began when the author started experiencing it. It doesn't mention anything about how so much of what software we have to day is descended from the DECUS tapes and BSD tapes that were circulating the 1980s and 1990s in addition to the FSF tape you could get. I used archie to download uuencded source archives of all kinds of "open source" development tools (the name hadn't been published and monetized yet, but the concept was in common use).<p>I think the post open source era started some time in the late 1980s when the internet started creeping into peoples homes.
I've been in open source for over 20 years now, Apache member, co-founder Jakarta Apache, blah blah.<p>I'm seeing a new era of Open Source reflected in DeFi. These projects are done in the open, with a group of eager young developers, just like I was 20 years ago.<p>The thing that is different is that people actually get paid for their work. These DeFi projects are minting so much money that they can actually afford to attract talent. The tooling is all there for them to use. A lot of projects are just based on existing codebases, re-using legos.<p>Everyone is "anonymous", code is of high standards, it is meritocracy driven and DAO based. Stuff moves <i>fast</i>.<p>Unreal. Never seen anything like it.
(Disclaimer I wrote the article)
My first ever computer was a Pentium 4 and I've started my software career around the middle of the open source era (not the free software era). I have missed the beginning and the history of open source, but I'm very interested in what is coming next. There is so much written about the history and various definitions on Wikipedia, that wasn't the focus of the article (hint: the future was). I've included just enough selective facts about the history, to make a point. The focus has been to predict what comes in the next 20 years.<p>Today, when I chat with kids that are starting their careers, they are hardly excited about what happened 20 years ago, not to mention 40 years ago. They don't give a sh*t about the ideological differences between free & open source, and what the early internet connection speed was. But they are defining the next 20 years through some Javascript and Web3 technologies.
I wonder if the elasticsearch fork takes off will that put a dampener on these new selfish source relicenses. Like, I think if these companies want to not have competition with this software now its popular, its pulling the ladder up behind them a bit, and they wouldn't have reached their level of usage that being competed against by cloud providers is a problem. It's more honest to start out with one of these licenses than build the audience then relicense/
"The next era will improve on the same decentralized development principles by incorporating decentralized monetization and governance too. This will take us the full cycle of Decentralized and Sustainable Open Software nirvana."<p>I'm not sure what this actually means but, nirvana.
Remarkbox is not open source, but the service is now free:<p><a href="https://www.remarkbox.com/remarkbox-is-now-pay-what-you-can.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.remarkbox.com/remarkbox-is-now-pay-what-you-can....</a>
Related and super useful insights on Commercial Open Source (COSS): <a href="https://coss.media" rel="nofollow">https://coss.media</a>