“Open source” is not broken

&gt;If FOSS was broken, the internet as we know it today wouldn’t exist; the countless marvels of technology that we take for granted and techno-economies that thrive on them wouldn’t exist;<p>I guess I just vehemently disagree. Nearly all of the early open-source software that made the internet possible was produced in universities. The only reason it was sustainable was because it was professors being paid by the university, or students doing it for free. Implying that means it&#x27;s viable for all these <i>other</i> projects that were created and maintained outside of a university setting is just not accurate. There&#x27;s also this fallacy of: it worked this long so it will continue working forever.<p>For me the long and short of it is: the only way I can foresee open source working in the way the purists want is if there is a universal basic income. SOMEONE has to pay the bills, and as we&#x27;ve seen time and again, hoping to feed your family on donations is a fool&#x27;s errand. With UBI, artists of all kinds (including developers) can pursue things that would otherwise be impossible. Without it, we&#x27;re left with the constant push and pull of people either burning out maintaining stuff in their spare time, or hoping a given corporate maintainer wants the same features and functionality as the community.

It feels like we moved from a world where open source software was develop by a community, to one where most of us are just consumers of the code. I don&#x27;t know if where actually more contributors 20 years ago, relatively speaking, but much of the code was also less complex.<p>Open source is still remarkably successful and the only reason why the whole Log4J RCE is such a big deal, is because the library is hugely successful. The failing isn&#x27;t in the work of the author(s), but those of us who been consuming the code. We don&#x27;t need to fund the main developers, what we need is for the project, and projects like it, to be true communities. That mean that all the companies who have been relying on open source need to allocate time to community work.<p>We pay for open source software by helping build it and that goes beyond creating an issue on Github or complaining about missing features and poor documentation. We all part of the open source community, but we seem to have forgotten how it works. Now we believe that we can throw money at the problem, but that still leaves a single developer with the responsibility for a massive code base. OpenBSD was right: &quot;Show us the code or shut up&quot;.

I didn&#x27;t get that the original article was bashing the <i>concept</i> of open source; more like it was bashing the &quot;on the ground reality&quot; of today&#x27;s open source.<p>I think that there&#x27;s a great deal of &quot;brokenness&quot; in the way that the software development community works, in general. Because OS is so ubiquitous, and because, as the author mentions, so many people make money on it, we think of OS as the problem.<p>I think the general quality level of software is catastrophically bad, in many instances. This is because people rush to do &quot;big things,&quot; and they aren&#x27;t actually ready to manage these &quot;big things.&quot;<p>One example is overengineered design. This is something that we&#x27;re all guilty of. Indeed, today, I am in the process of completely rewriting a view controller that I designed, that has that whole &quot;Lucy and the Chocolate Factory&quot;[0] thing going for it. The only solution was to take off, and nuke it from orbit.<p>When I create an overengineered design, it becomes brittle, and difficult to maintain or extend. What triggered my rewriting this, was because I needed to modify the way that the layout was done, and found it to be a complete bitch to figure out.<p>Fortunately, I am very experienced, and also wrote the original (messy) code. It would be another matter, entirely, if it was a &quot;black box&quot; dependency. I probably would have avoided modifying the layout, which would have resulted in a much lower quality of UX for my app.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=NkQ58I53mjk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=NkQ58I53mjk</a>

I recently looked into open sourcing Homechart (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;homechart.app" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;homechart.app</a>). It&#x27;s free to use already (for self hosting), but some users wanted it to be open source (almost entirely for auditing purposes, but I doubt they&#x27;d even read the code). I don&#x27;t want anyone using it for commercial purposes, and I found a few licenses that would prevent this-- namely Commons Clause, but at the end of the day I didn&#x27;t see a benefit to having it OSS aside from appeasing some OSS purists. The app is already free, and I don&#x27;t need the added burden of responding to issues and pull requests (and supporting the code they add).<p>EDIT: I also don&#x27;t want folks redistributing custom builds or effectively reselling it somehow. I&#x27;m a solo dev, I don&#x27;t have the resources to litigate and enforce any kind of restrictive license.

It seems like both sides of this supposed debate are saying precisely the same thing, with one side (&quot;how dare we suggest anything is wrong wth open source&quot;) taking umbrage for no apparent reason. The premise of &quot;both&quot; arguments is that open source maintainers are being exploited.

Oh my goodness.. if open source had not existed in the world, the world must not be as good as today. The world w&#x2F;o OSS must fall behind the world w&#x2F; OSS.<p>If open source is broken, it must be repaired.<p>I have contributed to OSS for over 2 years and it makes me feel fun and feel a sense of achievement. And I feel so grateful towards who had contributed to open source and had cultivated open source culture. I received help a lot from OSS and lots of open knowledge from the internet. And now I want to give it back to open source culture and I think I am making the world better a little bit.

Did this guy really just write a rebuttal to an article that he didn&#x27;t bother to read well enough to understand?<p>They are literally arguing the same things. The article he is arguing against is not trying to shit on open source. It&#x27;s trying to explain how insane it is that so much open source development is so critical but so massively underfunded.<p>The original article isn&#x27;t saying that the idea of open source is fundamentally broken. It&#x27;s the consumers of open source software whose morals are fundamentally broken.<p>Please, for the love of all that is holy, just spend like 5 extra minutes reading what you are arguing against next time. This is so embarrassing that I&#x27;m feeling the second-hand embarrassment.

Open source is most certainly broken, and not just due to the various financial, freedom and security issues these two articles focus on. My biggest peeve: documentation is often minimal (e.g. API docs only) or filled with useless toy examples that are effectively just rephrasing of API docs.<p>The entire underpinning of free and open source software is silly: software in this context isn&#x27;t an academic pursuit producing knowledge that should be freely shared to our collective advancement as a civilization. It&#x27;s a hammer, a wrench, a table: in short, a product. That fundamental category error made by our community is the source of all the problems with F&#x2F;OSS, financial and otherwise.

&gt; boast of their “innovation” and “growth” without … contributing<p>… from corporations that don’t bat an eye at donating billions to (often dubious) “social” organizations - often ones that criticize them anyway.

Re the author of &quot;open source is broken&quot;: The irony of bashing open source on a websiate using systems&#x2F;code&#x2F;infra containing thousands of open source lines of code which I am sure he hasn&#x27;t paid for... has probably escaped his attention.<p>Honestly, I am not sure why there is an argument anymore. Let people write or use free or proprietary software as they see fit. You all know the pros, you all know the cons, make a decision and god&#x27;s speed, live your life. I side with the free software. You do you.

A half baked idea, curious what people think:<p>Would it be possible to create an insurance policy against these major FOSS vulnerabilities?<p>The insurance company would then require audits of your tech stack, and fund security research. This is analogous to what car insurance companies already do. And then companies who are not insured are viewed as suspect, etc etc.<p>There&#x27;s apparently a misalignment of incentives because there&#x27;s a break in the chain of responsibility. The idea here is to close that loop.

The core &quot;problem&quot; stems from software having zero production&#x2F;replication cost, and we live in a world where nobody is used to funding development.<p>Even software companies are charging rent for what already exists, and using some of that to develop their next version or new product.<p>The zero cost reproduction enables the free collaboration, but doesnt fit our existing ideas around paying for things.<p>I think that notion that all commercial software is rented needs to be widely understood.

&gt; While I believe that it is unethical for large for-profit corporations to not support FOSS projects from which they derive (extract?) immense amounts of value, it is not illegal, thanks to the system.<p>While I very much agree with the article on it&#x27;s core topic, this is incorrect. It is not illegal <i>thanks to the license.</i> The FOSS world created the licenses, it is made legal <i>by choice</i>, it isn&#x27;t due to the system. &quot;The system&quot; very much allows for this problem to be entirely avoided.<p>If you&#x27;re happy making free software but you don&#x27;t want anyone to profit from your work without cutting you in on the success you contribute to, consider a dual license. Maybe the free software world should consider addressing this problem in some license scheme, a couple of options being royalties paid if the software is used in profit generating endeavors, or even something more restrictive, like requiring all derivative works and works being supported by licensed software to release their source as well. Imagine if Android were licensed in this way, google would not get to marry proprietary crap to it, as just one example.

The thing is, the answers for this are all here and old. I&#x27;m just kind of waiting for people to figure it out.<p>If you&#x27;re creating cool stuff and giving it away, great! No obligation.<p>If, however, you&#x27;re creating a paid product or service -- there already exists a ton of law and precedent and ideas about obligations. We just need to <i>remember</i> these and start using them again.<p>These ideas and law generally point to: If you put a product out there, and make claims about what it can and cannot do (either explicitly or implicitly) then you must be held responsible for the harm if people reasonably rely on it and you screw up. That&#x27;s it. That&#x27;s the entirety of it.<p>FOSS is one of your inputs, could be seen as something like gasoline or trucks or whatever. It&#x27;s your job as a company to handle those safely and make sure they don&#x27;t goop out and cause harm, and if you don&#x27;t get this right, you should be sued.<p>Edit -- and of course, sometimes the companies are too slow to make this happen and so we need regulation. We perhaps need an EPA or FDA for software.

The problem is Free as in Beer and Free as in Speech are related.<p>The issue is not $1 downloads so much at is the overhead, pain and issues that come along with it.<p>It&#x27;s hard to manage and control downloads, usage, and the legal issue might be that any hint of licensing problem makes it &#x27;no go&#x27; from a corporate perspective.<p>So the gap between &#x27;Free Beer and Speech&#x27; and 50-cent Beer and Speech is enormous.

In general, society has problems with monetization of valuable things. It&#x27;s not only the case with FOSS, it&#x27;s also holds true with science and a long term not quarterly counted products development. Sadly vile entertainment and advertising is perfectly monetized.

The most obvious sign that &quot;Open source&quot; is broken is that everyone uses that term and not Free Software.

I feel like we should at least reference some companies who &quot;do FOSS right&quot; by releasing internal projects to the ecosystem. in the data science realm, for example, I&#x27;ve made heavy use of Superset and Airflow from Airbnb as well as the Plotly tools (Dash, etc) and numerous others.<p>In many ways FOSS is thriving and on the cutting edge, and in others (especially project maintenance) it seems to be struggling.<p>But let&#x27;s at least recognize some of the good actors in that space.

Author describes a classic tragedy of the commons situation - many reap the benefits but there&#x27;s little incentive to invest in OSS.<p>Analysis from there is weak. The incentives I think fairly clearly lead to major underinvestment in open source relative to the ideal level because of the incentive problems Even if there is some investment and some significant success if there was investment of time and money order proportional to usage of major OSS components.

As an anecdote, all of my work on open source (and I&#x27;ve been working on and with open source software for the better part of 30 years) has been because I had something that needed to be done and writing, adapting, or fixing open source packages was the fastest, easiest, and cheapest way of doing that.<p>My employers paid me to <i>get things done,</i> not to write software. Writing, adapting, or fixing software is the means, not the end.

Solutions involving companies paying directly to the people whose code they use miss the point.<p>The reason is that software shared with the world is often shared out of passion and idealism. If only code that&#x27;s useful to some companies is paid for, the world of free (as in beer or otherwise) software as we know and love is still unsustainable, and not just because fledgling projects tend to be inferior in many ways to everything that came before.<p>Some software is written simply for the fun of it. Future Crew were kids writing demos and putting them out (by the way, an executable for a program that&#x27;s written in assembly is not so far removed from its source code; so whether they put out the source code or not is immaterial, here the point is &quot;free as in beer&quot;). These demos were unlikely to be directly useful to companies, but we were still amazed by them and some of us got into programming because of them. Do you want to live in a world where only people who produce software that&#x27;s useful to some company can sustain themselves?<p>Their parents provided them with food and shelter, so they didn&#x27;t have to think too hard about writing and releasing it. People in this thread claim that they don&#x27;t feel exploited, probably for similar reasons. They probably have an income or enough money to make them feel comfortable giving something away. What happens when circumstances don&#x27;t go your way, though? Then, while you live off your savings, see them shrink day by day, you realize that society doesn&#x27;t give you the basic stuff that&#x27;s needed for living, so why the hell should you give anything away? If you already gave stuff away while you were fat and healthy, and this stuff is being used profitably by others, the resentment can only grow.

I learned from the actix-web debacle that I don&#x27;t want to ever do libre or open source software. If people want to complain to me about my code and call me a lousy programmer, then they have to pay me for the right.<p>A sad day for Rust<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;steveklabnik.com&#x2F;writing&#x2F;a-sad-day-for-rust" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;steveklabnik.com&#x2F;writing&#x2F;a-sad-day-for-rust</a>

&gt; Then why is it that millions of FOSS developers, despite knowing that their work may be consumed by for-profit corporations for nothing in return<p>Well, that in itself is already some kind of return. Widespread use - even in a commercial setting - means widespread interest in your work and possibly in you. That might not directly translate into $$$ in the bank, but it is quite useful psychologically, technologically (think: issue reports and triage, testing of new functionality, input on future design) and even financially, in a roundabout way.<p>Still, the main reason - for many of us anyway - is that we wrote, and write, based on _need_: We needed the software, or our friends&#x2F;coworkers needed it, or maybe we perceived a public need; we wanted to satisfy this need, and there you have it.<p>----<p>Nitpick:<p>&gt; A world without Wikipedia.<p>Wikipedia could have functioned just fine on some commercial equivalent of a Wiki. Wikipedia editing does not involve working on MediaWiki source code. So, not a good example IMHO.

FOSS is the victim in a way, but that means it must defend itself. OSI needs to get off their asses and acknowledge the problem and work with the community to develop licenses that limit SaaSification and other forms of appropriation in a way that is compatible with the principles of open source and lacks the optics (FUD) problems of the GPL approach.<p>I’m not holding my breath since the OSI is funded almost entirely by huge companies that are quite happy with all the free labor they are exploiting. So far the OSI has plugged it’s ears and pretended everything is fine, and OSS zealots attack the character of any lowly developer who isn’t happy providing uncompensated labor to surveillance capitalist behemoths.<p>I don’t see FOSS surviving another generation if this doesn’t happen, or at least not in a form that isn’t weaponized to herd everyone into proprietary cloud environments.

My philosophy (albeit it might not be shared by many) is that if you are going to do a job, either do it well and all the way through or don&#x27;t do it. I see many half-assed (for the lack of a better term) open source jobs where the developers do not respond to criticism and feedback in other words than &quot;you should be grateful we did X and Y after all&quot;, with an air of arrogance and saintliness for even doing anything. I would analogize it with me going to a charity and giving them my food leftovers and getting mad when they do not like it.

The great thing about open source is that anyone can participate for free and for whatever reason: some for the feeling of giving back, some for creating something useful for others, some like it as challenge, some for the street cred., etc. and most people don&#x27;t expect to be paid. The idea of paying for OS cannot exist in such environment until everyone is on board with that idea. If you create something and demand to be paid, someone will most definitely create something similar and release it for free.

I see two sides arguing past each other. One side says &quot;FOSS isn&#x27;t broken, because X&quot;, the other side says &quot;FOSS IS broken, because Y!&quot;. Neither side tries to refute X or Y. We all have our personal goalposts. Why argue over a headline? Why not argue with the other side on common terms?<p>It&#x27;s like if I say &quot;fruitcake is terrible&quot; and someone says &quot;I like fruitcake, I use it as a paperweight and a doorstopper&quot; as a rebuttal.

I have huge respect for Open Source Devs.<p>Developer Ecosystem wouldn’t be same without them. I truly appreciate their efforts to make amazing software in there free time and it means a lot to me.<p>As a developer I owe a lot to open source thats why If I can’t contribute to their software I always try to personally thank them when using their software.

I feel like this is more an issue of people talking past each other rather than having actual differences in opinion.

I don&#x27;t think OSS is broken either, but I don&#x27;t get the complaint here. People and companies use things because it&#x27;s advantageous to them to do so. When you release software that&#x27;s free (as in beer), people and companies are going to use it for free. It doesn&#x27;t matter whether it&#x27;s &quot;hypercapitalism&quot; or not. You simply can&#x27;t eschew all of the systems available for extracting value from your labor and then complain that you&#x27;re unable to extract value from your labor.<p>In particular, this doesn&#x27;t make any sense:<p>&gt; While I believe that it is unethical for large for-profit corporations to not support FOSS projects from which they derive (extract?) immense amounts of value, it is not illegal, thanks to the system.<p>It&#x27;s been made specifically, intensionally legal by the people creating it. So of course it&#x27;s legal, and it&#x27;s weird to say, &quot;I went out of my way to make this free, but it&#x27;s unethical for you to actually use it for free&quot;.<p>In capitalism, you have the right to set your own price for your labor and property, and there are lots of mechanisms for charging people for stuff. That&#x27;s what all these software vendors are doing! In contrast, the MIT and Apache licenses say &quot;I made this but do whatever you want&quot;. We choose this license when making things because we want everyone to do what they want. We can&#x27;t be angry when they do.

&gt;Whose fault is it then? I believe that it is the society’s fault, the system’s fault, no matter how abstract or vague that sounds.<p>C&#x27;mon, man! Your argument is that its all society&#x27;s fault, and FOSS isn&#x27;t broken! That&#x27;s the weakest argument I&#x27;ve ever heard for keeping it!

Blaming &quot;society&quot; is a nothingburger. It doesn&#x27;t point towards any solution. Ditto &quot;capitalism&quot; (although the OP doesn&#x27;t go there) --- people pursue desires and respond to incentives; you can call those effects &quot;capitalism&quot; if you like but you&#x27;ll struggle with them under any kind of economic arrangements.<p>My self-diagnosis as an unpaid open source maintainer (rr) is that we like to share, the marginal cost of sharing with potentially everyone is close to zero (at least early in a project), so throwing code on Github with a liberal license feels good. It also benefits the project to some extent because some improvements may come back. But then we see rr creating huge value for people, some of whom are very well paid for their work, and none of that is coming back to us, and that seems unfair even though we did technically agree to it --- sure, you don&#x27;t have to give back, but it would be the <i>nice</i> thing to do. But in software it&#x27;s very easy to extract a ton of value from dependencies without really noticing, and very hard to give back systematically. So it&#x27;s the same old story --- perfectly good human instincts aren&#x27;t a 100% fit for our modern environment.<p>What if we made it easier to identify the value we&#x27;re all extracting and contribute back systematically? If we did, maybe we could build social norms around that. E.g. imagine we had tools that monitor your software development workflow, identify the tools and libraries you use, and quantify your usage via some heuristics. Then imagine you integrate something like Github Sponsors so you can allocate $X to support all your dependencies and make that happen at the press of a button. Then imagine we advocate for professional software developers to allocate 1% of their income that way, and agitate for Big Tech companies to make that a policy.

&gt; If there was a paywall, even for $1, how many people would install a library?<p>I would LOVE this solution. I use open source professionally, and I continually advocate for ways to pay open source projects and developer. And if there&#x27;s a way to pay extra to fund a feature, or hire a developer as a consultant, so much the better. In my experience, companies are highly willing and able to pay for software and services that accelerate the companies&#x27; goals.<p>If you want to pay for open source, then I can suggest Open Collective, Patreon, and GitHub Sponsors as ways that are working well IME. Or consider donating to nonprofit open source advocacy organizations including Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Free Software Foundation (FSF), Apache Foundation, Linux Foundation, and similar groups.

&gt; <i>FOSS is free as in freedom and not free as in beer (cost).</i><p>Actually, and critically, it is both!<p>You can&#x27;t have free as in freedom without being free as in beer first.

is it not possible to have a licence that says if you want to use this code to sell a service for a profit you must contact the owner and negociate a deal? this way if you are developing in the open source bubble you get to use software for free. if you want to build a service you get to test the software for free and if your company takes off then you must pay for your foundation.

The problem is not in Open Source itself but in the environment it lives in.<p>So many big corporations benefit from FOSS without giving anything in return? Well, then tax them. I mean lightly, say take .01% of the biggest 100 annual profit, then distribute part of it to the 100 more important FOSS projects and part to other FOSS projects whose developers are either unemployed or in financial difficulties, important projects with too few or no maintainers, that is, where it is necessary. It doesn&#x27;t seem that hard to me, but I&#x27;m sure neither FAANG nor any other giants would take this step if it doesn&#x27;t become law somehow. To become law, however, it may need some changes in our definition of healthy capitalism, which to me is the hardest part.

&gt; Whose fault is it then? I believe that it is the society’s fault, the system’s fault, no matter how abstract or vague that sounds.<p>I find it interesting that the author wasn&#x27;t willing to call out Capitalism by name.

Of course &quot;open source&quot; is not broken. It works exactly how it was intended to work and it perfectly models our economic system where a lot of people do essential work but are underpaid or not paid at all.<p>tl;dr: &quot;open source&quot; means free labor for corporations.

Nerd Sniping is HN&#x27;s official sport at this point

Its probably time for the next generation of open source licensing to make the code not usable for profit making purposes, thus ensuring open source is either funded by the companies that use it or forms its own separate community away from corporations.

Note to author you&#x27;re arguing with a bronie, so not exactly a cognitively unbiased crowd...<p>But seriously, this is that businesses are broken and grab a free thing and use it. If businesses were gassing employees because they got free ammonia to clean their buildings we wouldn&#x27;t be blaming the ammonia producers.<p>Please, stop blaming tools for the axe wielding by morons users. I&#x27;d say educate the users, but we all know thats not gonna change any time soon...