Open source is the way out of a tech downturn

By &quot;the Way Out of a Tech Downturn&quot;, he means that companies using more open source can save them money, and companies saving money is &quot;the way out of the tech downturn&quot;? And by &quot;tech downturn&quot; he means... &quot;destruction of shareholder value&quot;, he&#x27;s talking... stock prices?<p>I honestly don&#x27;t think this has much to do with any reality.<p>I don&#x27;t think any current &quot;tech downturn&quot; or reduction in stock prices specifically is caused by company spending on proprietary licenses; I don&#x27;t think companies saving an amount of expenses equal to spending on proprietary licenses would have much effect on stock prices even if it occured (well, it might harm the stock prices of an companies selling that proprietary software if done on a wide scale!); and I don&#x27;t even think that switching from proprietary software to open source can end up saving you the money he thinks it can.

I don&#x27;t think the writer of this article has thought this all the way through. Sure, replacing one of the SAASes from your tech stack with some self-hosted OSS will reduce your spending (as long as you spend less on the operations than you did on the SAAS of course). The main problem for tech companies comes when all their customers have the same idea and cancel their account in favor of OSS alternatives. That would lead to a much deeper downturn.<p>I also wonder how the &quot;use FOSS, it&#x27;s free!&quot; mindset will coexist with the &quot;pay OSS devs more&quot; movement. That will be very interesting to watch for sure.

This article didn&#x27;t price in opportunity cost.<p>It isn&#x27;t just a $150k&#x2F;annum expense on an individual SRE salary. One should consider the HR time to source candidates and time to interview. It would include the time your tech team is brought into system design and security meetings, time your tech leads spend in 1:1s. It may involve time for your CTO to document the part of your systems for enterprise customers who require full architecture details for their requisition process. It may involve time for your product team, business analysts or executives to be retrained on software that is unfamiliar and non-standard to them.<p>Most of these activities slow down critical parts of your business which could be focused on generating revenue. A fair accounting should attempt to estimate these costs. Consider: if you didn&#x27;t disrupt the business and instead spent the same effort on revenue generating product features then how much could you earn?

how about we go the other way and help out open source development by open sourcing codebases of failed companies in the downturn and releasing the patents&#x2F;licences? this would be a step one for next generation of startups to build upon. The VCs funding current startups (including YC) could implement this tomorrow as a policy and create a huge body of work ready to be reused.

If there is a &quot;when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail&quot; example in this industry, this is it.<p>Open source is not a panacea, in fact it can be the opposite. I don&#x27;t know the opposite of a panacea. But a maintainer can decide to fuck right off. And unless your team has the skill required, or another maintainer steps up, you are screwed. Businesses like predictable, they like contracts, they like knowing in 4 years somebody will support them. F&#x2F;OSS advocates need to recognize that.

2022 is&#x2F;was a terrible year for a lot of people in specific areas or regions of tech, but was it a terrible year across the board? The only fundamental shift I&#x27;m seeing is back to some semblance of rational thought and expectations, but I&#x27;ve been through a few of these so might have different goalposts. For me 2022 was a &quot;2000-light&quot; year.

Large scale FOSS success is dependant on fiscal surplus from non-FOSS ventures and the ability of the US empire to globally enforce related legal aspects (licensing). The article correctly states that the former is diminishing. Like it or not, so is the latter.

So... abusing free labor?

Or, &quot;How Cheap-As-Free Software Can Help Consolidate More Wealth in the Hands of the Bourgeoisie&quot;

So free labour? No thank you. Open source devs should think long and hard about how their good will is being taken advantage of. Not just by mega corps reselling their software by saas or ais but also by individuals demanding features and support. It also simply reduced the monetary value of code to zero. Unless it cures cancer there is no need to make it available free of charge.