
What comes after open source - steveklabnik
https://words.steveklabnik.com/what-comes-after-open-source
======
heathjohns
I think we need to zoom out more, even. The focus on freedom is too narrow -
freedom at the cost of becoming disconnected is a raw deal.

What we want is power. In the desktop era, having source code gave us power,
so we associated the two and demanded the former - but this obviously hasn't
translated to the cloud.

You can't download a Facebook profile and then re-upload it somewhere else and
still be connected to all your friends etc. That lock-in gives Facebook power
over its users: proportional to how much they need what Facebook gatekeeps
(e.g. "all the news about my grandkids is on there").

When I want to stop using something, but I can't, that's power someone holds
over me. In my case, that's Google search, GMail, and Android. I actually hate
the latter two, and I've tried leaving them all, but here I am. What they've
got in common is that they're all protective layers over what I need to stay
connected to the outside world despite being highly dysfunctional (i.e.
discoverability on the web, email spam, and phone hardware).

Because of this, Google's got me in a way that - because of open source -
Microsoft never could. Whatever comes after open source needs to address that
power delta directly. We need choice, but also connection.

~~~
phkahler
>> When I want to stop using something, but I can't, that's power someone
holds over me.

To take that power back means you have to do things yourself, and that means
manage your own data. Unfortunately that is too much to ask of the general
public, at least with the free tools available today.

People are trading power for convenience, in part because most people don't
have the power (know-how and/or time) in the first place.

~~~
thebaer
I don't think it's too much to ask of the general public.

Think of WordPress -- free software you can either run yourself or pay a
company to run for you. If you don't like a particular hosting company, you
can click a button to export your data, and upload it with a new host -- or
with other software that understands the WordPress export format. All of this
data handling is manageable by _most_ non-technical people. The process is
hardly any different than downloading an email attachment and sending it to
someone else, or uploading it somewhere.

It seems to me the biggest problem is either data not being exportable from
these services, or the exported data not being machine-readable. If the format
is machine-readable, developers can create alternative software that works
with it; managed services can then develop around that software; everyday
consumers can eventually end up with more choice, freedom, and power.

------
dwheeler
"Projects could then submit for certification... who would do this
certification, and how would they determine the criteria?"

There's already something that takes a stab at this, the Linux Foundation's
CII Best Practices badge:
[https://bestpractices.coreinfrastructure.org/](https://bestpractices.coreinfrastructure.org/)

If you run an OSS project, I encourage you to try to get a badge.

Full disclosure: I lead the project. Hopefully it'll be of use anyway :-).

~~~
scoutt
For hardware there is the Open Source Hardware Association
([https://www.oshwa.org](https://www.oshwa.org)) and they have a certification
program.

It is an interesting fact the company where the first listed member of the
board works for ([https://www.oshwa.org/about/board-
members/](https://www.oshwa.org/about/board-members/)).

------
Townley
I recently wrote a piece of software and wanted to make it open source.
GitHub's helpful dropdown of license choices gave me more pause than I
expected as I struggled to choose between MIT and GPL.

"I definitely want someone to be able to modify, fork, and publish better
versions of this code. Do I also want them to be able to commercially license
their derivatives?"

On one hand, this code was contributed to the public commons and it'd be
sleazy for Amazon to come along, improve it, and license it. It seems unfair,
and the spectre of giving free labor to innovation-killing, rich entities
discourages me from contributing. A GPL license takes care of that concern,
and provides a much-needed codification of fairness.

On the other hand, giving people an MIT license and saying "You can do
whatever you want! Go nuts! Innovate!" is a boon to creativity. If some
startup took my weekend project and made $1 billion off of it, good for them!
That's the innovation that open-source is meant to encourage!

When the article mentioned that coders are confused, it hit the nail on the
head. We're confused individually and collectively; emotionally and
conceptually; theoretically and concretely.

We're looking for a simple answer to the question "Which option do I select
from the GitHub license dropdown so I can get back to making value" when
there's no simple answer to be found.

~~~
StavrosK
Isn't a Creative-Commons-style license good for that? You could choose
attribution-sharealike-noncommercial or something like that and be done with
it.

~~~
Townley
I'm unfortunately even more conflicted than that. I can't answer the question
"If someone wants to take my crummy code and commercialize it, am I okay with
that?"

If it's a kid in his basement with an amazing idea, absolutely. I'll watch
them ring the closing bell at the NASDAQ from my couch and feel nothing but
pride.

If it's Google or Amazon... maybe still yes, but less so? It'd depend on my
subjective perception of the net benefits to societal innovation, which is 1)
more wishy-washy-subjective than I'm comfortable with, and 2) seems like it
would make for a really bad license: "MIT-Unless-I-Dont-Like-You"

~~~
Retra
You should probably just retain those rights then and encourage people to
contact you for permission to use it commercially under a more specific
license. No harm in mentioning that you'll probably allow people to use your
work if they aren't in a position to pay for it or working for someone you
don't like.

~~~
coldpie
I would agree, but then it makes accepting outside contributions much
trickier.

------
paddy_m
In response to the first quote "Today’s developers have never learned about
this history" I agree. I would love to see more CS history classes. I know
that star schema were a thing, and hierarchical databases were a thing, but I
know nothing about them. I don't know what their failings were that led to
dominance of RBDMSes. I'm very curious to know how similar they were to mongo
or other current schemaless databases. There are also probably many old ideas
that would be practical now, neural networks definitely fall into this
category.

~~~
osullivj
Strongly agreed. Exposure to a History & Philosophy of Software course might
reduce the amount of wheel reinvention that plagues our industry.

~~~
jimmy1
> Strongly agreed. Exposure to a History & Philosophy of Software course might
> reduce the amount of wheel reinvention that plagues our industry.

I agree that wheel reinvention is an issue that needs addressing but not to
the extent as you describe (a "plague").

I also believe this comment misunderstands why it happens. As it stands today,
it is a feature, not a bug. You don't see reinvention a lot in traditional
engineering disciplines because you have something concrete and functional
that takes years of research and hours of construction. Any hacker with a
laptop can pick up a language and start building stuff. This ease of access is
what creates the "wheel reinvention" situation, that and an endless amount of
choices and a limited amount of discoverability of what is out there. Exposure
to history and philosophy of software would do nothing to address that.

Finally, reinvention is seen as virtue in this industry, not a plague. To some
degree, I agree: software is never complete. And even if you think so, the
software built underneath your software may change, thus changing your
software. Some level of reinvention may come with new considerations that were
not considerations of the past.

------
jchw
Very clever and well put. I have to let this one stew.

That said, still in the camp of "nothing is wrong," I think. It is a tough
pill to swallow that companies that build around open source software are
fundamentally vulnerable, but perhaps it's time to swallow. Open Source has
never been healthier even ignoring those contributions.

If X manages to corner Y into a proprietary license, does open source win or
lose? I won't name names but I used to use a project that went open core and
the "open core" part of it became gradually more useless over time to the
point where many users just switched off. I think what needs to be established
is that what's good for companies trying to monetize OSS is not good for OSS.

There's plenty of other models for OSS that work. I'm fond of Patreon as a new
monetization model, for example. Won't exactly get you rich, but if that's
ever the point of OSS, then it really is dead.

We probably won't live in a future where everything is OSS, but we live in a
present with an amazing amount of excellent OSS and I'm willing to take that
personally.

I think the certification idea is interesting, but I definitely need to think
about it a lot more. While I personally don't mind where OSS is, I also would
not mind new movements, either.

~~~
steveklabnik
I didn't really get into what aspects of production that developers are
thinking about today in the post, because I didn't think it was necessary to
make my point. My point is to get some people thinking about this, not decree
exactly what I think the issue is.

I do think that open source is _working_. The question is more of, who is it
working for, and why? Could it be made to work for more people? Is it working
in the way we want it to work?

For example, your comment is framed about the health of Open Source itself. I
see a lot more developers concerned about the health (in many senses) of the
developers who are working on open source, over the health of the idea of open
source in and of itself. They're also concerned about corporate control (in a
steering sense more than a "total control" sense) over open source and
platforms that are open source.

Can today's open source sustain itself? Sure, probably. Lots of things that
are not fundamentally sustainable manage to last for quite a while. But I do
think people are wanting something better, even if they're not totally sure
what that is or how to get it. I mean, I don't fully know either :)

~~~
jchw
Fair point: open source isn't really my day job. But, I do ask, what qualifies
as an open source developer? I definitely work on open source, even if it's
not my primary work. If you only count people who work for OSS companies
specifically... Isn't that a bit selection-bias-y?

~~~
steveklabnik
I think that, in and of itself, is an interesting question!

------
jrochkind1
Certification isn't going to work for the very reasons Klabnik revealed in
this same post.

> Even if you are the kind of person who thinks boycotts work, there just
> aren’t enough free software diehards to form a large enough boycott. And
> even then, you’d want to do the boycott together, simultaneously, to send
> the message.

A licensing regime is the only way I know to _prevent_ someone else from
taking your software and doing whatever they want with it. So without a
licensing regime, they'd do that, it just wouldn't be certified.

The whole idea of certification relies on enough people insisting on using
certified software. And I think the same reasons that didn't work, as Klabnik
explained, for Libre vs OSI, it's not going to work for certification. In the
end, people will use whatever is cheapest/easiest (and legal, or perceived-to-
be-low-risk-for-them illegal) regardless.

I do see the issue's he's talking about and think they are real. I don't see
any solutions. (I also think he conveniently avoided one of the reasons we're
seeing license/open source splintering -- because of attempts to find ways to
_make a profit_ off open source. See the Amazon/ElasticSearch dispute. This is
a real thing going on in the landscape he's talking about, with maybe more
impact than the ideological concerns he talks about, but is inconvenient for
what he wants to talk about. I still have no solutions to it.)

~~~
steveklabnik
> (I also think he conveniently avoided one of the reasons we're seeing
> license/open source splintering -- because of attempts to find ways to _make
> a profit_ off open source. See the Amazon/ElasticSearch dispute. This is a
> real thing going on in the landscape he's talking about, with maybe more
> impact than the ideological concerns he talks about, but is inconvenient for
> what he wants to talk about. I still have no solutions to it.)

Yep, I didn't want to get into the details of what people are caring about
here, because I don't think it's necessary to make the broader point. And I
also mostly want to get people _thinking_ about this, and priming them on
specific things isn't as useful as just providing broad strokes.

I do think that the relationship between capital and labor is a huge aspect
here, along with the cycle of "thick client, thin client, thick client" that
we currently see with the move to the cloud. As you say, those are other
essays :)

~~~
jrochkind1
Right on. I think it's probably as much of what's going on with open source as
ideology (including beliefs about 'fairness') though. (Or maybe I'm just a
Marxist who thinks material conditions usually are primary to ideology :) ).

There were ways people made a living while producing libre/open source for the
last 30ish years, that also produced quality, useful, sustainable software.

I think those ways have broken down, and no longer do that. I could get into
the details of what I think those ways were and why they have broken down (I
tried to in an HN comment on one of the posts on ElasticSearch, the comment
replies did not express consensus with me :) But it includes that the software
we want now is 'more expensive' to produce, as well as increased 'rationality'
from employers of developers). But regardless of the details, I think things
like the ElasticSearch thing (there are many more examples; the whole variety
of "open core" software) suggest it's probably happening.

I think that's probably more fundamental to the splits around open source than
ideological predilections or beliefs about "fairness", in that any solutions
or succesful evolutions of "how open source-ish is done" will have to take
account of them, not just ideological predilections. Will have to provide an
ecology/economy where people can make a living while producing quality useful
sustainable "open source-ish" one way or another. I see no clear solutions
regardless.

~~~
steveklabnik
I can get into some base/superstructure, for sure :)

------
ran3824692
The point about what is in the right spirit is important to discuss, however,
there's also a lot wrong in this article. The thing that bugs me the most is
misrepresenting FSF.

1\. Attributes this
[https://fsfe.org/news/2019/news-20190326-01.en.html](https://fsfe.org/news/2019/news-20190326-01.en.html)
to the fsf. That is not the fsf, but the fsfe, which is independent from fsf.

2\. I don't think that fsfe press release "supports expanding copyright".

3\. "The FSF didn’t move to GitHub because GitHub is proprietary, and they see
that as inconsistent with their values." Thats not correct. For starters, see
[https://www.gnu.org/software/repo-
criteria.en.html](https://www.gnu.org/software/repo-criteria.en.html)

4\. "If a company were to add a proprietary feature to an open source project,
yet pays five employees to develop the open source part further, the FSF sees
this as a tragedy." Wrong. First, FSF accepts donations from proprietary
software companies, so it's participating in in a tragedy? FSF does not say
things like: "The FSF believe because your born, you're going to use nonfree
software, which is bad, so being born is a tragedy."

5\. Look at what fsf and osi say about "open source" vs "free software"
[https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-
point....](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-
point.en.html), [https://opensource.org/faq](https://opensource.org/faq), and
neither say that permissive or copyleft being any part of the of it, so its
definitely not the main thing like the article describes.

------
alvalentini
You know, sometimes I wonder if this whole conversation really isn't just
meant for developers. I ask myself what is the sentiment across the larger
population and realise no one really cares. They love free beers. They'd do
anything not to pay 0.99 for an app, seeing that as an incredible amount of
money to pay for something they expect nowadays to be free. There's a lot to
unpack here and I don't think I am in the right mind state to do it now. Good
piece!!

~~~
steveklabnik
Thanks!

I didn't get into it, but I do think that the user/developer distinction plays
a part here. That is, one way to think about the Free Software/Open Source
divide is that copyleft ensures freedoms _for users_ at the expense of
restricting developers, and permissive licenses ensure freedoms _for
developers_ at the expense of restricting users. As developers gained some
power, we directed it towards helping ourselves.

I don't think that's the whole story, exactly, but I think it's an interesting
way to think about it.

~~~
wrs
Historically one of the controversies/confusions regarding the FSF’s ideology
is that it ignores the distinction between developers and users. In the ur-
hacker world RMS wanted to preserve, the users _are_ developers. That’s why
the right to make a derivative work is paramount (a freedom no non-developer
can take advantage of), and why libre software is strongly skewed toward
developer tools rather than viable “end-user” software applications.

Traditionally the FSF advocate will say something here about end users hiring
developers to modify software for them, but in reality that’s economically
ridiculous.

~~~
dragonwriter
> That’s why the right to make a derivative work is paramount (a freedom no
> non-developer can take advantage of)

Non-developers take advantage of it by hiring a developer; it's essentially
the right to take your software to be serviced by someone other than the
seller.

> Traditionally the FSF advocate will say something here about end users
> hiring developers to modify software for them, but in reality that’s
> economically ridiculous.

It's perhaps ridiculous for non-wealthy individual end-users for software that
isn't integral to a profit-making business, but it's quite common for major
open source projects to see most of their contributions being from
institutional end-users who have hired developers to address their own needs
with the software.

~~~
wrs
If you define “end user” as “institution with enough profit to hire a
developer”, then yes, it’s a tautology that they can hire a developer. But
that’s a minuscule fraction of end users. The person who buys Quickbooks off
the shelf at Office Max isn’t hiring any developers.

------
rkido
"Open process" might be a good term for everything else that goes into
producing open-source software.

Free software is not about licenses; they're a very limited means to an end.
If we didn't have copyright, some other means would be needed.

For freedom to spread, free software has to become faster, prettier, more
convenient, and more intuitive than proprietary software. I would go further
than this and say that the distinction between developers and users has to
become fuzzier, so that anyone can edit software without needing to be a
"developer".

Sadly, developers love their arcane tools because it makes them feel elite.
And the FSF / GNU project participates in this elitism by continuing to
promote such arcane tools. Software like GNU Emacs only meets the absolute
bare minimum of "free software"; it empowers hackers but it doesn't empower
the general public.

The next movement, whatever it will be called, needs to embrace open source
licensing, _and_ open process, _and_ end user empowerment.

------
est31
For me, FLOSS is mainly about the users, less about the projects themselves. I
care more about the product, the piece of software that you can download, use
and modify in any fashion you want.

Most users of any popular piece of libre software don't contribute back,
whether it's bug reports or patches. Even if it's targeted at developers, most
don't do it. There is certainly value in community practices that encourage
productivity and make it easy for individuals to get into. But they are only
means to an end, it's not the end itself. For me, users should be at the
center, not the developers.

~~~
platz
If if the users of software don't even know about FLOSS, then there is no
incentive pushing companies to adopt.

If it's truly about the users, it has to come from users, not developers.

------
combatentropy
What I liked about Linux was that it was better while being cheaper, in fact
free of charge. Higher quality yet less money. It sounded too good to be true.

Did I even care that the source code was visible? I have yet to contribute a
patch to any of my favorite projects: Linux, Apache, PostgreSQL. A big reason
is that I don't even know C or C++. But yes, come to think of it, the source-
code publicity gives me comfort. At least some people are out there checking
for bugs, backdoors, etc. (Right?)

Copyleft always struck me as a little weird. This article has helped me
realize why. Copyleft is still based on the idea of intellectual property, and
I don't believe in intellectual property. If we translate the phrase from its
Latinate words to Old English, its meaning, as usual, becomes clearer: thought
ownership.

In my own little projects on Github, I usually ended up going with Public
Domain. It accomplishes what I want: that I and others can keep using what I
wrote free of charge, that it can remain visible forever so that others might
learn from and build upon it. I don't really care if a company wraps it in
their little package and never lets anyone know. Also, being prior art, it
should prevent someone from getting a patent on it.

~~~
steveklabnik
Glad you liked it :)

You should consider something like CC0, given that public domain does not
exist in many important jurisdictions. That said, the OSI hasn't approved it
for interesting reasons
[https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC0_FAQ#May_I_apply_CC...](https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC0_FAQ#May_I_apply_CC0_to_computer_software.3F_If_so.2C_is_there_a_recommended_implementation.3F)

~~~
justincormack
Zero Clause BSD is the closest that is generally approved.

[https://opensource.org/licenses/0BSD](https://opensource.org/licenses/0BSD)

------
throwawaymath
If I understand the thesis of the article correctly, the idea is that most
developers actually care about open source _production_ , meanwhile open
source licenses are only capable of restricting distribution?

The example given is GitHub versus open source bug trackers. You didn't come
out and say this directly Steve, but isn't this basically flirting with the
conclusion that developers tend to prefer proprietary platforms? You mentioned
that the numbers speak for themselves, and you personally shifted your
ideology from the Free Software Movement.

Couple this with the rise of SaaS as a business model, and it seems like a lot
of the tension here is related to the way that proprietary platforms focus on
production, while licenses themselves focus on distribution.

~~~
steveklabnik
Roughly, yes. Or, with slightly more nuance, open source has been synonymous
with "uses an open source licence", but semantically, developers are
understanding open source to be a more holistic idea of openness, rather than
purely a software license strategy. And the licence can't possible ensure that
the rest of those ideas are followed.

~~~
throwawaymath
FYI I edited my comment since you replied, I wasn't done with my train of
thought yet :)

Seems like I'm on the same page with you then. I don't really see a way to
codify all of the peripheral open source associations in a legal document. A
lot of it is very...ad hoc.

~~~
steveklabnik
It's cool! Let me respond here, rather than edit my response :)

> but isn't this basically flirting with the conclusion that developers tend
> to prefer proprietary platforms?

I don't think they prefer proprietary platforms, I think they prefer _good_
platforms, and will put that desire over "is it open source or not." But, I
think you also can't split that by "platform", that is, in some areas, the
open source aspect wins out. There are also hybrid platforms, with some open-
ness, some close-ness. I think ultimately my point is "most developers are not
free software absolutists."

------
realty_geek
Just a sidenote Steve - I met you briefly at a rails event in Berlin about 6
years ago and you were inspirational. Love the fact that you're a super humble
guy working your pants off for the community. Super busy right now (yes I
shouldn't be on hacker new right now but you know how it goes :) but I'm going
to have a proper look at your article as soon as I get a bit of time. Its sure
to be insightfull.

~~~
steveklabnik
Thank you :)

------
readingnews
I take minor aim a this part:

"but what people care about most today is about the production of software.
Software licences regulate distribution, but cannot regulate production.
(technically they can, but practically, they can’t. I get into this below.)"

Interestingly, I did not see the part where he really gets into this. Speaking
of history, I think one thing is forgotten here: before open source, how did
you produce software?? By buying closed source software, of course! So, this
is the catch-22. You claim they care about the production of software, but
without open source tools, you would then be at the mercy of closed source
systems in order to build your software. I am not saying it is bad, but I
would have never really gotten into software without GNU... Turbo-C from Mix
software was cheap, but the others were too far out of reach. One day I woke
up and the tools were too expensive. I don't think we want to go back there...
to the same place our phones are in now.

------
sanxiyn
Free software was always about users, not developers, hence unrelated to
production aspect. Maybe open source was about developers?

~~~
cr0sh
You are probably correct in this assessment; it's something I've thought
about, as in "Why do so many developers hate the GPL, and prefer things like
the MIT license and others?"

I think - I'm not sure - that developers have "forgotten" that they are users,
too.

It's probably also an age-related thing. There's a large group of developers
who don't remember - they weren't even born yet! - how software used to be in
the 1970s and 80s. How everything was extremely proprietary - and costly to
purchase. Heck, just a simple C compiler could set you back hundreds or
thousands of dollars (and we're talking dollars back then - not today's).

They also don't know or remember times of a company going under, and taking
the support of that proprietary software with them, and the mad (and
expensive) scramble to find something else, depending on what the software was
for. They never experienced Borland going under, as developers (or any number
of other development tools companies for that matter - Lattice C, anyone?). Or
the number of companies that supplied software to businesses going under, or
being acquired (usually by CA or IBM - with varying levels of "continued
support").

They forgot - or never understood - why Stallman created the FSF and the GPL
in the first place. Recent events, and probably future ones unfortunately,
will likely make them recall their history, hopefully.

Me, personally, as a developer, always liked the GPL. It isn't great for a
business; it makes it difficult to sell such software, because you have to
provide the source code - but from a developer perspective, I've always looked
at it as the currency being paid as being the source code.

In other words, by using the GPL for my code, I'm saying "if you use my code,
and develop something, and distribute it - I want to be paid". Other licenses,
they don't have to do anything - not even a mention in some cases (outside of
the BSD - which they can then easily bury elsewhere). But with the GPL - they
do have to pay you, as the developer, something in return: They have to pay
you with source code.

Source code won't feed you. It won't keep the lights on, or a roof over your
head. However, as a software developer, being paid in source code is valuable.
It means that (in theory) my code can be made more useful for others, that
those additions and changes can live on, and that the product - in theory -
won't go away if or when I go away, or the company I am a part of goes away.
The code - and the product it is - will remain available. The legacy of it can
remain. It won't be buried.

To me, that's valuable - in some ways, more so than cash. Maybe because source
code is what we make; it's our legacy - the artifact and mark we leave behind.
In a way, it's our art. We want it to continue to exist, for people to look at
it and hopefully enjoy it, to know who created it.

With both licensing (and to an extent, DRM, which is related) getting in the
way - it is possible to erase this legacy from the society.

To end this - I've found great pleasure in unearthing very old code from
various places and "things" on the internet; most of the time, it's been a
private endeavor, but at some point I want to get the code back out for
general use (that is, I want the code to live on). In some cases, I've found
this code in weird scanned research papers from the 1960s and 70s, dealing
with strange subjects (for instance, I found some stuff on 3D programming in
BASIC in a set of papers by someone at the USGS in the 1970s). Technically,
the code isn't "open source" (I'm not sure what it is, since it was paid with
tax dollars - probably not public domain, but I don't know) - but I think the
author and their code should be recognized, as a contribution to the history
of computing.

------
ndesaulniers
An excellent essay that puts to words something I've been feeling of for a
long time. Particularly:

"following the letter, but not the spirit,"

I'm unhappy with the GPL because companies do the bare minimum to comply, and
sometimes make their forks difficult to even find.

And freedom to me means freedom to have propriety forks, because either your
downstream fork plans to last as long as upstream, in which case diverging
from upstream makes rebasing more and more costly over time (incentivising you
to minimize that divergence as that's less work/cost in terms of
maintainership), or you have a very shortlived product that won't be relevant
for long.

And the point about paying developers to still contribute to upstream even
when downstream has propriety bits is lost in a lot of people.

------
fartcannon
All these articles about licensing are starting to feel a lot like Microsoft's
not-that-old 'Get The Facts' FUD campaign.

Anyone else get the feeling they're being manipulated by a campaign?

~~~
steveklabnik
I am unemployed, so I'm at my most free to talk right now :) So not these
posts at least!

~~~
fartcannon
Your employment situation doesn't really change the fact that you could have
been affected by previous articles. The tone of your article reminds me a bit
of what stuff Miguel de Icaza used to write, for example.

------
monetus
When it comes to verifying the process, I do think issue trackers are going to
have to be included in the version control software. Off the top of my head, I
can only think of fossil that does that. [https://fossil-
scm.org/index.html/doc/tip/www/index.wiki](https://fossil-
scm.org/index.html/doc/tip/www/index.wiki)

Also, thank you for writing this. It is fascinating.

------
astazangasta
>What I am saying is that refusing to use a wifi connection on your laptop
because there aren’t free drivers helps basically nobody, and only harms
yourself.

This is wrong. Doing this forces you to confront the deficiencies of free
software, the lack of available free software, and strongly encourages you to
support development of alternatives. Just like being vegan encourages the
growth of a market for vegan products.

~~~
steveklabnik
I also was strictly vegan for a while, and lost that religion too. For sort of
similar reasons! I think it's too focused on the ethics of one part of the
situation, and misses the whole.

~~~
zanny
The value in strictly adhering to religions like software freedom or veganism
isn't so much to cause any meaningful change yourself - you are actively
harming your own experiences and potential in restricting yourself in most any
way dogma would limit you - but it projects to those around you an adherence
to that belief that can inspire and promote the change in those you directly
interact with.

This happens in all manner of things - politics, old school regular religions,
intellectualism, scientific literacy, rationalism - for the ideas to spread
you need prophets and priests to spread the word and adherents to project
legitimacy to attract converts. But pretty much any belief system, followed
dogmatically, is not for your own personal empowerment - its self sacrifice
for the cause.

~~~
projektir
The point is that the presumed benefits of said dogma just don't seem to be
there. Mostly these things concentrate around people for whom the sacrifice is
relatively small and scare off everyone else with the holier than thou
attitude.

~~~
astazangasta
The entire technology stack the modern Internet is built on exists because
Stallman clung to his dogma, how's that for "presumed benefit"? Stallman isn't
the world's smartest person or best programmer or even a particularly gifted
organizer. His superpower is his fanaticism. And it worked.

~~~
projektir
I think his technical contributions are much more relevant here than the
dogma, which, as I said, seems to be scaring people away to this day.

~~~
zanny
There is ample evidence that in the absence of substantial GPL contributions
(Linux kernel, KHTML, GCC, etc) there would be a much reduced substantive body
of influential free code available.

Apple in 1998 definitely weighed their options between writing their own
proprietary browser engine vs forking a GPL one. To this day almost all free
software hardware device support is exclusively due to how second class
proprietary drivers play in the Linux driver ecosystem. Before the prevalence
of GCC compilers were one of the deepest and most tightly protected
proprietary secrets of corporations.

And _none_ of that would have happened with permissive licenses because it
required compulsory source disclosure to force businesses to contribute back.
The alternative is what we see Sony do with their Playstation OSes - they
built the PS3 and PS4 OS off FreeBSD, but neither contribute code back to said
projects, provide any sponsorship or support (dozens of companies do, but the
one making grotesque profits by exploiting user freedom isn't), and use an
open source product to cripple fully functional computers with unmodifiable
proprietary operating systems.

We would absolutely be in the PS4 world in regards to almost all software if
the free software movement didn't push its dogma in the 90s.

------
zokier
> It’s that the source being open is a necessary, but not sufficient,
> component of being open source

I would really have preferred if some other term than "open source" would have
been used to refer this wider concept of openess, in this paragraph and the
ones that follow. The article itself establishes that open source is all about
license, and thus argues it to be insufficient for todays environment.

------
catchmeifyoucan
Software can be paid. But paid and open source is fine. I like to think of it
as fixing a car, can’t do it, if you can’t open the hood.

------
return0
Imagine asking to certify your completely open software that , e.g. prints 3d
guns. Free also means free from gatekeepers

~~~
int_19h
Any such scheme would require some objective rules for certification, not
dissimilar to what OSI does with licenses really.

I doubt that a scheme that would take this sort of thing into account would be
popular, for the same reasons why licenses that try to do that never became
popular with the FOSS crowd.

------
sevensor
I think the certification proposal basically comes back to licensing, if I
read it right. "We'll extend you a license if you have the proper
certificate." I have a hard time imagining a way of enforcing good behavior
that doesn't hinge on restricting some parties' ability to use the software.

~~~
steveklabnik
Yes, I tried to say that in the piece. Sorry if that wasn't clear!

> I have a hard time imagining a way of enforcing good behavior that doesn't
> hinge on restricting some parties' ability to use the software.

Absolutely, but I think this problem is inherent. There is no such thing as
"no restrictions," so doing so is impossible.

~~~
sevensor
Thanks for clarifying! I think I got hung up on the part where you were saying
that licenses cannot give us the kind of community we want. (Which I agree
with.) In my utopian fantasies, every software project has a constitution as
well as a license, defining how the project is governed, who may participate,
what participation looks like, what obligations you undertake by using the
software, how the constitution itself may be changed, provisions for an
afterlife if the project is abandoned.

Real-world voluntary organizations like grocery co-ops have long operated on
this model, and some software projects, notably Debian, actually have
constitutions. The Debian model, however, doesn't place any obligations on
Debian's users, doesn't even acknowledge their existence. Their specific
constitution has a lot of other weaknesses in terms of its ability to
generalize, but the existence of the constitution seems like a very good idea.

------
jgamman
i don't see anyone saying the problem with OS is "developers have to eat" \- i
mean honestly, when did the concept of "a fair days pay for a fair days work"
become anathema? Even wildly successful OS packages don't generate enough $$
for the developer to just work on it full time - i mean it's cents per user
kind of levels would generate enough for a handful of full-time developers
(sagemath is the one i'm thinking of specifically but all sorts of critical
plumbing seems to be in the same boat).

I get in the old days that builders/users were the same people and sharing OS
code made sense but those days are long gone.

you don't have a problem with licences - you have a problem with an economy
that expects a major _critical_ chunk of it to work for free. well it aint me,
it aint me - i aint no fortunate one, no...

------
burtonator
The issue with Open Source and software freedom has its roots in economics.

As long as massive companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple harness pay LESS
taxes than you or I and harness 99% of the economic value we're facing an
uphill battle.

------
MangezBien
Is it true that developers are rabidly anti-union? I feel like this may be
changing. I think the discussion is very relevant to the npm layoffs.

~~~
cr0sh
> Is it true that developers are rabidly anti-union?

To me it seems this way; there are pros and cons to unionizing - while there
hasn't been a formal discussion, obviously, developers have seemed to have
selected for "no unionizing".

I recall there being a call for a union and efforts toward this back in 1998
or thereabouts; 20 years ago roughly. It died out rather rapidly. Maybe
related to the dot-com implosion, I don't know.

But...something is going to need to be done. We are rapidly either heading
toward needing a union, or we'll be forced to be certified and/or licensed,
much in the same way actual engineers are. Maybe a combo of those things.

We are seeing software being integrated more and more into devices and
machines that can and do put people into life threatening situations. Self-
driving vehicles, drive-by-wire controls, and other things - while none not
actually "new" \- have been failing in ways that are much more public than in
the past, and has caused discussion on the idea of "who is at fault".

Companies are ultimately going to want to shift the burden from them, to their
employees. I'm honestly surprised it's taken this long - and the fact that it
still hasn't occurred ; I'm not sure why that is.

~~~
morenoh149
If your question is "why haven't software engineers unionized?" the answer may
be that the average software engineer doesn't get mad enough to start a union.
haha

------
carapace
You've always got to remember that the whole FOSS enchilada got started when
RMS wanted to fix his printer and Xerox said, "No."

\- - - -

Two main reasons to touch a computer: study formal systems, create wealth.

Mathematicians learned (in the Renaissance) to share their work. So if all you
want to do is study the nature of formal systems you're good to go. (I can
vouch for this. You don't need money to learn (although it helps.) Personally,
I was more interested in the former and only "cashed in" later in life when
being a homeless scholar got old.)

If you want to produce wealth using automation, there are two main strategies:
maximize wealth, extract "rent".

The latter is relatively familiar: e.g. keep the generator and sell the
electricity. In computers it's the "smart phone" that (while ostensible a
portable computer) functions as a kind of shopping mall and arcade: the thing
is _designed to get your money._ (It's impressive! People line up at the Apple
store to be told how much money to put in the box to make the sacred artifact
work again. No wonder Apple is sitting on a huge hoard of cash.)

The former, maximize wealth, is a little more obscure. Bucky Fuller is perhaps
the best exemplar of the concept. In a nutshell, we have the technology
_already_ to create a "utopian" economic reality. Everybody _could_ have the
food, shelter, medical care, etc. to live a decent life, if only we applied
the technology we already have to our basic needs. We can't solve every
problem through tech, but we can and should solve the problems that are in
reach.

From the POV of someone trying to maximize humanity's total wealth, the Free
(copyleft) licenses are a tool, as steveklabnik says:

> The FSF sees copyleft, and therefore copyright, as a legal tool to enforce
> software freedom.

But "software freedom" is just an obvious corollary to building the automation
feedback loop to achieve economic phase transition to a post-scarcity regime.

\- - - -

As for how software should be produced going forward, first, there should be a
general _contraction_ in the amount of code in the world and of the number of
people writing it. The current situation is a kind of "Thundering Herd" attack
on human attention and memory.

To support contraction you need a formalism (notation or language) that makes
it easy. Most of the necessary research has already been accomplished. The
limiting factor is uptake. I suspect that it would be a thankless task, an
uphill battle, to try to get existing computer industry to adopt, so that
suggests that you have to take it directly to consumers (and businesses.) Just
bypass everything.

------
elpakal
Open models

------
jpetso
In a way, (A)GPL is the proprietary license of the community. Anything that's
licensed under (A)GPL will compete with corporate interests, rather than be
shared among competitors.

When you have competition, you can pick a different market or you can develop
a compelling alternative. In the spirit of "Commoditize Your Complement", the
corporate competition realized that the value proposition these days is not
really in operating systems and toolchains anymore, so they're commodify
infrastructure GPL code - with MIT/BSD on the client side, e.g. clang and
Fuchsia for GCC and Linux, and GPL on the server side, e.g. Amazon adding
missing features to Elasticsearch and Microsoft's supporting server-side
Linux.

The libre-minded community can fight this commodification, but it's a lost
battle. As more infrastructure becomes a commodity, competition for value-add
needs to move up the stack. Google, Amazon and Microsoft are now competing in
providing computing services. Facebook doesn't mind giving away tons of
server-side frameworks, as long as they can continue to harvest our attention.
Google and Apple are providing value in integration of devices, so their
marketplaces continue to gain market share. So the question is, with operating
systems being a lost cause, where can the community still compete?

I can think of only a few:

* Privacy: User data is part of companies' competitive advantage, so they're naturally disadvantaged in this area. Hasn't traditionally been valued highly by the masses though.

* Price: Displacing expensive competition works for professional creative software such as as Krita or Blender. Doesn't generally work for cheap, user-data-financed apps though, or for operating systems. Attempts to incentivize hardware vendors with a lack of license fees proved ineffective due to the existing popularity of proprietary alternatives and the extra attention/volume that comes with it.

* Convenience / UX: Not popping up annoying "Subscribe!!" dialogs has a certain value, although this may be neutralized by the extra attention that email subscriptions provide to companies, and by the possibilities that come with being able to promote only a single, well-integrated product by the same company.

* Interoperability: Would only be a competitive advantage if community-controlled software had a market share that's large enough to single out non-standardized solutions such as Chromecast or anything that Apple does. Generally only valued once people are already locked in and want out, so doesn't help much.

* Small scale / not profitable: Companies can't compete on stuff that they won't make money on. So far, this has been mitigated by monetizing a lack of otherwise unprofitable products via collecting user data. If the targeted market is small enough though, data-supported monetization may still not pay off while hobbyists aren't constrained by such concerns. Good starting point, but becomes less of an advantage as a project gets larger / more useful to more people. I'd include decentralization initiatives in this category, except that if we want something to be a standard protocol then there should also be open specifications and a permissively-licensed reference implementation.

* Existing technological advantage: It looks to me like Linux is pretty much the only piece of GPL software that has no available licensable alternative and can't feasibly be replaced by a well-funded upstart. (Even so, Fuchsia is coming and it won't be pretty for future hardware support of Free operating systems.)

Anything that doesn't provide a competitive advantage like one or more of the
above won't be competitive with corporate software in the long run. If it
can't or doesn't have to compete, whether you license it as (A)GPL doesn't
matter, so it may as well be MIT/BSD in many cases. But maybe not in all
cases!

------
intelliderp
Open source was such a powerful movement. In 2011, I was making six figures in
a major city for a huge company. Then, I got laid off and couldn't afford rent
anymore, so I had to move back to my hometown in another state that same
month. I had barely any savings at all due to the relocation costs I just paid
to move to said city.

I pulled a 5-year-old desktop computer out of storage, bought a new $50 hard
drive for it, put my resume on Craigslist (of all places), installed Ruby on
Rails and all my development tools, and within two weeks I had a job working
from home for $40 an hour. I didn't have to re-certify, renew any licenses, or
pay anyone any fees of any kind. I didn't lose access to any tools I relied on
in my previous job. My only expense for maintaining my employability was $50.
I have a four-year degree only.

I don't know of any other industry where that's possible, and I don't know if
it's possible to do that in this industry anymore. I know it is because of the
hard work of the open source movement. I've been thinking a lot about how to
preserve that level of economic empowerment in software. I don't think the
answer is in licenses, but in something like a union (although you are right
in that most developers are rabidly anti-union). Perhaps an alternative
corporate structure would have the same result, and that's why I decided to
start the first for-profit software collective.

~~~
morenoh149
Where is the idea that software engineers are anti-union coming from? I'd like
to know.

I like the idea of a software union and would love to flesh that out. Its been
well documented that the FANNG corps have been suppressing wages for several
years. Software is eating the world and if we have a role in that creation we
should have a larger portion of the benefits.

~~~
morenoh149
@intelliderp you got buried. I'd love to see links to such anti-union hn
discussions. I kinda get that HN is very capitalistic and unions check
reckless capitalism. But at the same time HN is very dev focused and unions
promise larger benefits/money to devs.

I'll go on the record saying I'm pro dev union. Even if its just a glorified
professional organization. I'd love to hear the holes in the argument.

The corporations are financially motivated to prevent unionization. If you
want a piece of the future you have to be just as savvy.

One tricky bit is if unionizing just causes a massive exodus of development to
offshore. Thoughts on that?

~~~
steveklabnik
Here's a recent HN discussion about unions:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19433610](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19433610)

You can read the thread and draw your own conclusions. My impression is taken
from reading a number of these threads over years; I could be wrong!

~~~
morenoh149
My guess is that that sentiment arises from the meritocratic attitude that if
you are disproportionately talented you should be compensated much much more.
And I get that. To a point.

I don't like when corporations collude to artificially suppress wages either.
Or when information asymmetry is used to keep an engineer's salary low or
prevent negotiating higher salaries.

I'll read that discussion.

------
fxfan
Very well written article, as usual from Steve.

How's the job search going?

~~~
steveklabnik
Thanks.

It's going well! Hope to have what's next sorted this week :) Stay tuned!

------
throwaway11992
> refusing to use a wifi connection on your laptop because there aren’t free
> drivers helps basically nobody

[citation needed]

What if the mild inconvenience encourages people to write a free driver or
donate to the developers? It happens all the time.

> and only harms yourself

...or it encourages me to work on an alternative. I often contribute to GPL
software. As a side effect, it really improved my skill and career.

------
bojanz
Fascinating article, and one that matches my recent thinking.

I am a part of a large GPL open source project, but am not sure that the GPL
made a big difference there, since "distribution" is a loophole large enough
to drive a truck through. If you extend & modify software just for your site /
your client's site, you have no obligations.

Conceptually, a great followup article is Kyle E. Mitchell's "Unhappy
Coincidences", published last year:
[https://writing.kemitchell.com/2018/08/28/Unhappy-
Coincidenc...](https://writing.kemitchell.com/2018/08/28/Unhappy-
Coincidences.html)

Nowadays, I gravitate towards permissive licenses because I feel that people
and companies contribute largely out of self interest, not because a license
compels them to.

~~~
blotter_paper
I prefer permissive licenses, but doesn't AGPL address the distribution
"problems" of GPL?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Affero_General_Public_Lice...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Affero_General_Public_License)

~~~
bojanz
Yes. And by closing the loophole while staying viral, it makes it unlikely
that anyone would ever use AGPL code.

For example, if you use an AGPL CMS to power your website, you now need to
open source the entire thing.

So, I'm not saying that it is necessary to have a stronger copyleft license, I
am saying that the existing copyleft license was successful because people
were able to often ignore it.

A lot of energy has been spent discussing the reach of GPL's virality, and its
loopholes. When it comes to copyleft, the Mozilla Public License 2.0 has a
much saner approach by avoiding virality all together. Share changes to the
code you received, keep the rest.

------
username223
I agree with most of what you've said: popular modern "Open Source" projects
are mostly just corporations uploading more-or-less obfuscated source code
from time to time. If I found a bug in Chrome, Safari, or Firefox, my first
move to fix it would be to get hired by Google, Apple, or Mozilla. In other
words, I'll just sigh and move on.

But I'd disagree with you here:

> I believe that this focus on process is why the GNU project has fallen out
> of favor as well. The tools that the GNU project uses to develop its Free
> Software are arcane, ugly, and unique to them.

GNU and other old-school projects (Perl, Python) are the only large Free
Software or Open Source efforts to which I would consider trying to
contribute. They have spent years building reputations and creating
communities. I don't care whether I submit a bug or patch through email or
GitHub, but I do care whether or not my effort will have a real effect.

~~~
steveklabnik
I spoke a bit too strongly in that sentence, it should have said _one of the
reasons_.

Funny enough, I tried to submit a patch to make a while back, and got one
reply where the maintainer misunderstood me, I tried to provide clarification,
and then radio silence for the past few years. Whereas I've gotten thousands
upon thousands of patches through on Github. I agree with you that I care most
about impact, but I've had much more impact via GitHub than via Savannah.

------
craigsmansion
> "card-carrying"

> "I used to see Stallman lecture."

I see this more often. Is this somehow to indicate the level of engagement you
felt? Because Free Software is about the 4 software freedoms, everything else
is maybe your own romanticised version of what that should mean, and you
somehow felt let down by those expectations. And that's regrettable, but
ultimately very much your own experience, and mentioning it lends no credence
to any argument.

> I started noticing that these beliefs weren’t really actually helpful, and
> were frankly, mostly harmful.

No, not "these beliefs", _your_ beliefs, as reality likely didn't quite pan
out as you expected it would.

> even though I was a passionate Free Software advocate, I found myself near-
> exclusively building Open Source software.

Maybe you're not the best person to write about "Free Software" vs "Open
Source", or what would or should come "after Open Source".

~~~
fartcannon
Right? It strikes me that perhaps he doesn't know what he wants. This is not a
F/OSS issue, this is a bureaucratic issue.

~~~
steveklabnik
Over the course of twenty years, especially in the twenty before your first
thirty, many people grow, change, refine their understanding of themselves and
the world around them, and reject beliefs they previously held. That’s just a
part of being human.

