
Ask HN: Is open source, as we know it, dying? - akswamy
Yesterday IBM acquiring RedHat was all over the news just as Microsoft finished formally acquiring Github. Last month Alphabet announced it is investing heavily in Gitlab.<p>Apart from high profile acquisitions and investments in open source projects by tech companies such as the above, open source projects are merging as well. The node.js and the Javascript foundation, for example, announced a merger.<p>On the culture front, there has been a renewed interest in making communities more welcoming to all resulting in high profile OS projects like the Linux kernel revamping their code of conduct. This has not been without backlash from some existing community loyalists who see the move as politically driven rather than community driven. On a slightly tangential note, Python lost its BDFL owing to burnt out that resulted from managing such a massive project for years. Once again highlighting how the culture does not even spare people at the top.<p>All these trends seem to point towards a move for professionally managed communities that value scalable stability over a close-knit passionate communities driven by individuals.<p>What do you make of all this? Is open source dying? And are these worrying times or exciting times?
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RickSanchez2600
Open Source is evolving not dying. It takes a lot of money to develop
something from scratch in the corporate world, in the OSS world people do it
as a hobby. Red Hat sells a server version and Fedora is free, but CentOS is
the free version of Red Hat Server.

OSS companies are the new Bell Labs inventing the new software to be used by
the masses. The thing about Linux is if you don't like one company you can
easily switch to another Debian instead of Mint Linux or Ubuntu for example.
IBM is only going to buy Red Hat but the source code is still open sourced and
free to use and compile.

IBM got out of the PC and Server markets for hardware and had to find a new
market, Linux, to get into in order to bring more money to shareholders.

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akswamy
Rightly pointed out. Thanks Rick.

But do you think there is a likelihood of the new management influencing
projects that RedHat should or shouldn't prioritize?

Essentially, the goals of open source organizations and for-profit businesses
have diverged at least in one way: Open source tends to tinker, explore and
take the long-term view just as you've pointed out 'they are the modern bell
labs'. While businesses, on the other hand, are driven by growth and profit,
often ruthlessly chasing them for their investors - evident from the quarterly
earnings calls. Google is famous for dropping its products over time, even if
they have a loyal user base simply because they don't make financial sense
anymore. Is there a danger of this myopia rubbing on OS?

Businesses are great at extracting efficiencies. Do you feel open source could
do with more of leaning down and setting of ambitious commercial goals?

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RickSanchez2600
Open Source needs to evolve in such a way to attract corporate entities to
fund research via donations or investments.

Right now there are a few operating systems not based on BSD Unix or Linux
called ReactOS, Haiku, and AROS that were created via open source and need
funding or corporate investment to make them reach Windows or OSX level
quality and marketability. Modern apps need to be made for these operating
systems that is the weakness. Modern apps that can use the DOCX or ODF files
or whatever the standard Windows and OSX systems use.

OSFree is an OS/2 rewrite that really could use help, I think it is a good
idea but it isn't even ready for prime-time.

Businesses only see money and how to make it, by having IP. So they don't want
to develop for OSS and give away IP and take a risk in being sued if the code
goes wrong and deletes files (Like the Windows 10 October 2018 update did).
The Open Source organization doesn't see making money and only wants to write
the best code on a budget and have quality results. Businesses want cheaper
programmers and lower quality code as long as deadlines are met.

Yeah Oracle buying out Sun and dumping OpenOffice.org and trying to downplay
MySQL to promote their own database are two examples of how a business can
mess up OSS. Yet still VirtualBox is a good VM in my opinion and I am glad
they kept that.

Open Source organizations I believe do a better job at quality with a
benevolent dictator accepting patches like Linus with Linux. I doubt a company
can make such a good quality, but Linus does it without the billions of
dollars of funding in R&D. He does it with hobbyists and volunteers.

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flukus
> Businesses only see money and how to make it, by having IP. So they don't
> want to develop for OSS and give away IP

This is only true of tech companies, there is a lot of potential funding out
there in non-tech companies, OSS has been huge for them but they're generally
not great at contributing back. If we could somehow bring them in and divorce
OSS from tech companies that would be a huge win.

~~~
RickSanchez2600
Non-Tech companies barely know how to protect themselves from hackers and
ransomware than know how to program and contribute to OSS projects.

In my experience in working with non-tech companies IT departments the
managers don't know how the tech works so they cannot properly manage it. A
tech company has managers that know how to manage technology and programming.
So you need that for the non-tech companies but managers don't want to learn
or be replaced with managers who already know.

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krapp
I suppose if you require "open source" to only be composed of "close-knit
passionate communities driven by individuals" who coalesce around some
particular anti-progressive ideology and the cult of personality of a BDFL,
then... still probably not.

Because as you mention, these trends seem to apply to "professionally managed
communities that value scalable stability," which is itself a legitimate
concern for some projects and not antithetical to open source as a concept,
and an outlier in regards to open source as a whole.

It's like the oft-cited argument that "the internet" is becoming corporate and
centralized because out of the billions upon billions of sites on the web two
or three are really popular... it's a failure to see the forest for the trees.

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sytse
I want to clarify that last month the main investment in GitLab in our series
D was from Iconiq. Google Ventures (GV) did our C round and did (part of)
their pro-rata in the D round, similar to other investors like Khosla
Ventures.

GV is part of Alphabet but independent of Google or Capital G. The $100m D
round GitLab raised is intended to get us to an IPO on November 18, 2020. We
see a multi-cloud future and no public cloud has a controlling stake nor a
board seat in GitLab.

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pictur
I think it's alarming times. large companies want to monopolize the open
source. I do not think that open days are waiting for good days in the future.

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informatimago
They cannot monopolize it: anybody can always write yet another program, and
distribute it with a copyleft license. Anybody can fork an existing free
software, and make his own derived version, with his own features. And when I
say anybody, that includes any group of persons too.

Of course, this would be truer, if we didn't talk about open source, but about
freedom-giving software licenses.

