
​Open source is 20: How it changed programming and business forever - CrankyBear
http://www.zdnet.com/article/open-source-turns-20/
======
rectang
Open source empowers software authors, giving them more control over their
creations than deadline-driven company funding can (even when management is
well-meaning).

At the same time, open source does not harm capital -- in many cases it
presents a superior alternative to proprietary competition and thus is a
better investment.

It seems to me that Open Source achieves certain aspects of what we might hope
for from unions and guilds and other models of labor organization -- a strong,
mutually beneficial framework for the collaboration of labor and capital.

~~~
paulryanrogers
Rarely beneficial for labors' wages, on the whole.

~~~
rectang
Hmm, what does that mean?

Open source increases the ability of individual authors to develop skills
which are transferable, which is advantageous in the job market.
Simultaneously, being able to hire expertise in a given open source technology
is valuable enough that it is worthwhile for companies to pay a premium for
it.

So I'd assert that indeed, open source is beneficial for labor's wages. (At
least for those workers who participate in it, as there is a barrier to entry
which is easier to overcome if you have the time and resources to invest.)

~~~
paulryanrogers
Transferable skills is a good point.

I was thinking more of the value developers created being more freely
accessible, and therefore making employers/consumers less willing to pay for
it.

Companies would pay to develop/buy non-core software such as for
infrastructure which they can now get nearly free. On the whole FOSS seems to
push the money into the hands of service company owners, since services are
not themselves FOSS (usually, excluding AGPL).

------
open-source-ux
Despite the passage of time, is it any easier today for a small startup or
individual developer to make a living from their open source product?

Thousands of developers make money building products or services for clients
or customers using open source software. But what if the developer simply
wants to charge a business for using their open source product?

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) says that you can sell your free software
by charging for distribution [1] (for example via CD-ROMs). But while physical
media may have made sense in an era of dial-up modems and low-bandwidth
connections, no-one can realistically charge for distribution today - not
least when so many projects are hosted for free on GitHub.

So what's the alternative if you aren't a large company? There's the dual-
licencing approach (Red Hat). The open core approach (GitLab). There's also
the option of charging for support only (probably the most unattractive and
unappealing option for many developers). Or there's the Kickstarter or Patreon
approach (e.g. Krita) which simply isn't a sustainable long-term solution.

For developers who want to support themselves with their open source product,
it seems amazing that we have no licencing model for the following scenario:

 _I have an open source product. It will forever be open source. You are free
to evaluate the software as long as you need to. If you are a business, you
must pay a fee to use the software if you wish to continue using it after
evaluation. You don 't get more features for paying the fee: there are no
closed-sourced extensions available for additional cost. There is no tracking
of software usage - we rely on your goodwill to pay for the software if you
use it for your business._

What, if anything, is unrealistic or unreasonable about this scenario? And do
current open source licences support it?

[1]
[https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html)

~~~
cmsj
(Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat, but this post is my personal opinion, as
someone who has believed strongly in the moral superiority of Open Source,
since before I even knew such a term existed)

tl;dr, no.

If you make a great piece of software and then license it in a way that allows
for cost-free redistribution, you're definitely going to struggle to make
money if your models are all focussed around making money from distribution :)

You used the specific phrase "FOSS product" and then talked about various
approaches - none of which are actually FOSS products. There is certainly a
lot of FOSS involved, but to me, the "product" is what you sell, and
everything else is infrastructure. In each of those cases, what is being sold
as a product, mostly isn't even software, it's access to updates (as opposed
to the updates themselves), access to support, etc. Only the open core
approach is really relevant, and it's a terrible model full of horrible
tensions.

I think that the difficulty of making a truly "FOSS product" is one of the big
reasons why Linux on the desktop will never happen. High quality desktop
applications are really hard to write, and there's very little opportunity to
sell something around them, or use them to build something more. Linux on the
server, or Linux in devices though, happened easily because who doesn't want
to get all of the infrastructure you need to build cool/useful
products/services, for ~nothing!

So, in summary, IMHO FOSS shines for infrastructure projects, and it's
possible to make money from those, but usually only really by using them to
make something else.

------
jwatte
Open source is much older. I remember contributing to nethack 30 years ago,
and rogue was older than that.

Saying ESR defined open source is giving way too much credit.

~~~
acqq
Specifically:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Manifesto](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Manifesto)

“The GNU Manifesto was written by Richard Stallman and published in March
1985”

It is mentioned in the article.

~~~
cat199
GNU builds on (one interpretation of) an older
tradition/culture/practice/whatever of source redistribution which goes back
to the dawn of computing..

------
donarb
I recall the story about Bill Gates at Harvard in the 70's. Programmers there
would store programs on punched tape and leave it in a desk drawer. Others
were encouraged to use and modify the code and share their changes. Gates
balked at that idea. Surely an example of open source before it was formally
named.

~~~
cmsj
Correct. Open Source as an informal concept is how almost all software used to
work. It was folk like Bill Gates who saw an opportunity to make money by
making it proprietary.

Also, some of the formal concepts are more than 20 years old - e.g. Free
Software: the precursors of GPL-style copyleft go back to the mid-late 1980s
(GPL v1 was published 29 years ago this month).

~~~
acqq
For example:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists)

------
GuiA
For those who might not be familiar with the distinction, Stallman's article
"Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software" is worth a read:

[https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-
point....](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html)

~~~
romwell
That difference is also talked about in the linked article, but who reads
that? :)

------
yarrel
By allowing them to ignore user freedom.

~~~
rectang
The environment around "open source" is less litigious than the environment
around "free software" because of enforcement. This is key to the willingness
of companies to invest in open source products.

