
Questions on the Future of Open Source - diegopacheco
https://gist.github.com/skamille/78fcc0576a0db3e72c25ec0cf456f619
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jondubois
As the main author of a popular open source project, I can see a growing
divide between the OSS ecosystems of large corporations versus that of small
independent developers.

Large corporations tend to stay away from independent projects altogether. For
example, my project has several thousands of stars on GitHub and gets tens of
thousands of downloads. I've interacted with well known startups on many
occasions but I've only once interacted with someone from a very large and
well known corporation which was using my project and it was quite strange
because when I asked if I could mention the company on my customers page, they
told me that they have a policy against using their name as an endorsement...
Yet when I look at other 'mainstream/corporate' OSS projects, their website is
covered with big brand names.

I think that the problem is both that big corporations are less likely to use
independent projects and also that if they do use them (out of desperate
necessity), they don't want to admit it unless they know that other
corporations are also using it.

~~~
klft
> Large corporations tend to stay away from independent projects altogether.

Two possible reasons:

\- Risk assessment: In 2 - 5 years, will there still be further development,
bug fixes, especially of security bugs. Taking over responsibility for all
those abandoned projects is not an option.

\- Cultural differences: Large corporations understand requirements of other
large corporations better. Like long-term maintenance commitments.

~~~
Juliate
Count legal compliance too.

Legal departments in large consultancy companies have been working on "open
source policies" internally (mostly on the "using open source software" angle,
less on the "contributing" angle).

And those policies are specific/hard/complex enough to discourage public
endorsement.

For instance, use of GPL-based software is strictly forbidden (for good
reasons, when you take the perspective of the company); unless a specific
review by legal allows it, in which case, you've already been through several
layers of management with a convincing case for each of them.

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rjf72
In my opinion, this a tier away from the fundamental problem -- idealism. Many
open source projects have been driven by people that believed that society
would, one way or the other, commensurately reward them for their efforts. $0
and open source comes with with immense benefits: trivial adoption, social
signaling of various sorts, and sidestepping nearly all the immense hassles
and unpleasant issues involved in running a business - taxes, the actual
process of accepting money, a gazillion rules and regulations, etc.

The idea many people held (and still hold) is that if your project succeeds
you'll somehow be inevitably rewarded. But in general this idealism is not
really justified. The emergence of distributed computing 'exploiting' open
source projects is just another example of reality along the same lines as the
person who released an AI art generator and then was surprised when somebody
used that generator to produce a piece of art that auctioned for $400k, yet
chose to give exactly $0 back to the creator. Distributed computing working to
sort of 'centralize' free software is mostly just another example along the
same lines. Give something away for free and people will use it, monetize it,
and you will generally see nothing particularly substantial in return.

~~~
jlokier
Your comment reminds me about the podcast linked below, where the issue of
people hoping to be paid for their idealism in open source is discussed,
taking it further, to the idea that "corporate open source" is not only
parallel to "idealistic open source", it actually tends to produce community
pressure on people to continue working for free, and perpetuate a bit of an
illusion that they'll be paid some day.

It seems relevant to this thread.

"Corporate interests in open source and dev culture "with Zed Shaw" \-
[http://changelog.com/podcast/300](http://changelog.com/podcast/300)

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kierank
Uh, there's a whole world of Open Source out there beyond cloud-related tools
and JS libraries.

~~~
seabird
The problem presented is very foreign to me for this reason. Maybe it's
because I've never been sold on "the cloud" and have always detested web
development, but I would hope that the people who were drinking the Kool-Aid
would realize that there's only so many buttons you can make to push other
buttons before there's nowhere left to go.

A lot of the tools and libraries that I use every day are largely written and
maintained by a single developer or a small group of developers. Some of these
projects started before I was born and will keep on truckin' after I die. This
sort of development has its ups and downs, but it's a good life in the long
run.

~~~
lsh
which libraries do you use that are older than yourself?

are you very young and do you intend to die soon?

~~~
jlokier
BSD 1 was released in 1978, and was itself a derivative of Unix 1 released in
1971 and started in 1969.

BSD derived works (including parts of MacOS, Windows and GNU/Linux, and
numerous embedded devices like routers etc.) are still going strong today.

Most of the code will have been gradually replaced over such a long time, but
there are libraries which can trace a lineage that far back. libc and libm
come to mind.

Quite a few well known, non-trivial applications still used today were,
perhaps surprisingly, first released in the 1970s. Examples: grep, diff, cron,
awk, make.

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zzzcpan
> What happens when no new open source comes out of the smaller companies, and
> the big-3 decide they don't really need or want to play nice anymore?

Companies of all sizes can still benefit from releasing software as open
source, so it's not going anywhere. But of course the way big companies behave
is not getting unnoticed and is definitely going to reflect in future license
choices away from permissive licenses for smaller companies and startups.

~~~
sanxiyn
I hope AGPL gets popular and we return to free software root instead of so-
called "open source".

