| > Open source software is more than a license and code. It is a community and the digital public square. Unfortunately, there's absolutely nothing about the OSS community that actually instills this mantra in people. I like to think that I also see OSS as a community and digital public square, but there's no universality to that philosophy. > Either we as a community hold ourselves and others within our community to a higher standard than the text of a license, or licenses will inevitably become increasingly restrictive in the future, to the detriment of all. There's just no way that the community will ever do this because there are inherently conflicting incentives to participating in OSS. If you tried to explicitly motivate people to do this, you'd immediately get pushback from the individualistic elements of the community that don't want to participate in something that they feel is politically motivated or that Amazon did nothing wrong. OSS is a great thing that has tremendously benefited the industry, but the idealism of a community acting together without any consequences or incentives to do so is truly folly. As much as I wish OSS had more of a true community feel to it (and I think there are little pockets where this is tangibly felt), OSS largely exists to provide tools for commercial software development. Those people are out to build businesses and accrue wealth, not fortify the OSS community. I'm sure there are people that actually work to accomplish both, but the vast majority of founders and companies I've worked for in my career don't see OSS as a community. They see it as a giant puzzle box where each piece is an OSS project and their goal is connect pieces together in order to sell a product to somebody. Get acquired/IPO and you've solved the puzzle. |
I'm beginning to question this. The proliferation and commoditization of F/OSS is what made SaaS business thrive, and made it so that integration and polish is the only avenue left to make a buck, leading to our paltry attention economy, oligopoly, and platform lock-in by network effects. This after decades of personal computing striving to liberate users from mainframes. F/OSS is also drying out - when was the last time you used a piece of software that truly achieved something useful on its own rather than solving a perceived problem that only exists because of the idiosyncratic nature of the web and cloud stacks? Meanwhile, maintainers of popular F/OSS get nothing in return.