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by tannhaeuser 2078 days ago
> OSS is a great thing that has tremendously benefited the industry

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.
6 comments
pwdisswordfish0 2078 days ago
> The proliferation and commoditization of F/OSS is what made SaaS business thrive[...] after decades of personal computing striving to liberate users from mainframes.

That's because of developers' (read: devops folk) own narrow focus of open source. When someone talks about open source having won, they're referring to how their company has three dozen services published on GitHub that can somehow be strung together to approximate 60% of what their company is actually putting in people's hands at the end of the day. That's open source for you.

Stallman and his acolytes had it right all along about focusing on free software as a philosophy meant to empower users and not career programmers (who already generally make more than the average household...). It doesn't matter if a smattering of SaaSsy services are open source if (a) it's mired in the sort of headaches that are par for the course in devops today with respect to actually being able to run the thing, and (b) the app that real, actually people are jabbing with their fingers and literally touching is still proprietary.

So it's not a problem of too much open source; it's a problem of not enough, and a problem of eschewing with the user-focused underpinnings of free software along the way, to instead follow the career devopser's AWS/GitHub/whatever-powered path while advertising it as win. To borrow liberally from Alan Kay, the computing revolution hasn't been won—because it has not yet even happened.

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save_ferris 2078 days ago
> 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.

Do I think F/OSS played a role in these issues? Absolutely. Do I think it's the primary role in causing these issues? Definitely not. I'd argue that weak antitrust law, ill-intentioned VC money, and lack of oversight of software titans play the biggest role in what you've described here. Yes, F/OSS gave the companies tools to iterate over app development quickly, but they were pushed for hockey stick growth and total market domination by the checkbooks, and the government has completely failed to police their behavior. F/OSS gave people with questionable incentives the ability to do questionable things, but it didn't create the motivation to do those questionable things.

> 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?

I actually use a fair amount of F/OSS that is independently useful to me, projects like Hammerspoon, MIDIMonitor, VLC, MuseScore, and others. Yes, the majority of F/OSS that I use is for commercial purposes, but that's certainly not exclusive.

> Meanwhile, maintainers of popular F/OSS get nothing in return.

I completely agree with this, and I think it's one of the most critical problems to the F/OSS movement.

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Intermernet 2078 days ago
"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?"

Go and Rust. Probably unpopular opinions, but I'm very glad those two languages are open source.

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pwdisswordfish0 2078 days ago
I'd bet that this outlook is the sort of narrow-sighted, can't-even-understand-the-question sort of thinking that the person you're responding to had in mind when asking the question—as what not to focus on when talking about the successes of FOSS. That even with the point made in a very straightforward way it gets responses like this is a huge signal of what sort of problem we're dealing with.

Go and Rust amount to infrastructure, not software that "truly achieve[s] something useful on its own".

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dboreham 2078 days ago
It benefitted the hardware industry in the same way free gasoline would benefit the auto industry.
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ryukafalz 2078 days ago
> 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?

All the time. One I use every day? Emacs. (Which long predates anything web or cloud related.) For a more recently developed example? Guix.

Setting aside the fact that a very large portion of the software I use outside work is free software.

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pas 2078 days ago
SaaS was a natural emergence from the Internet. Software is eating the world, and eventually it will eat itself too.
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