[krspykrm]

Corporate sponsorship of open source is entirely dependent on top talent caring about open source and thus being more willing to tolerate working for EvilMegacorp if major pieces of the infrastructure they work on are open.

When top talent just accepts the big money contract regardless, corporations see little incentive to sponsor open source. Software development is the only industry that has large portions of infrastructure free and open for anyone to use, and this is due to inheriting the values of key founders of the industry a generation or so ago.

It's up to us to carry that torch, or we will become like every other industry.

[ericb]

> and this is due to inheriting the values of key founders of the industry a generation or so ago.

Is it? I think it has more to do with companies realizing that [1]commoditizing their complements is a sound strategy, and [2] using open source as a growth strategy.

When you get to the "harvesting" stage or the "entrenched monopoly stage", the FOSS license doesn't make sense if you were using it merely as a growth strategy.

[1] https://www.gwern.net/Complement

[2] https://www.gwern.net/Complement#open-source-as-a-strategic-...

[mcguire]

Commoditizing software was never a strategy, at least until a very recent stage. Open source software projects commoditized software either by being vastly more successful and out-competing their alternatives (gcc[1]), or by being a singularly better value proposition than their alternatives (linux[2]). The companies which have "commoditized their complements", used "open source as a growth strategy", or "become entrenched monopolies" have always had a rather sketchy relationship with open source software, which is why they have preferred to avoid an actual free software license.[3]

[1] Back in the good ol' days, everybody made C/C++ compilers. OS vendors made compilers highly tuned for their hardware and software; others, like embedded vendors, made compilers tightly integrated with their tooling. Then gcc showed up everywhere, and started producing optimized code better than the tuned products. By the time LLVM appeared (2003?), its only real competition was gcc and a fork of gcc.

[2] Originally, Unix vendors had incremental improvements over their competitors in specific areas (IBM: SMIT/JFS, SiliG: graphics, etc.). Initially, Linux was a joke. Then it became as stable as the vendor OSs and the hardware it ran on was cheaper. Then it ran on any hardware. It may never have achieved feature-advantages over the competition, but taken as an entire package, the competition couldn't provide anywhere near enough value.

[3] IBM's a funny case, especially with Red Hat. IBM hasn't had a functioning software (or hardware?) product for at least 30 years.

[AmericanChopper]

You’re just describing the process of how all that software became commoditized. Software the everybody needs to use is simply a commodity now, and that’s why the more generically useful something is, the more open source support it’s going to have. Companies (usually) don’t want to build their own infrastructure, the want to spend their money investing in their value adds, because that’s where they get their RoI. A company could build their own web server, operating system, compiler, database... But their customer are unlikely to see any benefit from that, which is why they find themselves with an incentive to improve open source software. That’s the reason big open source projects attract large corporate sponsorship, not to satiate the ideological motives of “top talent”.

[sounds]

Many of the companies that appear to be "harvesting" their entrenched customers have not switched away from a FOSS license.

Examples:

• Apple

• Amazon

• Facebook

• Google

• Microsoft

• Netflix

• Red Hat

[ericb]

The open source from your list largely falls under #1. They didn't open source their primary product, but rather their complements. That is sustainable, whereas #2 is not when a permissive license is involved.

Strategy #1 is self-interested and doesn't require any real zealotry and survives the harvesting stage just fine.

Open sourcing your core product with a permissive license is generally going to be at odds with business goals at some point, and if you're in business, often the thing to give is the license.

[CydeWeys]

Ah yes, Apple, which famously open sources its software ...

Only Red Hat on this list comes even close to open sourcing a significant percentage of its stuff.

[sounds]

I personally prefer to let Apple have it, it's "open source" all right.

If you want Free Software, then feel free to use something more potent than merely an "open source" license the next time you release something.

[adamc]

I'm skeptical that this is a big factor. I think companies support open source where it aligns with their own strategic incentives.

Oldie but goodie: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

[hodgesrm]

People who write open source do it for analogous reasons, except the "strategic incentives" are often personal. Those reasons can change quickly when shiny new things appear. There's a wealth of abandoned OSS projects that illustrate this point.

Anyone working on Mesos these days?

[omgwtfbyobbq]

That's been my experience as well, and the same applies to groups that own/maintain certain projects, like drools/RHDM. The project/technology owner/maintainer is aligned with corp based on customer size/needs, and that alignment is a function of how much the customers are paying.

If and when a large customer drops out, the entire corp and open source structures can change because the monetization changes. On the plus side, if there's a broad customer base, this is less likely to happen.

[JMTQp8lwXL]

When will this not be the case? Most companies use a lot of open source, in order to ship quickly. I suppose the thesis of main link is, that's no less so the case -- but here we are, building UIs with Vue/React/Angular/etc. Tons and tons of open source tech to enable shipping more quickly.

[hctaw]

Which values would those be? Everything used to be proprietary. It's the younger generation that expects things to be open source.

[na85]

I don't pretend to be an industry expert but things seem different now, in this day of Everything-as-a-Service and subscriptions-as-primary-revenue-streams, from when Free Software first became A Thing.

It's just so easy these days for a corporate parasite like Amazon or Sony to rip off your hard work (ElasticSearch, BSD) and contribute essentially nothing back.

The SSPL seems like a perfectly rational response to this newly-emerged phenomenon.

[SXX]

I have serious question to you and everyone who try to advocate for SSPL. Don't you understand that this license has clause for SaaS providers that impossible to comply with?

Even if Amazon wanted to open source every single line of their own AWS code under AGPLv3 or APLv2 it's still not enough: the license require everything to be published under SSPL in very fuzzy terms that can even apply to OS kernel.

Even copyleft licenses always had a goal to increase amount of copyleft code, but SSPL only goal is to completely ban 3rd-party SaaS from using said software.

[na85]

> the license require everything to be published under SSPL in very fuzzy terms that can even apply to OS kernel.

Not even a little bit.

From the SSPL itself:

>However, it does not include the work's System Libraries, or general-purpose tools or generally available free programs which are used unmodified in performing those activities but which are not part of the work.

Explain to me again your FUD?