[agloeregrets]

I'm betting on this article being controversial here somewhat. The point on OSS is hilariously true though. Like, everyone does realize that the tech giants just found a way to make the community work for them and to make money off the backs of it right? OSS is great for almost everyone, don't get me wrong, but in whole, the largest tech companies in the world have gotten an entire community to test, fix, and develop software for them at zero dollars. Small devs can make some use of it, but the gains mostly go to FB, Google, MS, and more. Those OSS contributors who believe their work is bettering the community based on the (entirely moral good) concept of Free and OSS who have had their house gaslit against them do not get paid for their work that the large companies gain from.

I almost feel like that for-profit companies of a certain scale should be charged a reasonable licence to use OSS software and that money should be re-distributed. I know there is GitHub Sponsorships but now that MS runs that, well, there went that. Large companies are parasites that have zombified OSS with cute "X <3s OSS" icons and marketing.

Beyond that, the bit on passion being a weakness is incredibly important. I have been mulling that over the last few years in America. Extreme political movements tend to cater to a popular passion that they can then bend to their will (such as religion) that they then try to tie their movement to it. (E.g. "You are not a [religion/passion here] if you support [political opponent here]", even when the usurper's agenda is not clearly aligned to the religion.)

[PragmaticPulp]

> Like, everyone does realize that the tech giants just found a way to make the community work for them and to make money off the backs of it right?

Virtually every tech startup or company makes use of open source at every level. We all benefit.

There’s no need to be cynical because big companies are also benefiting.

[rvense]

No company I've worked for would be able to exist without free software. Literally everything I've ever done professionally has been Linux, nginx, Postgres, frameworks, etc.

On several occasions, I've found a bug and suggested that I spend time going to the framework source or whatever to fix it. I have never been allowed to do it, we've always just worked around it. There has been no concept of giving back.

I suppose Facebook et al are probably better in that respect.

[oblio]

Big companies have their own gravity.

The world for sure didn't need Go, yet we got it, and it's gaining mindshare versus stuff like C/C++/Python/Perl/PHP/Ruby/OCaml/... (I'm not including Java and C# as those are also enterprise languages).

Angular, React, same story.

Sometimes it's good, but with stuff like Dart you can definitely feel thatsome Googlers are bored and desperately want to own their language instead of contributing to a pre-existing language.

Reason vs OCaml, etc. there are a ton of examples.

Basically big companies can afford to throw a ton of money into their own open source projects, basically depriving true community open source projects of the attention/oxygen they need.

There are pluses and minuses to this... But we should definitely start pushing back when the open source project is a clear open source "land grab" (for example to me Dart definitely falls into this category).

[BlargMcLarg]

It's not that they make use of open source. It's that some have the gall to expect developers to contribute to open source in their own time, rather than working on their own projects or contributing to open source on the company's dime (the last one being, by far, the best option for humanity as a whole in a vacuum).

Though the main problem is in companies expecting too much from their employees (see: "looking for starter with 5 years of experience in framework X Y Z, language A B C and preferably knows devops front to back"), it is somewhat naïve to expect a passive force can only be beneficial to everyone while the majority power is still in hands of employers and employees are too decentralized and unorganized to fight it.

[sokoloff]

I don't expect my employees or candidates to contribute to open source, but the curve of those who do is shifted to the right in my opinion over those who don't. (It's the practical part of why I fight for HR policies to allow continued contributions to open-source, even unrelated to work: because otherwise I close myself off to that subset of the population, in addition to my philosophical stance of 'what you do outside of work is none of my business'.)

It's in much the same way if I were recruiting for an auto mechanic for a repair shop, a body shop, or a race team: someone who had their own custom car is probably a better bet for me than someone who is otherwise identical on paper but drives a stock Toyota Camry. I'll absolutely hire the qualified driver of the Camry, but I'll prefer the driver of the '65 Candy Apple Red Mustang that they restored and painted in their garage.

[agloeregrets]

The point I'm making is that large companies benefit on a scale much much larger than others. Facebook isn't just gaining from OSS because they can use other's repos, they are gaining because they can have others fix and build their own repos. The Gameplan is to gain from the community, not contribute. Sure, React is nice and fine for the community, great framework...but the intent is not to help the community in the first place.

[the_local_host]

As far as I know the goal of free software was never "free for those who pull their weight by contributing." It simply meant free to run, change, and distribute, without any obligations except that the right for others to do the same had to be preserved.

[villasv]

> The point I'm making is that large companies benefit on a scale much much larger than others.

They do benefit immensely, but no by having "others fix and build" their own repos. You're overestimating the source code contributions and underestimating the cost to manage a hugely popular project.

> The Gameplan is to gain from the community, not contribute.

This is just silly. The """gameplan""" is to contribute and AND grow a community, which benefits everyone. Does it benefit more the company than the community as a whole? Maybe, but that's petty reasoning.

[BlargMcLarg]

I don't necessarily agree with "The Gameplan". Yet the inverse, the idea that the majority of companies in a position to contribute to the communities they utilize, is just as much something I have yet to see. If anything, the overwhelming attitude I see in companies is "this is our secret sauce, and we don't want to let go of it because a competitor might use it and one-up us", while making liberal use of e.g. open source Unix distros and open source libraries. Confidentially clauses.

Even many companies who do eventually release parts of their secret sauce (e.g. Google, Facebook) first secure their financial and tech positions before they do so. In other words, when they do release their secret sauce, the good will they get far outweighs the risk of a competitor improving on top of their secret sauce and getting a significant chunk of their market.

[villasv]

> In other words, when they do release their secret sauce, the good will they get far outweighs the risk of a competitor improving on top of their secret sauce and getting a significant chunk of their market.

Which is completely understandable? I can't see how things would be different and I'm still pretty satisfied with the outcome of releasing "the secret sauce" after it is a bit more stable instead of going through a turbulent development (looking at you, Angular).

[lucian1900]

There is little difference. The vast majority of programmers are workers without any kind of ownership, but still expected to volunteer unpaid time to open source projects for career advancement.

[neilparikh]

I'm skeptical that OSS actually provides that much free work for big companies. If you look at React for example, 25 out of the top 30 contributors are FB employees. The other 5 might have been as well, I just couldn't tell. If, for some reason, no one outside FB contributed to React, I doubt it would affect FB at all. The few commits that come externally would just be written in house.

I think looking at other corporate run project (VSCode, Kubernetes etc.) will tell a similar story: the vast majority of the code will be written by the employees of the company owning the project in the first place.

You could argue that companies are getting free bug reports, but users are probably reporting bugs because they find value in the tool, and would like it to be better, so it's hardly parasitic there either.

[DreamScatter]

You picked a bag example, look for a project that isn't owned by a big company but still used by them, like OpenSSL

[tayo42]

Yeah I struggle to find the words but I lost interest in hacking on stuff because it's mostly just corporate stuff. Like any major project, it's for businesses. I think user/people focused computing use is mostly solved. None of this stuff is for making regular people's lives better, it's for making businesses run.

[jaccarmac]

> Like, everyone does realize that the tech giants just found a way to make the community work for them and to make money off the backs of it right?

People are starting to realize this, but to understand it it's important to disambiguate "free" and "open source" software.

See https://www.boringcactus.com/2020/08/13/post-open-source.htm... for one perspective.

[commandlinefan]

I kind of wonder about the opposite. Back in the 90's when open source really took off, open source projects were useful things like Linux, MySQL and GCC: open alternatives to commercial software. Now that open source has become "important", though, we see more and more things like Spring and Angular: idiotic useless "frameworks" that seem to exist solely for the sake of existing and padding resumes.

[oblio]

Spring was released 19 years ago. MySQL was released 26 years ago. It's not such a big difference as you're claiming, especially since MySQL really took off around version 4 or so.

I'm not sure you can put Spring in the same category with Angular, plus Spring definitely filled (fills?) a niche that's useful: pre-built components for Java, especially for enterprise development.

[random_ind_dude]

Spring framework is "useless"? It's used by well-known companies like Netflix and LinkedIn as well as by a lot of Fortune 500 companies.

[watwut]

The thing is, bulk of OSS development is paid by big companies. Based ok FOSS developpers survey, we can safely say that majority of OSS developers are paid for that work. And a lot of those money goes from bif companies.

Practically, these are not in free time weekend projects. Tech people are really invested in mythology of it all being done for free or mythology of everyone having side project on top of work. Neither is reality.

[deepstack]

>I almost feel like that companies of a certain scale should be charged a licence to use OSS software and that money should be re-distributed As far as I'm concerned, FANNG companies (plus MS ) ought to treated differently than other companies. As they are quasi gov-entities getting subsidies from government contracts and use security market to leverage money. I mean Windows is still using the FreeBSD network stack for all these years.

[kiba]

Then get paid for the work. I just don't want licenses that pretend to be OSS or Free software when they are not.