| I think it's great that we're cleaning up the nomenclature. In the 90s, we had shareware/freeware/beerware. No one expected source availability. At universities, the Unix world had open source, in the real sense. Then something happened that caused these two tracks to merge. Maybe the university students grew up and carried on their belief in open source, but also had to create the business. After 20 years, they realized (1) it doesn't have to be open source to _feel right_ and (2) maintaining in the open is more expensive. They're now in management positions, not coding. Selling B2B doesn't require code to be open to the public, since you can have source available licenses. And as you said, perhaps ScyllaDB isn't really targeting the hobbyist. We'll continue this trend. Or perhaps open source has stopped being a buzzword. We're now much more of a SaaS world, where being open source isn't as important as costing $10 per month or having 200 "data partners" that need to track you. That said, I think there's a really good reason for core libraries and security-sensitive libraries to be open. I want to be able to inspect them, before using them. And I'm in the HN crowd of actually using open source code because I can fix bugs as I encounter them, but I realize this is a small crowd. I'd love for open source to be a useful word again, and not something that goes on the Silicon Valley PR budget. |