I was reading this article and wanted to post a comment but I felt this warrants a response article. First, if you don’t know me I've written a ton...
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Why do the Big Corps beat their chests around OSS? It is essentially free improvements. Someone more capable would be able to patch the software without paying them a salary (reminds me of the meme It's Free Real Estate)
A lot of the OSS software forums are dead because although the source code is open, teams are told not to engage too much with the community and let them tackle the problems by themselves.
I take a philosophical and altruistic stance when it comes to OSS. I open-source a thing without any expectations, if someone makes a billion off of it, that is great, if someone sells it, that is great too.
Like you mentioned, you are doing it for the fun of it, the day that fun factor goes away you should move on to the next one.
So that's not a joke when they say its socialism, all for the community and none for the individual.
Its too good if you work for a big corporation and don't need to make money from software (as you are literally making money by selling your time, the worst possible deal, the 9-5 offer).
Or ironically, live by doing consulting, which is what I do. Its not for everyone and I'm only able to do it on top of having income from owning companies that only do closed source, which is what I did in the beginning of my career for a couple of years until I built my passive income stream. It took 3 years to be able to have the income from consulting to be greater than the passive income from owning shares at the company.
I would never be able to do that on top of OSS and bootstrap my finances, I would basically be working for free.
I use OSS as infrastructure to fill my customer requirements, I leech on OSS, sometimes and I'll contribute back (if the cost of backporting is higher than the value of the code shared back, consulting is a business after all), but as I do mostly glue code, I often tend to use BSD license, so I can keep the "glue code" hidden, so no one else benefits from it, except my customer and me.
I mostly use OSS for the technical perspective, as I do modify it for my requirements, I need the source code to do what I do, less so about ideology, forget that.
Oh god, yes. I've mostly vacated any OSS discussion spheres in the last decade or so, because the evangelism got unbearable. No, OSS isn't your path to a career, and it certainly isn't a playground for you to learn everything you need. It's a good thing to have a look at, see what other people do, maybe try and solve some issues, but it's not the Second Coming either.
I totally agree. Unfortunately, people should not expect to get paid for their code. They should expect to get paid for the products/services they create. In short, nobody is going to pay for code if they see value in it.
If you just write code and need inspiration on how to overcome this problem, look at Taylor Otwell. This guy made millions just from writing a little PHP framework. He wrote high quality OSS then turned right around to sell first-party addons and tailored cloud solutions.
He also left room for people to develop an ecosystem around his code. Every business must have a competitor.
Thanks for the well-articulated perspective. I agree with your stance about overly-simplistic ideas about open source doing more harm than good. I can say from my own experience that things have gotten messy. There are new(ish) reasons that FOSS is critical, for example it has never been more important for people to understand what their software does. Apps are doing all kinds of unexpected things underneath the UI, and unless the user or someone they trust audits the code, they will never know. That has little to do with whether or not one can hack on or distribute the code of a program they own, so it is a little to the left of the original Libre thesis. Also, 'open source' has become shorthand for 'trusted form factor'. Many enterprise Ops teams have a hard requirement that critical infrastructure be open source. Ostensibly, this is so that they can see exactly how it works, and maintain it themselves if support for it goes away. In practical fact, these tools get adopted despite being shot through with functionality that run counter to company policies for adoption... in short, nobody actually looks at the code. Okay... this is turning into a rant... I will just say there are many well-intentioned people pushing an open source agenda from within corporations as well as without, and the more they focus on the unsolved problem of getting a FOSS project to survive and thrive from a financial perspective the more likely we are to have valuable open source software in the future.
The concerns are backed for things that happened in the past. Like this one:
Great example. I've watched it twice and still don't fully grok it. Everything worked as intended... which added up to a problem!
While I definitely like the idea behind the GPL, I'd advise everyone to take extra care, which version of the license they chose. GPLv3 has some very over-reaching implications, which makes it difficult for companies to endorse. No wonder Apple went their own way to basically remove every component from macOS, where upstream switched the license to GPLv3. They were fine with GPLv2. Linus Torvalds has a great breakdown on this, and why he embraced GPLv2 only for the Linux kernel.
Also the SaaS economy made it painfully unclear, who is the user of the software, who has rights to the source, and what kind of other rights they have. If a backend component uses a GPL piece of software, the end use who uses it via an API and a frontend, might not have rights to the source for it anyway. Even worse if it's behind a reverse proxy like nginx. So this might not help people building GPL software on the backend.
Yes.
I mostly use GPL 2 and usually with the classpath exception which is more lenient. I like a lot of the ideas behind GPL 3 and it uses language that makes more sense to lawyers (so has better potential standing in court). GPL 2 is already in organizations everywhere thanks to Linux so we can "prove" it's OK with pretty much any org.
I wish there was some kind of license which is a mix of both GPL and BSD-4-Clause (Old)
This way the creator of the software can get recognition, top level priority and mentions along with fork protection
Thank you for the in-depth post and thoughts for consideration. I still find a lot of OSS a mind field to walk through. As some that uses both closed an open source professionally and for fun it can be complicated.
On the one hand I have a responsibility to my day job to make sure everything is in compliance and OK to use, and on the other a moral respect for giving back to authors.
Personally I agree that authors of OSS should be reward for their talent and time. I have issues with folks that think OSS always means free. Time and talent are not free, the code might be.
Again, thanks for giving me more to think about.
As an example of making a lot of money from open source software, I would direct you to Taylor Otwell, the creator of Laravel and a very astute business person.
Yes. There are some great examples today. But you need to be a business person more than a coder. This goes a bit against the conception of "OSS hacker" and more of a businessman, politician, community organizer, etc.
Great article, loved the strangely odd Dalle2 creation