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this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2023
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Free and Open Source Software
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I was at an evening reception in Germany together with people from the German software community, business owners, government and associations. Beside interesting discussions, I met a couple of people from organizatiojns participating in the GAIA-X initiative to build a European alternative to American cloud providers such as Google, Amazon or Microsoft. Something I usually am not really interested in. These government initiatives often tend to be focused more on bureaucracy and imho don’t produce any hard output. As the evening got longer, I was given some updates on how the initiative progresses. To no one’s surprise the initiative had produced a vast amount of papers and concepts, and conducted numerous meetings. The shocker came when one person said that they’re now ready for the implementation.
I asked her what funding was associated and whether there are any bounties for implementing any of their concepts. She looked at me confused and responded; “No, the Open Source community should implement it now”. I asked her whether she knew how Open Source actually works, if she had ever met any Open Source project teams, had ever written any software herself. You can guess the answer: it’s No. Why am I telling you this? Because this is absolutely the perception many organizations have of Open Source. Someone, somewhere writes software that businesses, NGOs or government can use to build services. And that’s a huge problem now. Open Source and Free Software is not a charity — it involves people with lifes and families to feed
The Commercialized Open Source
The Open Source movement was supposed to be a movement that is the exact opposite of commercial software. At least, if you believe the popular Open Source writing “The Cathedral And The Bazar”. The idealistic approach of Open Source was to make source code openly and freely available. Funding should be through sponsorships and donations to the projects. Open Source is, or maybe was?, about making software freely and openly available to anyone. Today’s Open Source projects fall into very narrow categories and almost all projects seem to go through the exact same path in your lifetime.
Run by a single individual, overloaded by ignorant users and forced to shut the project down due to a lack of time and funding.
Run by a group of people in their spare-time always trying to keep the project afloat. Chronically underfunded, but powering millions of software products across the globe.
Started small, created a commercial spin-off and has mainly become commercial software with a light version published as Open Source.
Started by an individual or a FAANG organization, entire projects funded by FAANG companies, run by FAANG employees and controlled by FAANG.
If you’re honest, the large part of successful Open Source projects is funded by organizations. Often not in hard cash, but by allowing employees on their payroll to work on the projects. The OSCI or Open Source Contributor Index draws a very clear picture: the majority of support and funding for Open Source comes from big tech. Big American tech.
The argument, often heard in Europe, that Open Source software makes European governments and organizations independent of American suppliers lacks any understanding of how Open Source currently works. Maybe even lacks understanding of how software works at all.
The World Was Never Ready For Open Source
The idea that Open Source software would free the user can be considered a failure. Don’t get me wrong! Open Source is awesome. I contribute, I publish, I participate and I love it. But I am also a programmer and I claim to know what Open Source is since I read “The Cathedral And The Bazaar”. The average person however could not care less about the licensing of the software they use and they become increasingly unaware of what software is at all.
The amount of people being able to understand Node.js, let alone read its source code is tiny. The same goes for Bitcoin. Numerous myths surrounded Bitcoin and the way it worked when it launched. Yet, the Bitcoin source code happily resided in a Github repository — for everyone to read. Only a few really read it — including me. People are simply not interested. The result? Open Source has become a way of collaboration for big tech and moved far away from its original ideals. Linux was invented by Linus Torvalds in Finland. MySQL came out of Sweden. PHP has Danish heritage. The list of European software inventions goes on. Yet, they found their destiny and home in America for a simple reason: the lack of funding in Europe, the lack of interest in Europe and a horrendous amount of bureaucracy in many EU member states that makes building a software business a living nightmare. Not to mention trying to established the organizational foundations for an Open Source project.
The Funding Issues Remain Unresolved
The path to success of an Open Source project is often either becoming a U.S. software company or becoming a part of one. If you have a look at Mastodon, the proclaimed Twitter killer, and its funding situation relying on Patreon donations, the outcome is pretty clear. Even a highly popular project like Mastodon, that even has government users and large-scale installations, can hardly grow a substantial organization. Open Source projects hardly survive without big tech as a donor Most Open Source projects remain chronically underfunded and there’s no change on the horizon. Any project team I came across in my life as a programmer warmly and wholeheartedly welcomed big tech as a donor. You can’t blame them and it’s not surprising at all. The vast majority of private individuals, small and medium-size businesses that use Open Source never donate a single penny while producing cost and consuming time of Open Source projects. People posting issues in the bug trackers demanding swift responses, downloading gigabytes of Open Source software without ever giving back and complain whenever projects don’t go in their favour. I have yet to come across a single popular Open Source project that thrives while being funded by private individuals, small and medium size companies. Open Source has a funding problem.
What Is Needed To Fix Open Source
All the Open Source projects we love were build by individuals or very small teams. These individuals or project teams have made a lot of sacrifices for their Open Source projects. They invested money and a large fraction of their time without ever receiving anything in return. In a world of ever-rising cost of living, increasing taxation, increasing rent, families struggling to make ends meet, there are fewer and fewer people capable and willing to build and maintain Open Source projects. The idea of Open Source that people would build the software they love to share with other people who in return would fund the builders remains an idealogic pipe dream. The idealogic pipe dream of free people through free software never materialized Only if private individuals, small and medium businesses are capable and willing to donate to Open Source in the masses, it’ll change. The last 30 years of Open Source and Free Software have shown that the willingness isn’t there and the capability of individuals to donate is in decline. Further governments have never created any incentives (e.g. tax incentives) for Open Source projects. Society was not ready for Open Source and society is is becoming less and less ready.
Why Is It Not Open Source?
Over the past 25 years of my life as a software engineer, I published both Open Source and commercial software. Only the commercial software has ever made a noticable return. When publishing commercial software, you’ll find a number of people asking why I did not publish my software as Open Source. My response is very simple: “Because you wouldn’t pay for it”. People have become to believe that Open Source is a charity and that anyone is entitled to take from an Open Source project whatever the person wants. The result is that fewer and fewer software is released as Open Source and instead distributed as Cloud-based commercial SaaS. With web- or cloud-based commercial SaaS there’s no piracy and users can hardly circumvent paying the authors for the software. Open Source is in shambles and it’s breaking my heart as a software engineer and die-hard Open Source fan. Do you have a solution to fix Open Source or are you fine with the way it is? Thanks for reading. Jan
I think this is true for a lot of software in general. The average person is becoming less and less tech literate as time goes on. You'd think it'd be the opposite, since we're so saturated with technology now compared to 25 years ago. But we're moving so rapidly away from general purpose platforms, and more open ecosystems. A large number of my family don't even own a desktop or laptop computer. They have a phone and maybe a tablet, and that's it. And then you look at the state of the web and Internet, and how most digital lives revolve around a handful of tightly controlled walled gardens, with people being extremely reluctant to branch out to explore or experiment with other apps, sites, or services. I've seen people, even on here, say that they don't want another login to some app or service, so if they can't get what they want where they already are, then they're not interested.
And this ties into the last point there: people simply aren't purchasing software anymore. Even a few bucks for a mobile app seems a bridge too far for a lot of people. Your average user doesn't spend money on desktop software. Unless they're a power user or a business user (where the cost might be shifted to the business), they're just going to use an OS's built in tools, or Google docs or something like that. PC gamers may spend a lot of a rig and on games, but they're a small market focused on very specific purchases. Even in the mobile space where everyone is now, the only ones making money are predatory subscription- or micro-transaction-based games.
Exactly. And that only further decreases the control the user has over their computing lives. But the problem is: we as software devs are generally the only ones who care about OSS. The average user couldn't care less. They're not going to modify or redistribute it. They just want a tool or app or service that does what they want, and they don't care what happens behind the scenes.
I really think our shift away from general purpose computing toward locked down devices and walled gardens is driving a great deal of the problem. Add the problems of capitalism, the fact that it's so hard to get a small project off the ground without the dev burning out, and it really is a crisis. People like to think of the Linux kernel as an example a big project made by hobbyist, but it isn't. Companies like Oracle, Google, Intel, et al are the largest contributors. So what do we do when the most prominent examples of OSS are driven by companies who's primary goal is lockdown, lock-in, and control?
I don't know. I don't know what the answer is.