The strange economics of open-source software

I think it's important to note the strange duality of this moment:

1. This is a cambrian explosion of open-source infrastructure tools

2. This is the dark ages of open-source UI

I think it's important to be aware that on this front the Open Source movement has completely stalled. When I was in College, I used Abiword, Evolution, and Rhythmbox. Now those things have been replaced for me with Google Docs, Gmail, and Amazon Music.

I love the web, it's incomparable for convenience, data protection, and access on multiple devices. But it is fundamentally at odds with Open Source software. Back in the day of desktop software, you could throw a tarball on the web and people could use your stuff without any real handholding. In order for people to use a web service you write, you have to maintain a server instance. It's just not worth it for me, random open source web service author, to maintain a server for millions of you, random open source software users. It's time and it's money for very little direct benefit to me.

And on app stores, it's pretty bad too. Maintaining a reviewed and updated app in an app store is a huge job, and not something a casual contributor to an open source GUI is going to want to do, just to have access to their branch of an app. And I'm not even sure Apple will let you submit an identical app with just one little feature changed.

This will change... the endgame is something like Ethereum, and the currentgame is maybe something like Heroku Button, but there is still a lot of infrastructure to build to make it as easy to maintain an open source web app as it is to maintain a desktop app.

And in the meantime, Open Source UI is just going to languish a bit. That's OK, it's just where we are in the history of the web. But it's going to get a lot better in the not too distant future.

Right? They could have at least gone into detail about how businesses now follow the model of open-sourcing the software and then making revenue on the implementation fees.

Or they could have talked about how open sourcing is part of a race to the bottom. They mention some SQL-like databases, which is a tech that started out as proprietary. How much tech starts immediately as open source?

Yeah, the post comes across as a random rant about everything, and nothing in particular, just venting out. I guess the op was somewhat drunk or something... we all do that ;)

My desktop is Linux and I still use LibreOffice, VLC and Thunderbird. And I also used Google's Docs, Calendar, Gmail and Music, but I've cut off my Gmail / Calendar usage due to their poor implementation for standards, having migrated from Google Apps to FastMail. I'm also paying for a Dropbox subscription because they are the only major cloud storage provider with native support for Linux and even though some clients exist for Google Drive I can't use a solution that doesn't want me as a customer; but enough ranting.

I don't agree with you because the browser is ubiquitous and the web is open and based on standards. And you don't actually need a server to do interesting things in the browser. Quite the contrary, because of modern browsers, a majority of people with a PC have access to a potent development environment. And then the difference between the web and app stores is like night and day.

IP communism is not in conflict with belief in private property rights. The trick is in denying IP the status of property, because you cannot own ideas in the same sense you can own a car. Cars are fundamentaly scarce, two people can't use the same car at the same time. Ideas can be copied and improved upon, they don't go away when somebody steals them. Anyway, there would certainly be successfull business models in absence of software patents. Not saying 'we should abolish software patents', we are probably too invested in this model.