What comes after open source

Just a sidenote Steve - I met you briefly at a rails event in Berlin about 6 years ago and you were inspirational. Love the fact that you're a super humble guy working your pants off for the community. Super busy right now (yes I shouldn't be on hacker new right now but you know how it goes :) but I'm going to have a proper look at your article as soon as I get a bit of time. Its sure to be insightfull.

Re: What comes after open source

#5

Post by dwheeler » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 3:06 PM UTC

"Projects could then submit for certification... who would do this certification, and how would they determine the criteria?"

There's already something that takes a stab at this, the Linux Foundation's CII Best Practices badge: https://bestpractices.coreinfrastructure.org/

If you run an OSS project, I encourage you to try to get a badge.

Full disclosure: I lead the project. Hopefully it'll be of use anyway :-).

Re: What comes after open source

#6

Post by catchmeifyoucan » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 3:09 PM UTC

Software can be paid. But paid and open source is fine. I like to think of it as fixing a car, can’t do it, if you can’t open the hood.

Re: What comes after open source

#7

Post by burtonator » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 3:11 PM UTC

The issue with Open Source and software freedom has its roots in economics.

As long as massive companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple harness pay LESS taxes than you or I and harness 99% of the economic value we're facing an uphill battle.

Re: What comes after open source

#8

Post by jchw » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 3:14 PM UTC

Very clever and well put. I have to let this one stew.

That said, still in the camp of "nothing is wrong," I think. It is a tough pill to swallow that companies that build around open source software are fundamentally vulnerable, but perhaps it's time to swallow. Open Source has never been healthier even ignoring those contributions.

If X manages to corner Y into a proprietary license, does open source win or lose? I won't name names but I used to use a project that went open core and the "open core" part of it became gradually more useless over time to the point where many users just switched off. I think what needs to be established is that what's good for companies trying to monetize OSS is not good for OSS.

There's plenty of other models for OSS that work. I'm fond of Patreon as a new monetization model, for example. Won't exactly get you rich, but if that's ever the point of OSS, then it really is dead.

We probably won't live in a future where everything is OSS, but we live in a present with an amazing amount of excellent OSS and I'm willing to take that personally.

I think the certification idea is interesting, but I definitely need to think about it a lot more. While I personally don't mind where OSS is, I also would not mind new movements, either.

Re: What comes after open source

#9

Post by paddy_m » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 3:15 PM UTC

In response to the first quote "Today’s developers have never learned about this history" I agree. I would love to see more CS history classes. I know that star schema were a thing, and hierarchical databases were a thing, but I know nothing about them. I don't know what their failings were that led to dominance of RBDMSes. I'm very curious to know how similar they were to mongo or other current schemaless databases. There are also probably many old ideas that would be practical now, neural networks definitely fall into this category.

Re: What comes after open source

#10

Post by throwawaymath » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 3:15 PM UTC

If I understand the thesis of the article correctly, the idea is that most developers actually care about open source production, meanwhile open source licenses are only capable of restricting distribution?

The example given is GitHub versus open source bug trackers. You didn't come out and say this directly Steve, but isn't this basically flirting with the conclusion that developers tend to prefer proprietary platforms? You mentioned that the numbers speak for themselves, and you personally shifted your ideology from the Free Software Movement.

Couple this with the rise of SaaS as a business model, and it seems like a lot of the tension here is related to the way that proprietary platforms focus on production, while licenses themselves focus on distribution.