To start, let me say that I believe in Free (
libre) Software, as it is defined by the Software Freedoms. People should have the right to run the software they have, as they themselves see fit. That said, there is a lot wrong with open source and free software right now.
First, and I think foremost, is that we’ve done ourselves a huge disservice in training users into believing that software should be gratis. Through the surveillance-driven ad economy for services, to FOSS adherents who insist they won’t pay for software, to smartphone app stores making it impossible to differentiate between products (and also, making it impossible to make a good product). Few people are willing to pay for software anymore (especially developers for development tools). This leaves software development to the privileged few who can afford to work for free, either because they work at a company that sees software as a loss-leader for some ad-economy service, or because they are financially independent. I cannot imagine how one might be able to replicate the 80s and 90s market where you could do hard work, make a great, common product like a word processor or an email client, and consumers would rejoice instead of snarl, “what do you mean you want money for this?” This consolidates power in the hands of Google, Microsoft, or worse, Oracle.
Second, we have grown complacent and too accepting of crap. A lot of gratis software has very little polish (unless it’s being pushed by FAANG). People don’t want to pay for software because they rightly expect to have to try a dozen different packages before they find one that marginally works. Not getting paid means developers don’t have time to put into polish, nor any non-vanity signal to work on anything but neat features. With that, I think comes the ability for any actor of means to easily displace any smaller actor in the market. When a buyout happens, they don’t do it to acquire the technology anymore, they do it to acquire the users. We’ve raced ourselves to the bottom, so the only products we can afford to make are easily replicable by a 10x larger team. Or they don’t even have to replicate it, they just have to dump into marketing the kind of money that would setup any individual one of us for a nice, healthy, “fuck you” lifestyle.
Third, because we haven’t fought “free software does not mean gratis”, companies demand software be permissively licensed or they won’t touch it. So they get to take your work and never pay you and it’s legal. You could GPL license instead and just get ignored, still not getting paid. You get to prove out the market for them, and then they copy your features, release under MIT, and don’t give a shit that they aren’t making money on it, because the only software they make money on is the ad seller console.
I think we need to do several things:
1) grow a spine and a conscience, finally admit that there is no such thing as technology divorced from politics (it8s made for people, by people. Without people, it’s masturbation at best), and refuse to work for Google and Facebook, selling out our fellow citizens for a few bags of silver.
2) stop publicly publishing source code. The GPL doesn’t say you have to leave your source lying around in the open. It says you have to give it to your users. That’s fine. Users need lovin’ too, they just gotta pay first.
3) start taking a little more pride in our craft than, “I made a thing”. Software isn’t done until it is documented. It isn’t done until it’s usable without having to install Node and Python, just to run the setup. It isn’t done until it’s compliant with ADA and 508. With pride comes an expectation of remuneration.
4) stop “bucket of crabs”ing our fellow developers. If you don’t like something about a project, that is fine. But don’t call into question their fundamental right to exist. Too often I’ve seen projects cut down because they were “reinventing the wheel” or “just a solo dev”. Reinvention is important, or we wouldn’t have electric cars or faster computers or really anything. And solo devs wouldn’t be solo if you took them seriously and at least tried to put as much effort into supporting them as you put into cutting down their work.
Realistically, I know this isn’t enough. But it can at least be a start. We can’t keep going on like this.