Comment by briandear
8 years ago
> We cannot allow corporations to take over open source tools.
I don’t know how much I agree with that statement in general. There are several major open source projects with corporate “control” – Mozilla, Google and Apple control/heavily influence Firefox, Angular and Swift respectively and there are probably a dozen others. The idea that corporations are “bad” is a tired trope. Some corporations are bad, some are good, some are in the middle.
But I agree with your actual actual sentiment though – corporate involvement in open source should be as benevolent as possible.
"Some corporations are bad, some are good, some are in the middle."
I don't think we need to bring morality to the discussion and complicate the issue.
Corporations are organized around profit, open-source is not. With only that in mind you can predict what will happen in most of the cases.
To put Mozilla, a not-profit, in this context, in the same set that Google and Apple is not fair, by the way.
"Corporations are organized around profit, open-source is not. With only that in mind you can predict what will happen in most of the cases. "
All three of these statements seem like nonsense.
First, "Corporations are organized around profit". No, they are legal entities, organized around articles of incorporation. These have a purpose statement. Often, those purpose statements are directed toward lawful business goals. But you do not have to be.
Non-profit vs profit corporations can, quite literally, have the same set of purposes. The only difference between the two is what you can do with profits.
"open-source is not".
I'm not even sure what you are trying to say here. Very large amounts of popular open source, is, in fact, produced by for-profit companies, and has been since the beginning of open-source. The term was even created by a group of people at a for-profit company. So ....
"With only that in mind you can predict what will happen in most of the cases."
No, you can let whatever biases you seem to have stoke your imagination and prognosticate. You can't actually predict what will happen. There are plenty of happy, well functioning for-profit companies in open source that have been helping open source for many many many years. There are also plenty of non-profits that have harmed open source greatly.
It takes a lot of blindness to see this stuff as simply black and white.
So let's discuss your argument by taking Red Hat. For-profit, pure open source company. Founded 1993. Are we (I work at Red Hat) behaving badly?
I explicitly tried to put out "god" and "bad" from the discussion but OK, let's do that.
Red-Hat main worry is to be profitable. That's is above any other concern.
You can be sure that, if their bottom line was threatened, they will be pushed, in order to survive, to change their business model and they will not be beyond behaving in a "bad" (but legal) way if they don't see other way around the problem.
If fact, we can argue, that Red-Hat management, being it a public company, is forced by law to do that.
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did you support and push systemd?
Corporations are just legal structures.
For instance, you call Mozilla a non-profit. But it is a non-profit corporation, a legal entity that has organized itself in a certain way and applied for special tax treatment.
For profit or non-profit, makes a huge difference, in my opinion.
The goals and the incentives are very different.
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> With only that in mind you can predict what will happen in most of the cases.
With just this information and no other, I think I'd predict corporations to make better software than open source. I take it that's not what you had in mind.
(This is for similar reasons that I expect for-profit companies to provide better service than government-run ones. I don't particularly want to get into a debate right now about whether that actually happens, just trying to explain my intuitions.)
I'd agree with this. We can all agree Windows is infinitely better than Linux because people pay for it.
Also Internet Explorer is infinitely better than Chrome and Firefox.
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I have no idea who makes better software.
What I mean is this: If you mix open-source with a for-profit entity, don't be surprise when that entity try to extract profits even in orthogonal ways to the original intention of the project.
Of course, in practice, and by the nature of open-source, this is a very difficult to do and, normally, can be prevented, but the trend is there and should be take into account.
Mozilla made firefox. Google made angular. Apple made Swift. That's not "taking over". While I am not a fan of this phenomenon either, that has nothing to do with the current situation. They simply built something and open sourced it, nothing was "taken over".