Comment by jh0486
2 years ago
I understand this is a jaded take, but it's not wrong.
Open source entered a bubble because companies started requiring active open source contributions to staff+ engineering requirements. The model was never sustainable. A select few contribute to open source out of sheer passion, but the majority are/were using it as a career advancement mechanism or network effect.
The result is that major companies were able to advance their technology and profits rapidly off of people's free work. The result is better products, services, and tooling for everyone, but let's not kid ourselves about who benefits most from open source: large companies.
This is what I dislike about OSI. It feels like their mission is specifically to provide free labor to megacorps. The FSF has (IMO) goals that have a more tangible benefit to society, and while megacorps can and do use free software without contributing anything, that feels like more of a side effect than the primary goal of the movement.
If you know that someone is going to take your code and make money off of it anyways (which is almost guaranteed whether you pick an FSF or OSI license), then you might as well make it so that society can benefit from this too. GPL/AGPL do this, MIT/BSD/etc do not.
And as an aside, I feel like it should be easier to profit from open source if you pick a license like AGPL. Companies that want to use it can pay you (the sole rights holder) for a commercial friendly license, while everyone else can use the free license. This is the same model for Qt/KDE.
You don't even need to sell support, and could probably even throw up a self service checkout page for commercial licenses. Thats minimal effort for maximizing profit lol.
Maybe I'm naive but I get the feeling open source is more about convincing the megacorps that they can get better, cheaper and higher quality software without vendor lock-in by cooperating with the other megacorps. Not so much as convincing volunteers that doing open source in their time off is some great idea or that they can make a living off it.
> who benefits most from open source: large companies.
Maybe in absolute terms but because of FOSS software I have been made free from the shackles of the windows ecosystem and liberated from the prison of Apple lock in to be free forever in the fields of the Linux and that alone has been invaluable to me.