Comment by keeda

17 hours ago

One of the biggest shortcomings of Open Source was that it implicitly defaulted to a volunteer model and so financing the work was always left as an exercise for the reader.

Hence (as TFA points out) open source code from commercial entities was just a marketing channel and source of free labor... err, community contributions... to auxiliary offerings that actually made money. This basic economic drive is totally natural but creates dynamics that lead to suboptimal behaviors and controversy multiple times.

For instance, a favorite business model is charging for support. Another one was charging for a convenient packaging or hosting of an “open core” project. In either case, the incentives just didn’t align towards making the software bug-free and easily usable, because that would actively hamper monetization. This led to instances of pathological behavior, like Red Hat futzing with its patches or pay-walling its source code to hamper other Linux vendors.

Then there were cases where the "open source" branding was used to get market-share, but licenses restricted usage in lucrative applications, like Sun with Java. But worse, often a bigger fish swooped in to take the code, as they were legally allowed to, and repackage it in their own products undercutting the original owners. E.g. Google worked around Sun's licensing restrictions to use Java completely for free in Android. And then ironically Android itself was marketed as "open source" while its licensing came with its own extremely onerous restrictions to prevent true competition.

Or all those cases when hyperscalers undercut the original owners’ offerings by providing open source projects as proprietary Software as a Service.

All this in turn led to all sorts of controversies like lawsuits or companies rug-pulling its community with a license change.

And aside from all that, the same pressures regularly led to the “enshittification” of software.

Open Source is largely a socialist (or even communist) movement, but businesses exist in a fundamentally capitalistic society. The tensions between those philosophies were inevitable. Socialists gonna socialize, but capitalists gonna capitalize.

With AI, current OSS business models may soon be dead. And personally I would think, to the extent they were based on misaligned incentives or unhealthy dynamics, good riddance!

Open Source itself will not go away, but it will enter a new era. The cost of code has dropped so much, monetizing will be hard. But by the same token, it will encourage people, having invested so much fewer resources creating it, to release their code for free. A lot of it will be slop, but the quantity will be overwhelming.