I've Soured on Open Source (opens in new tab)

I have never fully understood the motivation to work on OSS. Don't get me wrong there isn't anything that I write on my personal time that I have a problem sharing with others or even making PD. What I don't want to do is to be responsible for software that I am not being compensated for (compensation does not have to be money). I have children, grandchildren, animals, and personal goals that require my time so I just cannot see trading away these things to maintain software. I can see how software could be part of my personal goals in a way similar to building a cherry sideboard but the difference is that no one will request features or bug fixes for my sideboard after it is completed.

This is partially why I began to look at source available more: https://gavinhoward.com/2023/12/is-source-available-really-t... . And what I found is that source available can still be good for end users, leaving us most of the four freedoms, including control, while discouraging dealers.

> There are two miserable fates [...] Nobody ever uses your code [...] Everybody uses your code

That is indeed a sour take. What about in-between, where me and lots of other people are happily sitting?

> if that code becomes too useful, you have somehow fucked up because you now have a second job

It only becomes a second job if you allow it to. You can tell people "No, I don't want that feature" or "No, please don't send any unsolicited PRs", and no one can do anything (to you) about it.

The world is rarely black and white with clear lines, and same with open source. No, it won't solve capitalism, and no my code isn't exactly the holy grail, but neither I or users of the code I wrote expect that either. And that's fine.

I expect to see more and more written on this topic as we fall deeper into late stage capitalism.

Open source is how software developers are conditioned and socialized into participating in their own exploitation under capitalism.

It is interesting how otherwise smart, talented people rationalise the donation of their labour to an entitled majority who have no idea about or interest in the person or motivation behind the work. Who cares right? Just keep the free shit coming.

This seems more like souring on the idea of developing open source software in your free time, which I totally understand.

I personally think open source works the best when it is created by developers working for a company who are writing software that supports, but is not core, to the company’s actual product.

A company decides to allow the developers to open source it so they get free, outside, collaboration and the prestige and publicity of having open source projects.

Ideally, a majority of the contributions will be from developers working on the clock at their main jobs, where they use the open source project.

It is fine if some people contribute on their own time, but the bulk of the work should ideally be paid for by an employer.

I think the problem is the author's attitude. If suddenly my open source project becomes super popular and I don't have the time to give to it then that's a problem. I choose my own priorities. The open source software does not choose for me.

Like most of these articles, it looks at open source, or rather, free software, through a purely economic lens. But free software is not primarily about economics, but about empowerment and sovereignty. I like having a text editor/browser/OS/chat client & protocol/compiler/video player/etc. that aren't closed binary blobs full of ads, telemetry, DRM, and subscription services (or printers betraying their owners with invisible tracking dots).

The concern is not theoretical, as protesters in Hong Kong discovered when "their" phones refused to run software they used to organize: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hongkong-protests-apple-i...

The FSF is clear on the motivations: A proprietary program puts its developer or owner in a position of power over its users. This power is in itself an injustice. - https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/proprietary.html

The links on that page give many other examples of why free software is necessary.

> I don't know what the answer is, I just know that I've stopped feeling good about people sinking so much of their time, energy, and good vibes into this work, only for their good intentions to be taken advantage of.

"If you release your code under the GPL, large companies won't touch it."

"The GPL isn't as free as these corporate-friendly licenses."

It's too bad the corporate talking points took hold and convinced so many people that open source means "free as in free labor". I've seen people berated for choosing the GPL. Use the GPL if your goal is to contribute to the open source ecosystem. Choose another license if your goal is the honor of having a company with billions in revenue using your software for free.

i wrote some popular projects, and honestly whenever I see an issue pop up i don't like it. i work on it in bursts whenever i feel like it. i wrote it for fun. i wonder if there's a setting somewhere where it's like use it at your peril, this is a for fun project or something.

I'm tired of people soured on open source.

FFS if you don't like it, just don't do it. You don't owe anyone anything.

If you want to get paid, find a business model that works for you. Open source is not a business model.

If I had a dime for every time someone complains they can't make a living volunteering, it'd fund my own open source efforts.

Counterpoint: I write open source software that lots of people use, and I receive approximately 95% thank yous, 4% simple requests for help or features, 1% attacks/hacks/complaints.

The secret (IMHO) is keep it simple, so people know what they're getting and can figure out how to be successful.

70M downloads of my oldest project, Ruby unaccent port: https://github.com/sixarm/sixarm_ruby_unaccent

200K downloads of my newest project, Rust testing macros: https://github.com/sixarm/assertables-rust-crate

Open source authors inspire me every day to create, improve, and share. The point isn't money; the point is helping each other learn, explore, and grow.

Open Source is just a way to share a project with the world.

It is not an obligation to maintain the project: Read the license terms.

It is not an invitation for others to contribute, though many projects welcome bug reports, feature requests, and contributions.

Rich Hickey's "Open Source is Not About You" provides some great thoughts about it: https://gist.github.com/richhickey/1563cddea1002958f96e7ba95...

I run https://github.com/camgunz/cmp and I think I'm in the middle of (well, maybe closer to nobody but not nobody) the "nobody" vs. "everybody" extremes. The thing I think I had/have going for me was that there was a clear end to the project: build a MessagePack implementation that doesn't allocate. Could it be better? Could I remove the ancient, not working Travis CI badge? Could I roll it into something bigger? Sure, but I haven't been motivated to do any of that, and it seems like everyone's reached some equilibrium of happy. I've also been lucky enough to get great contributions from people, everything from fixing compiler breakage to making floating point support optional. It hasn't been zero work, but it has been gratifying.

I do question the kind of "open source project takes over the world" model, the GCCs, the Apaches, the Linuxes. Those projects are of great importance, so even if you have a small group of contributors the responsibility is still large and weighty. It's even more so if you've suddenly got a huge community to manage. That kind of thing feels a lot less like a hobby and more like either a job or a lifestyle (e.g. you hang out in an IRC/email window all day and manage the community, and you like it), and I'm not sure how sustainable a lifestyle it is. So maybe I agree with OP here.

I wonder if there's something to like, creating some kind of barrier to interact. Like, if I want to file an OpenBSD bug I have to work pretty hard, so some filtering is happening. Filing a bug on GitHub is very easy, so anyone can jump on there and demand whatever they want.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.

Just let that sink in.

I think there's a basic contradiction at the bottom of a lot of the angst over OSS, sustainability, etc.: there are a lot of OSS people who simultaneously want their projects to be important, but also don't want the responsibility (in a basic civic, not legal sense) that comes with being widely adopted.

If you don't want your projects to be important, there are well-trodden ways to send that message to companies that attempt to extract wealth from your free labor: you can close and ignore their issues, send them nastygrams, etc. But if you do put effort into making your projects easily adoptable, I don't think it's crazy that companies do in fact come knocking.

(This is a non-normative position: I don't think any of this is particularly fair. But I think it's telling that there is a huge pool of OSS that companies mostly ignore, since it gives of "go away and don't rely on me" signals.)

I think there are use cases for open source. E.g., you write some throwaway code, and want feedback - the obvious strategy is to publish it open source. It becomes clear that the app you are working on is not a viable business - maybe the code is useful to someone else, and if you were tracking licenses properly it costs nothing to publish it. Some types of software, like compilers, I simply wouldn't trust if they are not open-source.

But it's also true that it is easy to buy into some strange ideas like "sharing is caring" and end up going past reciprocal altruism and into territory where you are working for free.

You can also make opensource software, not maintain it, get it forked so someone else will actually do the heavy-lifting, someone who maybe wants to gain money out of it, but he will still get to credit you because of your GPL license. I guess this globalized turbocapitalist mindset is making you not see open source and free-as-in-beer as what it is: you write code, everybody can read and fork. So, you can have a 1 million dollar gift, or a 30$ one... it's still a gift. This is what is anti-capitalistic, and I'm sorry you don't get it.

There is no responsibility in open source. It's the wild West. Anyone with expectations of you is simply new to the scene and doesn't get it yet.

Forking is a thing. People don't do it enough. GitHub doesn't make it easy to find active forks.

The problem starts with the old but highly important distinction of calling it "open source" instead of "libre software".

"Open source" puts narrow emphasis on the code itself, downplaying how that code is actually used, and the resulting abilities of its users. In the "open source" paradigm it makes perfect sense that you can study a piece of source code and even modify and run it locally, but then when you want to actually practically use that software, often to interact with other people, you're strongly incentivized to use the centrally controlled (aka proprietary) SaaS instance/copy/fork. This dynamic of stripping user agency and providing a canned product in its place is what allows businesses to view your project and your effort as a raw materials to be mined.

"Libre software" keeps the emphasis on user freedom. Having the ability to modify and run the code is a necessary, but not sufficient part of that. SaaS is an attack on user freedom from shortcomings of the GPL3, just the way Tivoization was an attack on user freedom from (perceived and commonly held) shortcomings of the GPL2. By keeping the emphasis on user freedom, we can easily perceive these types of attacks as taking away user freedom. Whereas by focusing on one mechanism "open source" encourages identifying with operations of the attackers - eg that common fallacious refrain that you can always make your own centrally-controlled clone of a given site.

it sounds like the author was looking to achieve some level of "success" in the open-source world. finding "success" (depending on your definition) is possible, but i think it's a mistake to go in looking for it. open source is and always will be the holding up the foundations of everything we build. it's our most important shared resource. without open source software, the software industry would not exist. full stop.

Yet another post from someone who didn't understand open source, and now does. We've seen these posts for well over a decade - why did people assume otherwise?

Open source is just fine. Your expectations around it were not.

Open Source never made sense (to me. I'm a Free Software partisan.)

> but y'all, capitalism is winning, and Open Source isn't changing that fact by an appreciable margin.

Open Source was a capitulation to capitalism. That's what differentiates it from the Free Software movement. The whole point was to woo business interests.

> you have somehow fucked up because you now have a second job. A second job that doesn't pay,

That's a classic case of "Don't do that." Charge people money to write and maintain software, of course! That is valuable economic activity.

Don't charge people to copy software that is already written. That is regressive and holds back human progress and economic wealth creation.

The entire point of computers and software is that it makes wealth easy to duplicate! You write a machine and then everyone can use it for free (technically there is a cost but it's so incredibly tiny that it's negligible.)

We should take advantage of this to reconfigure the economic system to take care of everybody (and the global ecology) and live happily ever after.