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Comment by geofft | Hacker News Reader

The fundamental "open source sustainability" problem is capitalism, or at least our incarnation of it, and everyone dances around it. You can't license your way out of this problem. You can't services-company your way out of this problem. The fundamental issue is that it is good for the world for skilled developers to spend all day writing software and giving it away, but they can make much more money writing software and not giving it away.

And I'm not even necessarily advocating we change our system of governance - we can do it fine with our current one. Even the culture of academia would be fine here. There certainly are skilled scientists who find it more profitable to do secret work in for-profit labs, but far less so than in software. (In large part, that system works because of government-funded universities and government-funded research grants.)

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> You can't license your way out of this problem

Why not? The government already distinguishes between a corp and a person - why can't licences do the same?

As an aside, the flip-side of not being payed is less liability. Charging people for your library could make you liable for security issues? Since security is important, maybe there is room for improvement on both sides of the aisle.

> but they can make much more money writing software and not giving it away

Hey guess what. It's possible to take an Apache 2.0 codebase, let's say Lucene, and then build more Apache 2.0 code on top of it, give it away entirely for free, and still build a $15B business. And you think capitalism has failed here?

Absolute nonsense.

Yes, it's possible to take an existing Apache 2.0 codebase, release some new Apache 2.0 code, build a $15B business, and then stop offering your code under Apache 2.0. Great! Shareholder value! That's literally what you set out to do! How could it have possibly failed?

What I'm actually saying is that when people think that outcome is a bad thing, their beef is with our particular breed of capitalism. When they say "This good outcome could have been so much better, had there been regulations on breaking up large companies so they can't bully small ones," then what they're saying is that they're objecting to the free market as it exists in our particular breed of capitalism. And when they say, as others say, "This good outcome could have been so much better if it weren't for the dictators at the OSI micromanaging the term 'open source'," then what they're actually saying is they're objecting to companies freely choosing to believe what the OSI says, because the OSI has no power. If you think that something was short of the mark here, that something was our breed of capitalism.

I'm agreeing with you. Capitalism did not fail. It did what everyone expected it to do. If you're happy with the outcome, great! I'm not telling anyone they ought to be unhappy with the outcome. But if you are unhappy with the outcome, I'm telling you why.

The reason I'm happy with Capitalism is because Elastic backstabbed the community and in a manner of weeks we'll have community-driven Apache 2.0 forks. So I think the market is responding as it should and am happy to see it.

> This good outcome could have been so much better, had there been regulations on breaking up large companies so they can't bully small ones

Well, I disagree with the (I think?) implication that Amazon is doing any bullying here, and I disagree that companies should be broken up purely for their size. But since we're getting into anti-trust authority, perhaps I can convince you to throw the ring into Mordor:

While anti-trust could theoretically fight monopolies, those laws exist within a system in which special interests will co-opt those powers to essentially defend their own monopolies. So, big company X kicks over the right amount of lobbying dollars and magically the politicians want to bring an anti-trust suit against competitor Y, etc.

Now the blue-pilled response is to say, "hey that's just another failure of capitalism, and that's why we need to get money out of politics!". In my unashamedly biased opinion, the red-pilled answer is to realize that these power structures will always be co-opted and the best solution is decentralization and therefore not having a state that can hand out bailouts, force small businesses to close up shop, discriminate against low-skilled workers with minimum wage regulations, exert arbitrary power through anti-trust legislation, etc.

Sorry, I kind of got down a philosophical rabbithole.

It is the state that recognizes Amazon and Elastic in the first place, though. Without the state's involvement, a developer at Elastic could choose to continue releasing their work product to the world under an open-source license - and a developer at AWS could choose to release the secret sauce that makes AWS's Elasticsearch such a threat to Elastic.

We're having this whole conversation about whether big companies might subvert and coerce the state without recognizing that they already do coerce it by making the state recognize their very existence. They would have no power without that (what is a lobbyist without anything to lobby on behalf of?), but they've been so successful at hawking their narrative that all of us think it's perfectly normal and inevitable that they exist.

Take that red-and-black pill (either because it's half-doomer or because it's ancom, either way) and chew on it.

> Elastic backstabbed the community

I seem to recall something like this. I also recall working with ES and having a negative impression on it based on some technical detail - but I can't recall what that was :-/

If you think capitalism causes problems with people getting paid for good work, I think you might be glossing over the historical failures of the alternatives relative to the ultimate goal of free / open software: user freedom.

Even in a socialist system, how does it solve the problem of competition, free ridership, and economically non-rival/non-excludable goods like software source code? You still need to collect money but no one has to pay it unless you erect laws that restrict user freedom.

Criticizing capitalism doesn't require being stalinists, so please stop with this cliche, it's old and extremely boring by now.

What’s even more boring is critiquing capitalism when that has actually nothing to do with the problem at hand.

I brought up socialism as a counter example of how there is very little practical way to solve this issue with a different economic system. You’re free to bring up a different example of how an economic system will help the conundrum of preserving economic exchange and user freedom. A Potlatch gift economy perhaps? Except that’s kind of hard to impose.

Right, I don't know the answer here. I just want people to start thinking seriously about the problem, because neither the regulatorily-captured free market nor the Politburo sound like great options.

And I'm mostly agreeing with the comment I'm replying to, because it is concretely thinking seriously about alternative models. "Capitalism, but your company can't get too big" seems fairly compelling tbh.

Regulated capitalism is certainly a start. Would be nice.

We already have regulated capitalism. The core issues are still there.

Capitalism is the elephant in the room, the economic (and cultural) system we have now.

Any change we want to do within this framework requires changing its rules. The real problem we have to face now is the perpetual growth model, which is a natural consequence of capitalism.

I don't know how and if we can fix this system to prevent perpetual growth without killing its essence. That's the real conversation we should do.

So don't act like someone is offending your religion.

It's not an elephant in the room if we're actively talking about it.

For someone who claims to want a conversation, you're doing a good job of insulting me repeatedly without actually discussing anything relevant to this post.

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