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Comment by softwaredoug | Hacker News Reader

The sad thing is so few companies really invest in participating in FOSS software. That’s one reason these “open source companies” came to exist. It really should be a community of contributors, backed by a diverse set of companies. At best, employers will allow contributing bug fixes or small patches. Not the in depth dedication these projects really need.

We’re heading towards a handful of giant companies that can afford to pay large teams to build and maintain FOSS, and hence own developer mindshare, for their own selfish reasons.

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> We’re heading towards a handful of giant companies that can afford to pay large teams to build and maintain FOSS, and hence own developer mindshare, for their own selfish reasons.

"heading towards"? I'd say we're there.

And it's been a while coming. I wrongly discounted Stallman. Like many, I found the GPL onerous and annoying to deal with as a developer. But we've paid a high price.

> But we've paid a high price.

What price?

Everyone using BSD and Apache licenses - so any changes or improvements they make aren't contributed back to the source repo.

Well, there are also many who want to contribute code back to GPL and LGPL projects, but can't because the companies that control these projects want them to sign contributor agreements with unacceptable terms.

According to GPL, you do not need to contribute back to the original authors, you only need to make your changes available under GPL.

But maintaining a fork is not everyone's cup of tea.

> But maintaining a fork is not everyone's cup of tea.

It is not in the interest or benefit of the community if everyone makes or is forced to make his/her own fork. Forces should be joined, not scattered.

Probably a big reason why Linux is successful in attracting contributions; the distributed copyright means that there's nobody more equal among equals that has the sole right to monetize it however they see fit. Everybody gets the same deal.

Have a look at PostgreSQL, SQLite, LLVM, Clang ... all these are projects that get a lot of support from proprietary software vendors. I'm pretty sure that the companies contribute to these projects because of the liberal license, not in spite of it.

I think a big fallacy with regard to the GPL is that companies don't contribute to open source because the license forces them to. Companies contribute to open source because it makes more sense to collaborate on some projects rather than each work on their own.

Licenses like GPL etc. are great for ensuring their user's freedom; but they don't really incentivise companies to contribute to them at all. Instead, they prevent some companies from using them. So counter-intuitively project with liberal licenses end up with much more contributions than projects with strong licenses...

Counter argument: the Linux kernel. (Since we are mentioning open source projects with the highest profile on earth, I don't think neither of the examples are fair)

I agree, the Linux kernel is one of the examples where the GPL really works, because a lot of companies really need it for their products, and they need to distribute it, and there are very few alternatives.

> there are very few alternatives

QNX, WxWorks, Windows Embedded, Windows CE (RIP), NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, OS/2 Warp, Plan 9, Inferno, RiscOS, ReactOS...

It's a shame what happened to BeOS - I wonder what would have happened if BeOS was open-sourced when the expected Apple buyout fizzled and the company went-under instead of it simply disappearing - that would have put a huge damper on, say, Ubuntu and other Linux desktop projects because the whole selling-point of them being "the only usable desktop alternative to Windows on non-Apple hardware!" wouldn't be true.

I doubt that any of these (except maybe one of the BSDs) would be a viable alternative in most cases where companies use the Linux kernel.

See my other comment in this thread for my answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25896907

I don't think it's really a price - including corporate projects was always the point of "open source" as opposed to "free software". The split is generally understood to have started when part of the community embraced Netscape's open source browser.

To be clear, I don't typically have any issue with corporate use of my code. That's why I chose MIT and other permissive licenses.

That said, what I had in mind when I licensed my code were start-ups and small+medium businesses. It didn't occur to me that behemoths like Amazon might stripmine open source and fail to contribute back. Even though the permissive licenses permit this kind of behavior, it seems exploitative.

Additionally, as the GP mentions, we're at the point where it's primarily massive tech companies who can afford to develop ambitious open source projects.

Far more importantly, it also failed to occur to me that tech companies would become the new railroads -- massive monopolies that dominate society, the economy, culture, politics, etc. When I started in open source, Microsoft had recently been slapped down by antitrust regulators, there was no social media, and the tech ecosystem - particularly the open source ecosystem - was much, much different. It was more democratic, egalitarian, and balanced.

Granted, as far as I know, it has been small and medium sized companies that have used my own open source code. I'm not aware of any of the Big 5 using it (my most popular libaries have been superceded by newer/better projects anyway).

Nonetheless, I would have been more wary of philosophically supporting permissive licenses had I fully realized the implications.

> Far more importantly, it also failed to occur to me that tech companies would become the new railroads -- massive monopolies that dominate society, the economy, culture, politics, etc.

These are social and political problems, you can't fix them by sitting in your basement writing copyleft code anymore than you fix them by writing permissively licensed code.

It's not like the FAANG's of the world would go, oh no we really want to use this copyleft library, oh well, let's release all our code under a copyleft license as well. They'd just use some other code with a more permissive license, or then they would reimplement the needed functionality themselves.

> These are social and political problems, you can't fix them by sitting in your basement writing copyleft code anymore than you fix them by writing permissively licensed code.

This is true. But just because you can't fix something by yourself, doesn't mean that you should contribute to, or participate in, the problem.

> We’re heading towards a handful of giant companies that can afford to pay large teams to build and maintain FOSS

“Heading toward”?

I remember people talking about that as the existing state...in the 1990s. If anything, we’re heading away from that, with a much wider array of companies actively investing either cash or employee time in open source.

What's actually changed, IMO, is that it's a lot harder to get traction with commercial software than it used to be, so even forms that have no open-source-compatible business model in mind launch as open source, meaning that they have to figure out a unexpected business model or pivot out of open source at some point.

And, for PR reasons, they want someone else to blame for the pivot out of open source, so we get all the AWS-blaming and “the market has become radically less favorable to open source” stories, neither of which is grounded in reality.

> We’re heading towards a handful of giant companies that can afford to pay large teams to build and maintain FOSS, and hence own developer mindshare, for their own selfish reasons.

Can you name some examples of such "selfish reasons" connected to some OSS?

I can think of Google taking over the internet with Chrome, but MS did the same with IE, so that has nothing to do with OSS. It's more that Chrome happens to have source code available.

Gradually, more and more of Chrome will become closed source as is already happening. DRM, Sync features,...

A community of contributors backed by a diverse set of companies has to be seeded by an MVP. Where would that MVP come from? For complex software it's either an internal project spun out from a unicorn or a labor of love from a gentleman hacker. These are pretty limited routes; it's much easier to start an open source startup with the caveat that the community will probably never emerge later because the startup will be moving too fast for outsiders to jump in. Now startups feel they have to use "innovative" licenses to be successful but the powers that be are deriding these licenses as "fake open source". We're setting ourselves up for an OSS winter where sophisticated developer tools or installable infrastructure software just won't be created.

The term "open source" has a well-known definition, and the "novel licenses", like Mongo's, do not match it. They are more like the "source available" licenses, as practiced by MS in 1990s, and by IBM, much earlier.

There are several definitions for Open Source that come from foundations and other groups, which push their own beliefs and standards. Opensource.org, for example, pushes their own definition that excludes all those who do not use the perferred license!

However, dictionaries that mirror collective understandings, as used by millions of people, tell a different story. According to OxfordLanguages, Open Source denotes, "software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified." If you look at Dictionary.com. you will see that Open-Source is defined as "pertaining to or denoting a product or system whose origins, formula, design, etc., are freely accessible to the public."

So, no, open source doesn't have a single definition, except to groups who are pushing their own definitions.

For software the overwhelming consensus is the OSI definition (extremely close to the FSF def, extremely close to what is applied as criteria by various distro, etc.)

You may want to write "Open Source" to be sure it is not confused with something else, but even "open source" should be parsed as that definition by default. This is not even pushing a political agenda or a judgment of value. Just "everybody" calls that like that, so there is no point in overloading the term for other approaches. Using another term for other things is perfectly fine and there are plenty of them possible with a positive tone, in case they bring positive things to the table.

> There are several definitions for Open Source that come from foundations and other groups

...and all of them do so because they really want to pretend that their software is "open source" without actually putting it under an open source license. Like, in the abstract I agree that it's weird having the OSI (or any one group) define "open source", but in this case I'm okay with it because every single "alternative definition" turns out to be someone just trying to pretend that their source-available software is "open source" for marketing reasons when it isn't.

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