The After Open Source Era Has Started | Hacker News Reader

The After Open Source Era Has Started

monetize.substack.com

70 pointsbibryam46 comments

It's hard to take this seriously because it starts with false premises. Both the open source definition (from the open source initiative), which defines open source software, and the free software definition (from the free software foundation), which defines free software, include both protective (copyleft) licenses and permissive licenses. When the article starts with fundamental false assumptions, it's hard to take its conclusions very seriously.

See: https://opensource.org/osd https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

I've only skimmed the article, but this is what my perceptions are on the subject.

The way I've always perceived it is that the Free Software movement promotes that Free Software is good, and that non-free software is bad (or unethical). Whereas the Open Source movement was more of a counter to that second point -- non-free software isn't unethical, and Free Software is good (and can often be better than non-free), and that pragmatism is more important than blind adherence to a philosophy.

The next era applies to specific types of software that fits with a service-based monetization scheme which funds the software development, which says that benefiting from the software at the expense of those funding it is bad. It sounds to me that this is worth calling out as a divergence in philosophy from the previous two world view. (No judgment calls here, I don't have a horse in this race, just observation).

Edit: I see which world view this article gets its philosophy from after looking at it more carefully. Both Free Software and Open Source philosophies had at the core of them user freedoms with regards to software. The direction that this article is coming from is monetization as a first priority, and the software license (and associated end-user rights) are secondary to monetization (again, not judging, just observing).

But this “new era” is just a move back to the pre-free era where software was proprietary.

So it’s a regression.

There was no era without free or open source software.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_free_and_open-sourc...

> In the 1950s and into the 1960s almost all software was produced by academics and corporate researchers working in collaboration, often shared as public-domain software. ...

> The first example of free and open-source software is believed to be the A-2 system, developed at the UNIVAC division of Remington Rand in 1953,[5] which was released to customers with its source code. ...

> Some free software which was developed in the 1970s continues to be developed and used, such as TeX (developed by Donald Knuth)[8] and SPICE.[9]

You should also recall that software wasn't considered copyrightable before the 1974:

> Therefore, software had no licenses attached and was shared as public-domain software, typically with source code. The CONTU decision plus later court decisions such as Apple v. Franklin in 1983 for object code, gave computer programs the copyright status of literary works and started the licensing of software and the shrink-wrap closed source software business model.

That very well may be, especially when viewed from the Free Software philosophy. Also note that Stalman may view Open Source as a regrission too. From the Monetization side (another word that RMS seamed to dislike), they see it as progression.

What would be really nice is either something that works for everyone, or baring that, recognition from all groups that different people have different needs, and those needs have some validity.

>> Both Free Software and Open Source philosophies had at the core of them user freedoms with regards to software

Observationally, and I am sure OSI would disagree, it seems to be Open Source has it core to be DEVELOPER freedom, not User Freedom.

Open Source is about allowing developers of software access to source code, and be allowed to redistribute their source code with in the developer community, but Open Source has no problems with locking out USER freedom

Where as Free Software is about freedom for USERS which would also include developers.

> Open Source is about allowing developers of software access to source code, and be allowed to redistribute their source code with in the developer community, but Open Source has no problems with locking out USER freedom

Do you care to provide any proof for this?

Well if you look at the Open Source Landscape today it is dominated by Library's, frameworks, and Dev Tools used to create commercial software. this is largely non-copy left code that users of the end products that contain this "open source" can not access the code of the larger system and often times are not even aware of the open source code that is in the system they are using..

This would be in violation of Free Software Core Freedoms [2]

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....

[2] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

The insistence of Libre Software on the 4 freedoms is more user-friendly?

Open Source = Newspeak created to sow confusion around the idea of free software so that developers release the products of their labour under licences that allow maximum rent to be extracted from them by corporations.

According to Wikipedia: "[ESR and others] concluded that FSF's social activism was not appealing to companies like Netscape, and looked for a way to rebrand the Free software movement to emphasize the business potential of sharing and collaborating on software source code. The new name they chose was "Open-source", and quickly Bruce Perens, publisher Tim O'Reilly, Linus Torvalds, and others signed on to the rebranding. The Open Source Initiative was founded in February 1998 to encourage the use of the new term and evangelize open-source principles."

The author is conflating Copyleft with Software Freedom movement. This kinds of misrepresentations are prevalent, look how BBC website for kids misrepresenting what Open Source is: https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zhx26yc/revision/11

I think you are being a bit too nitpicky. When the author says open source, he clearly means non-copyleft open source.

The problem is that he is playing fast and loose with definitions, and he is also playing fast and loose with history.

Copyleft started with GPL version 1, which was its first embodiment. Sharing source code in a permissive way started long before that. The term open source software came later, but people were doing this in the 1950s and 60s. His notion that permissive software licenses only started later, after copyleft, ignores actual history.

Also, in terms of definitions, free software (even if you equal that with copyleft) doesn't really require that changes "must be submitted to the original maker for redistribution" (quote from TFA). Copyleft, at least in the sense it's generally used, only requires that if you redistribute the code, the redistribution (including modifications) must also be free and copyleft.

This might be nitpicking, but the wording could give a wrong impression of what free software is or isn't, and in a post that's essentially about the cultural and social foundations and relative merits of different models, that's IMO quite important.

Companies like IBM would provide customers with sources of their software for.a long time, without any permission to use it as the customer sees fit, though. This has nothing to do with open-source or free software licenses.

IBM wasn't the only company or person developing software.

Consider TeX, released before 1980. Is that open-source?

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_free_and_open-sourc... , which includes a link to the work by SHARE - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHARE_(computing) .

> In 1959 SHARE [a volunteer-run user group for IBM mainframe computers that was founded in 1955] released the SHARE Operating System (SOS), originally for the IBM 709 computer, later ported to the IBM 7090. SOS was one of the first instances of "commons-based peer production" now widely used in the development of free and open-source software such as Linux and the GNU project.

I'm sure some people in the 50's and 60's said "make sure to show me what you change" so copyleft would also have been around.

MIT and BSD licenses date from the late 1980s, and from what I recall (vaguely - I was very not old when this was occurring) were explicitly not "Copyleft" even years before the Open Source Initiative was a gleam in its founders' eyes.

MIT license history is here: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=926... First version 1984, revised version more widely used 1986. I'm sure that software was released in a permissive wray long before that, but I'd have to do more research, and that's enough for my point.

GPL version 1 was released in 1989: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License

> I'm sure that software was released in a permissive gray long before that, but I'd have to do more research, and that's enough for my point.

For a few bonus swings at the horse, MVS source was freely available until 3.8j in 1981 and AT&T UNIX V6 source was well distributed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MVS#Modern_MVS

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lions%27_Commentary_on_UNIX_6t...

To be fair, in earlier times it wasn't clear if software was copyrightable. In the US the Copyright Act of 1976, which became effective on January 1, 1978, clearly stated that Congress intended software to be copyrightable; before that there were many questions. So before that, in the US many considered any source code distribution as equivalent to a permissive license.

Unix v6 source was well distributed, but the Lyons book (with Unix source code)) was only distributed as Samizdat for years because it wasn't clear it was legal.

Minor nit: GPLv1 was released in 1989, but the "copyleft" idea has been used in the license of GNU software releases since 1984.

An odd take on history. Evidently history began when the author started experiencing it. It doesn't mention anything about how so much of what software we have to day is descended from the DECUS tapes and BSD tapes that were circulating the 1980s and 1990s in addition to the FSF tape you could get. I used archie to download uuencded source archives of all kinds of "open source" development tools (the name hadn't been published and monetized yet, but the concept was in common use).

I think the post open source era started some time in the late 1980s when the internet started creeping into peoples homes.

> Evidently history began when the author started experiencing it.

If you pay enough attention, this is usually the failing of most non-historian takes on history. “Normal” is usually better replaced in such articles with “whatever was in place when I was born”.

Yep, I’m on DECUS tapes from ‘82…spoke in front of darkness filled with 6,000 people reacting to every one of my jokes many years before I could shave (and also before I worked for DEC). In the old days, pear shaped bearded gurus ruled —from 2000 until recently that was frowned on, but you can bet I gotta beard now lol..totally resisting the pear shape tho) ;)

It's hard to learn about things nobody discusses. I've been around for a while and can't say I've ever noticed those being mentioned anywhere. If you wanted to write something longer about it I'd really love to read it :)

There’s books and web sites and stuff. Learning doesn’t just come from discussion, but research. (Edit to change “learning” to “research” because autocorrect changed it and I didn’t notice until now)

If you haven’t read ESR’s Cathedral and the Bazaar, it’s pretty good and will go into some of the background.

To be fair, we used to have search engines that were good for exploring all kinds of history, but not so much anymore.

Yeah, but all the sites that had this info are all around now.

I like the book recommendation threads on HN for learning stuff.

What’s funny to me is that some of this history is so ingrained that it doesn’t make sense to discuss it. It would be like talking about how great George Washington is all the time.

The stories that get repeated are the ones that get remembered. Even if the information is out there for those who dig, I believe that storage and recall are fundamentally the same thing when it comes to our human memory :)

I've been in open source for over 20 years now, Apache member, co-founder Jakarta Apache, blah blah.

I'm seeing a new era of Open Source reflected in DeFi. These projects are done in the open, with a group of eager young developers, just like I was 20 years ago.

The thing that is different is that people actually get paid for their work. These DeFi projects are minting so much money that they can actually afford to attract talent. The tooling is all there for them to use. A lot of projects are just based on existing codebases, re-using legos.

Everyone is "anonymous", code is of high standards, it is meritocracy driven and DAO based. Stuff moves fast.

Unreal. Never seen anything like it.

DeFi explained

https://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/review/2021/02/...

Is DeFI decentralized finance? Where are all these open source projects and are they doing anything useful?

Wikipedia has some answers for you

> Decentralized finance (commonly referred to as DeFi) is an experimental form of finance that does not rely on central financial intermediaries such as brokerages, exchanges, or banks, and instead utilizes smart contracts on blockchains, the most common being Ethereum.

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_finance

I would love to hear more about this. I'd like to implement a model like this for my project.

Any articles or communities you could point me to?

DeFi and other blockchain projects follow the same model. It is not only about writing the code, but also running it. In which case you can embed the monetization in the software. Hats off.

I’ve been in software for more than 40 years (STILL can’t qualify for the senior menu at IHOP) and I’m sure you can imagine how I feel. We had “public domain” back in the day (I contributed to it..exchanged on mag tapes at conventions, later via BBS like Fred FishNet) and it was great. Then some f’n OG communist with MIT “tenure” and a beard down to his navel (was once a sign of hacker cred), at that point known mainly for TRYING (and failing) at knocking off RSX and AOS but settling on an EDT (written in Teco) clone, “inspired” one of the teens who grew up in the backwater shadow of the then respected Soviet Union carrying around Andy Tannenbaum’s book (on MINIX) to grab free stuff for his doomed OS and, in turn, release it open source to others. (If you have any doubt about the perp’s evilness, check https://m.slashdot.org/story/83675) I could have used any OS I wanted (or write my own as I did in EARLY ‘80s for companies we sold for ~$100M) was running Yggdrasil and the OG RedHat (had the kids who “assembled” RedHat in my sports car with my 65+ yo Chairman heading down the 10 from DTLA pondering where we could take drinking-minors to chill and talk shop..decided on, a coffee shop, of course, in those pre-Sbux on err-corner days). Can I blame the young peeps for that biz model? No. “The Cathedral and the Bizzar” guy for trying to make a career out of that sheet? No. I blame the older than dirt SOB with guaranteed tenure/income for spreading his diseased politics that many of my elders dedicated their lives to ending. I was too young (but fully aware, emancipated and working the traditional biz, not plotting to takeover the world. That dot-com crash in 2000 cost more than anyone realizes —it removed our “protectors” (my mentors/elders) permanently (once you crack open your 401K boy…) and left the handful of peeps like me looking mighty Quixotic until we learned to STFU and watch all of America’s Crown Jewels being published on the Net, “training” the unwashed masses and our sworn enemies. The rise of China was horrific —have vivid memories of former clients interrogating me for refusing their all expenses paid trips to visit the “manufacturer.” I kept thinking, “someday I might need to work on something super secret like the Old Man and his posse when I was growin’ up —and a trip to COMMUNIST China is probably a Bad idea.” I’m not exactly a Trump nut case, but I can tell you watching Mornings with Maria over the past 4 years has brought me to tears. Biden’s statement to CBS on China policy scares me, but whatever. Point being we turned those (literal) cave dwellers into a superpower that wants to kill all non-Chinese as soon as they get done recapturing Formosa using “open source.” Russia would do us wrong if we were unworthy, but China is an alien monster and the guy who enabled it (along with his cousin who is now a Google Fellow talking interplanetary IP addressing) need to be memorialized for what they are and what they f’n did. —ooh betta downvote raw experience/emotion, it’s so inappropriate…

(Disclaimer I wrote the article) My first ever computer was a Pentium 4 and I've started my software career around the middle of the open source era (not the free software era). I have missed the beginning and the history of open source, but I'm very interested in what is coming next. There is so much written about the history and various definitions on Wikipedia, that wasn't the focus of the article (hint: the future was). I've included just enough selective facts about the history, to make a point. The focus has been to predict what comes in the next 20 years.

Today, when I chat with kids that are starting their careers, they are hardly excited about what happened 20 years ago, not to mention 40 years ago. They don't give a sh*t about the ideological differences between free & open source, and what the early internet connection speed was. But they are defining the next 20 years through some Javascript and Web3 technologies.

As others have said, please research the actual history before writing your interpretation of it.

I wonder if the elasticsearch fork takes off will that put a dampener on these new selfish source relicenses. Like, I think if these companies want to not have competition with this software now its popular, its pulling the ladder up behind them a bit, and they wouldn't have reached their level of usage that being competed against by cloud providers is a problem. It's more honest to start out with one of these licenses than build the audience then relicense/

"The next era will improve on the same decentralized development principles by incorporating decentralized monetization and governance too. This will take us the full cycle of Decentralized and Sustainable Open Software nirvana."

I'm not sure what this actually means but, nirvana.

In case you are really interested what it means, but not only picking on the nirvana word, here it is: The Bazaar, and open source in general cover the development model through open collaboration. That is awesome, but not enough. You need to think about open funding and open governance elements.

- Ex. DeFi (that is a word now people seems to be familiarizing with) is an extension of open source where monetization is also backed in the project. It is open source + monetization in a decentralized form.

- There are also MANY blockchain projects that incorporate governance by voting of token holders, etc. That is better than a bunch of folks with commit (or some other lifetime) rights taking all the project decisions, at least it is more transparent. That is open source + decentralized governance.

So the conclusion is: Open/free source (cool but not enough) + decentralized governance + open monetization = nirvana. To get there, that will take the next 20 years.

HTH

Interesting, I mostly thought that the smart contracts had flopped by now (it has been more than 5 years now that Ethereum has launched, where are the smart contract based unicorns?), but maybe with a complex technology like that they just need more time ?

This is missing the era when copyright law wasn't applied to software.

Remarkbox is not open source, but the service is now free:

https://www.remarkbox.com/remarkbox-is-now-pay-what-you-can....

Related and super useful insights on Commercial Open Source (COSS): https://coss.media

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