Hacker News Reader

Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Heaven forbid a FAANG doesn’t touch your code. Look at all the exposure you’ll miss out on. They might actually have to spend resources to write and maintain the code themselves, instead of open source maintainers begging for scraps [1]. The horror.

The homebrew maintainer couldn’t even get hired at Google [2] if I recall, even though they’re big fans of using the tooling internally!

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/tech-... (OpenSSL Software Foundation President Steve Marquess wrote in a blog post last week that OpenSSL typically receives about $2,000 in donations a year and has just one employee who works full time on the open source code.)

[2] https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768 (Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but you can’t invert a binary tree on a whiteboard so fuck off.)

View on HN

Who said anyone was doing anything for exposure, either? I think open source is doomed if people fail to understand that when you release open source code under open source licenses, your users don’t owe you anything, and in return, you don’t owe your users anything either. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t even really care that much about whether or not people adhere to the licenses I use for the most part.

Nobody is owed a sustainable ecosystem to profit off of open source. When things align to be mutually beneficial, that’s great. But by the nature of it, if you want to make money off of software, you should not release it as open source. It’s probably going to eventually wind up being a conflict of interest, wherein the “open” parts of a project eventually become less and less relevant in favor of closed parts.

Open source doesn’t and shouldn’t guarantee a sustainable business model. The best you can hope for is that parties collaborate because they can benefit mutually from this collaboration, like with the Linux kernel.

An important distinction of Linux kernel development from most open source contributions is that the companies contributing code typically make their money off of selling hardware which must run or work with linux to be successful. These companies are all financially incentivized to keep the Linux collaboration successful.

Almost every open source package has a model where multiple contributors make money off something else. Usually that something else is software or hardware that is built with the open source package.

That sounds a bit like Thatcher 'there is no society' - society, I am not sure if open software can survive without permanence, trust and reliability (from the developer and customer side, not the code basis).

Sort of how Elastic using the license that’s biting them; can’t really expect much else so long as “it’s a private company they can hire as they see fit” is the default political posture.

Your problem transcends one whiner on Twitter; private entities can monopolize public agency across contexts and not be held accountable at all.

Here you are in a VC echo chamber; good luck

Reply on news.ycombinator.com