"I support it only if it's open source" should be a more common viewpoint
What are your thoughts? Any counter-counter points to the author's response to most concerns regarding open source?
I’m an open source developer who’s put thousands of hours of work into my open source projects.
I get wanting to use open source software. I want to use open source software. I want to write open source software. I do write open source software. But please understand that I only do that because I enjoy it. I also need to pay the bills, and there’s not much money in writing open source software.
If you value an open source project, especially if it’s just a small development team that doesn’t sell anything, please donate to them.
Right now, I run an email service, https://port87.com/, and it is technically closed source. But it’s built on my open source projects, Svelte Material UI, Nymph.js, and Nephele. Probably about 70% of the code that makes up Port87 is open source, and if you use Port87, you’re helping me continue to develop those open source projects. So even if you don’t donate to open source projects, there are other ways to contribute. Support companies who support open source projects.
In some "ecosystems" everything being free is kinda how you are compensated, instead of money. You spend time making your thing for free, but so does everyone else so you don't have to pay for those things either. The two main examples I've personally been involved with are game modding and 3d printing models, I use the free stuff other people make all the time, releasing the things I make for free is how I pay it back.
But yeah, if you use something you really like, throw them a buck or two for the work.
...although I've donated about as much as I've received as donations myself. Eh. No matter.
Yup, I'm the same way. If I could work in FOSS, I'd be happy to take a pay cut, but FOSS doesn't pay anywhere near good enough. So it'll remain a hobby.
As such, I'm pretty reasonable about what needs to be open source, and what's fine being proprietary. For example:
Basically, the more risk there is of a security issue, the more I expect it to be FOSS. And I'm willing to help out too. I've submitted patches to Lemmy and other FOSS projects I use, and I'll donate something similar to what I'd pay for a proprietary app for certain projects.
This sort of thing can't really be done in capitalism at all. Open Source (as it was advanced by Eric S. Raymond and the Mozilla Project back in the late 90s) was always stuck in a capitalist way of thinking.
In a society where everyone has their basic needs met and people are expected to contribute what they can, writing FOSS can be your contribution.
The early mobile phone apps conditioned people to expect things free.
I donate to any project, open or closed source if it's worth it.
"I only eat food that's free."
I fully support open source software, but it's not feasible under the current economic system to expect everyone to exclusively contribute to open source projects.
Aren't "consume" and "support" different concepts? The article is trash, so I'm not referring to that, but I could take this stance in broader terms.
If my boss says work on this project -I'll do it because I'm paid to do that, for the amount of time I'm paid to do it, but no more. If my bank says use this closed source application, okay fine, but I'll never recommend it to anyone or submit a bug report when it breaks. If my government or library is considering entering into some closed source ecosystem, I'll go out of my way to recommend against it, but I'll probably end up having to use it. If I feel like paying for Netflix, I'll share passwords and use regional VPNs, cancel whenever I feel like it, or whatever and never feel guilty.
If your product is open source, pretty much the opposite of all of the above. That's what I would consider as "support."
You are allowed to charge money for open source.
Its the recipe that makes the food you're eating that would need to be publicly available and free to redistribute.
Yep, you sure are. You also can’t stop someone from forking it and giving it away for free. See: Red Hat Enterprise Linux and AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, etc.
Money in open source is one of the biggest hurdles to it becoming the norm. IMHO, governments should fund more open source projects and fund them at higher levels. We have art grants because art improves society, and we should have an equal or higher amount of open source grants because open source improves society too.
You’re allowed, but as long as anyone else can do it for free, you can’t build a business model on selling it. At most you can sell something else (support, cloud compute, some solution that makes using it easier etc.).
Technically, according to the GPLv3 you don’t need to make the source code publically available. If you sell software with binaries then their source code must be included with it. If you’re Red Hat you can also add an additional ToS to the website that states if you buy the software you can’t freely distribute the source code you download from the website or you will be sued to oblivion.
It's not a perfect metaphor.
Bitwarden and Cryptpad. Both open source and self hostable, yet I pay for both. paying for open source is possible.
He never said paying for open source projects is impossible, obviously we have the ability pay. It's the expecting EVERYONE to drop money on every FOSS project that's infeasible. That shit ads up.
It's the same issue that PeerTube has, people making free content with no ads, but they aren't guaranteed payment. I'm not about to pay $5 per month on Patreon for every creator that I like, cause that's just not sustainable.
i stopped paying for cryptpad when they stopped building their own software and started peddling the utter garbage that is onlyoffice.
i asked them a few years ago if they are planning to build something new and they just said why build when there are things like onlyoffice already available.
sigh.
Paying for closed source software is kind of like voting for your oppressors. Using closed source software is literally like giving away access to your computer in hope that your computer may be used in a way you’d prefer… The software economy is the only reason I don’t create software. The customer is rarely the user.
Counterpoint: "I support drone strikes in random developing countries as long as the drones are open source" doesn't really sound that good lol
How about, if we must have military drones, they should be open source.
Yea this phrasing sounds a lot better
Heh. It's a very software-centric view. Open source trivializes things that can run as software on readily available hardware, but if there's a linear relationship between cost of hardware/manufacture and results you aren't solving much of the gatekeeping. There's plenty of open source availability for a lot of stuff, from email to LLMs, that nobody self-hosts. The problem isn't the underlying reproduction rights.
I will say this, I don't care about what the author or anybody else "supports". If we should have learned something from the last decade or two is that "support" means jack shit.
I care about regulation. And just like I think education, transportation, medical patents, health care and other key resources should be fundamentally public by law, the same is true of other technologies.
"...from email to LLMs, that nobody self-hosts"
As someone that self-hosts those things, both professionally and personally, I'm gonna have to disagree. I wish more did, but there are plenty of self-hosters out there, they just don't get headlines.
I self host those, too.
I am nobody in the scale of this conversation.
I think there's a business opportunity in simplifying self hosting into a commodity (have your people call my people, we'll talk), but nobody is taking advantage of it other than, say, Synology, and they are still way too complicated and mostly only concerned with selling you hard drives.
Apple and Google aren't going to invent the iNAS or the Servoor until they can find a path to datamining and revenue in those that beats hosting things themselves, and that time is probably never. So while everybody uses Gmail and Facetime and ChatGPT nobody selfhosts.
Consider, though, the value you received in non-monetary terms. How much would you have had to pay?
I love the thought, but it the thinking behind it is very utopian. It doesn't match the real world. In my experience, if a company can't make all of the profit from a thing they invest in, they simply won't invest. I wish that wasn't the case, but it's what I've seen. The C-Suite and management would rather make 100% profit from living in the dark ages compared to "just" 99% of the profit from pushing the world forward.
but it the thinking behind it is very utopian
I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Things don’t have to be realistic to be aspirational. It’s a bigger problem when people give up because improvement isn’t realistic or deemed necessary by comparison to some other factor.
Saw it a lot here. People would be all “sure our healthcare isn’t great but at least we’re not like the U.S.” as the rightwingers bit by bit enshittified the entire system.
A utopia is what we should aim for. What’s the point of anything less?
There's a difference between being realistic and being pessimistic. The latter expects any attempt to fail, while the former seeks an attainable path to a goal.
One can not attain that utopian vision without setting realistic goals. Setting your eyes on the end game without ever focusing on the path to get there is dooming yourself to failure.
How the world "should" respond to the thing we care about is an actively counter-productive thing to get hung up on.
Its much important how they do respond to it, and how we can reach those who don't connect with it
(And that doesn't just lecturing people and trying to brow beat them into caring about it, which seems like the default approach for a lot of foss folks 🥲 thats the opposite or reaching people, that's alienating them)
Fuck Vitalik Buterin.
Damn, why?
He's the founder of a major cryptocurrency project, Ethereum
Its my way of thinking. From the ip perspective I can see peoples argument about profits and companies but for individuals you are likely to get your stuff stolen and used by companies. I mean look at ai training. So better to deny any company trying to claim your work is thiers. Added to that is the company technology that goes to the graveyard. Open source allows ones work to be immortal. Then from the user perspective we all know how controlling and privacy invasive proprietary software is.
Open source can refer to MIT licensed code/projects where it can be taken, modified and redistributed as proprietary software without giving back. You can't contribute without wondering if you're doing work for a mega corp.
I would be temped to argue that doesn't go far enough. If copyleft wasn't circumvented by AI I'd argue for that.
I think a new GPL needs to be created to account for this. Like, "any generative system using this as an input which can ever replicate this code base (even in part), must be bound to this license." People could then run overfitting analysis to see if they ever get their copyleft code out of the model. If they do, then they have grounds to sue. I'm fine with an LLM being trained on my code, but I want the four freedoms to be preserved if it is.
It"s a difficult viewpoint given where money flows. A better method shoupd be more government funded software, with a FOSS requirement since it's tax dollars.
That being said, I'm very fortunate to be working for a company that releases software under MIT and/or SSPLv1, and we use almost exclusively Open Source for our infrastructure and back office (decisions I made, but had the strong, proactive backing of our CEO/Founders).