Open source isn't struggling. It's a struggle. People have high expectations, and expectations go awry in open source and profit models.
this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2023
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I think the article does raise some interesting points, particularly around the disconnect in non-technical people having absolutely no understanding of open source software and the lack of funding (including government tax incentives) to creating and maintaining open source software.
There are some projects that are doing well, completely unfunded by corporations, but they're definitely in the minority. And most of the successful ones have a freemium model or are related to piracy or ad blocking or some other philosophically- or economically-motivated project.
I had an encounter pretty similar to the one in the article at a former job.
I was the head of software development at a 10 year old "startup" with ~50 employees.
The CEO and the marketing lady walk into my office and tell me about this great new hardware (basically an underpowered server with 15 SFP+ ports for network traffic manipulation) they found somewhere in China. They don't have an use case for that yet, but they have a solution: They will sell it really cheap (€5000) so that, I quote, "some nerds will buy it like the Raspberry Pi and they will make software for free for us".
I ask them why they would be doing that, to which the marketing lady says "Because they are nerds. They do stuff like that."
Needless to say, not a single "nerd" bought that dirt cheap €5000 networking device with a huge amount of SFP+ network ports as a hobby device, let alone produce free software for it.
That device was a total flop.
But it also goes to show what they must be earning if they think that anyone would spend €5000 as an impulse buy with no further reason.
Did you not fancy telling them what a stupid idea it was?
I did tell them. Multiple times and in very direct words. They told me I don't understand nerds or open source.
Both marketing and CEO are jobs where Dunning-Kruger is considered an asset, not a problem.
I just had to scroll back up to double check what you said your job was, because I was sure you said you were in charge of software development, and then I thought, "no, I must be misremembering that, because there's no way the CEO and marketing person could genuinely believe that they know more about open source software development than a software developer." But no, you really did say your job was head of software development, and the CEO and marketing person really did think they know more than you.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is very real in marketing and executives.
Titles are a bit inflated in small companies, so "head of software development" meant I was the team leader of a team of 7 developers including myself. But yeah, they really thought they knew so much more about open source and open source developers than me.
Even if you'd said you were "just" a software developer, not even a head of a small team of developers, I'd still work on the assumption that you know more about software development than a CEO and a marketing person. Relevant professional experience gives you much more credibility than they had. :)
My thoughts exactly, insane that these people can get to such positions of power and destroy organisations by dismissing the opinions of the people who actually know things
I guess they just sort of... bullshit their way through life, and so few people call them on it that they just keep getting more power based on nothing more than them manipulating people into believing they're more competent than they are. And because they just say a lot of bullshit, they think everybody else does too, and so they don't listen when they're given real information from people that actually know what they're talking about.
As far as I can tell, humans generally think they know more about literally anything they have passing familiarity with than anyone else on the planet.
I did maintain an opensource project for a while and that taught me how to do it correctly:
- Don't. Just don't.
- If you really, really want to, just do what you need to fulfill your needs, never do something for someone else.
- If someone is really insistent, say you'll do it if that person pays for the implementation of the feature, and use your day job's hourly rate for it.
- Then don't implement anything you don't want to, because nobody is going to pay for it anyway.
Or to put it differently: Never see your project or contribution as anything more than a hobby. You will never see an return on investment.
If anyone demands I implement some feature into one of my open source projects that I either don't have time for or don't want to do, my response is one of the following:
- I'll get to it when I can (if I actually care to do it)
- You are welcome to implement it yourself and submit a PR
- You are welcome to fork the project and do it yourself or convince someone else to do it
But thankfully, my projects don't have a very wide audience, so requests/demands are rare.
But you have to implement [Insert Niche Feature That Adds No Benefit For The Average User] because I need it and can't be bothered to implement it myself! /s
You can leverage your projects to help land jobs. Other than that yeah, you don't owe anybody anything.
As I understood it, one of the foundations of open source development is scratching your own itches, then putting what you made up for grabs in case it scratches someone else's. There shouldn't be any expectation of support on your part beyond an email or two. The code's out there if they want to scratch the itch a different way. It's kind of a homesteader ethic.
That's basically right. But it's quite a difference what you have to do to scratch your itch, and what you need to do for it to be useful for others.
If you do it for yourself, there are no tests or documentation or even a GUI. It's quick and dirty, all configuration is hardcoded. If you need a different config, you'll just change the code.
All that doesn't really fly if you expect someone else to use the project.
On the other side, especially if it's too polished, idiots will perceive the project as being a commercial one and demand that you do what they want.
If you don't know the stories, maybe read up on the maintainer of core-js or Marcel Bokhorst. These two people complained about how tough it is to make good open source software. Both talked specifically about their toxic audience. So in turn the audience ridiculed them and they even received death threats.
I suppose the thing is, I personally wouldn't care much if anyone else used it or not, my itch has been scratched. If someone else finds it of use, great! If they need changes, they've got the code and can get crackin' on it themselves. Or, they can pay me to do it if we can agree on a price. Outside of that I have no expectations.
That's definitely a healthy way of dealing with that.
But with this way, something like Linux, Distros, Firefox, Blender or LibreOffice would have never happened. There are those who want to build retail-level open source software, mostly out of idealism, and then you are stuck between a non-monetizable rock and a toxic hard place.
But I totally agree with you, unless you are super idealistic, your way of handling it is probably the most healthy one and the one that will cause you the least amount of trouble. And it's also what I do, except when I sometimes do get idealistic.
I put it to you that ideals may constitute a scratchable itch.
That is true, but then you probably are in trouble ;)
Depends on how hard you scratch! lol
I was at an evening reception in Germany together with people from the German software community, business owners, government and associations. Beside interesting discussions, I met a couple of people from organizatiojns participating in the GAIA-X initiative to build a European alternative to American cloud providers such as Google, Amazon or Microsoft. Something I usually am not really interested in. These government initiatives often tend to be focused more on bureaucracy and imho don’t produce any hard output. As the evening got longer, I was given some updates on how the initiative progresses. To no one’s surprise the initiative had produced a vast amount of papers and concepts, and conducted numerous meetings. The shocker came when one person said that they’re now ready for the implementation.
“We’ve created all the concepts and ideas and now we’re looking for the Open Source community to build the software for an autonomous European Cloud.”
— Anonymous person involved in the European GAIA-X initiative
I asked her what funding was associated and whether there are any bounties for implementing any of their concepts. She looked at me confused and responded; “No, the Open Source community should implement it now”. I asked her whether she knew how Open Source actually works, if she had ever met any Open Source project teams, had ever written any software herself. You can guess the answer: it’s No. Why am I telling you this? Because this is absolutely the perception many organizations have of Open Source. Someone, somewhere writes software that businesses, NGOs or government can use to build services. And that’s a huge problem now. Open Source and Free Software is not a charity — it involves people with lifes and families to feed
The Commercialized Open Source
The Open Source movement was supposed to be a movement that is the exact opposite of commercial software. At least, if you believe the popular Open Source writing “The Cathedral And The Bazar”. The idealistic approach of Open Source was to make source code openly and freely available. Funding should be through sponsorships and donations to the projects. Open Source is, or maybe was?, about making software freely and openly available to anyone.
Today’s Open Source projects fall into very narrow categories and almost all projects seem to go through the exact same path in your lifetime.
- The solo project
Run by a single individual, overloaded by ignorant users and forced to shut the project down due to a lack of time and funding. - The underfunded survivors
Run by a group of people in their spare-time always trying to keep the project afloat. Chronically underfunded, but powering millions of software products across the globe. - The actually commercial software
Started small, created a commercial spin-off and has mainly become commercial software with a light version published as Open Source. - The FAANG project
Started by an individual or a FAANG organization, entire projects funded by FAANG companies, run by FAANG employees and controlled by FAANG.
If you’re honest, the large part of successful Open Source projects is funded by organizations. Often not in hard cash, but by allowing employees on their payroll to work on the projects. The OSCI or Open Source Contributor Index draws a very clear picture: the majority of support and funding for Open Source comes from big tech. Big American tech.
The argument, often heard in Europe, that Open Source software makes European governments and organizations independent of American suppliers lacks any understanding of how Open Source currently works. Maybe even lacks understanding of how software works at all.
The World Was Never Ready For Open Source
The idea that Open Source software would free the user can be considered a failure. Don’t get me wrong! Open Source is awesome. I contribute, I publish, I participate and I love it. But I am also a programmer and I claim to know what Open Source is since I read “The Cathedral And The Bazaar”. The average person however could not care less about the licensing of the software they use and they become increasingly unaware of what software is at all.
The amount of people being able to understand Node.js, let alone read its source code is tiny. The same goes for Bitcoin. Numerous myths surrounded Bitcoin and the way it worked when it launched. Yet, the Bitcoin source code happily resided in a Github repository — for everyone to read. Only a few really read it — including me. People are simply not interested. The result? Open Source has become a way of collaboration for big tech and moved far away from its original ideals. Linux was invented by Linus Torvalds in Finland. MySQL came out of Sweden. PHP has Danish heritage. The list of European software inventions goes on. Yet, they found their destiny and home in America for a simple reason: the lack of funding in Europe, the lack of interest in Europe and a horrendous amount of bureaucracy in many EU member states that makes building a software business a living nightmare. Not to mention trying to established the organizational foundations for an Open Source project.
The Funding Issues Remain Unresolved
The path to success of an Open Source project is often either becoming a U.S. software company or becoming a part of one. If you have a look at Mastodon, the proclaimed Twitter killer, and its funding situation relying on Patreon donations, the outcome is pretty clear. Even a highly popular project like Mastodon, that even has government users and large-scale installations, can hardly grow a substantial organization.
Open Source projects hardly survive without big tech as a donor
Most Open Source projects remain chronically underfunded and there’s no change on the horizon. Any project team I came across in my life as a programmer warmly and wholeheartedly welcomed big tech as a donor. You can’t blame them and it’s not surprising at all.
The vast majority of private individuals, small and medium-size businesses that use Open Source never donate a single penny while producing cost and consuming time of Open Source projects. People posting issues in the bug trackers demanding swift responses, downloading gigabytes of Open Source software without ever giving back and complain whenever projects don’t go in their favour. I have yet to come across a single popular Open Source project that thrives while being funded by private individuals, small and medium size companies. Open Source has a funding problem.
What Is Needed To Fix Open Source
All the Open Source projects we love were build by individuals or very small teams. These individuals or project teams have made a lot of sacrifices for their Open Source projects. They invested money and a large fraction of their time without ever receiving anything in return. In a world of ever-rising cost of living, increasing taxation, increasing rent, families struggling to make ends meet, there are fewer and fewer people capable and willing to build and maintain Open Source projects.
The idea of Open Source that people would build the software they love to share with other people who in return would fund the builders remains an idealogic pipe dream.
The idealogic pipe dream of free people through free software never materialized
Only if private individuals, small and medium businesses are capable and willing to donate to Open Source in the masses, it’ll change. The last 30 years of Open Source and Free Software have shown that the willingness isn’t there and the capability of individuals to donate is in decline. Further governments have never created any incentives (e.g. tax incentives) for Open Source projects. Society was not ready for Open Source and society is is becoming less and less ready.
Why Is It Not Open Source?
Over the past 25 years of my life as a software engineer, I published both Open Source and commercial software. Only the commercial software has ever made a noticable return. When publishing commercial software, you’ll find a number of people asking why I did not publish my software as Open Source. My response is very simple: “Because you wouldn’t pay for it”. People have become to believe that Open Source is a charity and that anyone is entitled to take from an Open Source project whatever the person wants.
The result is that fewer and fewer software is released as Open Source and instead distributed as Cloud-based commercial SaaS. With web- or cloud-based commercial SaaS there’s no piracy and users can hardly circumvent paying the authors for the software.
Open Source is in shambles and it’s breaking my heart as a software engineer and die-hard Open Source fan.
Do you have a solution to fix Open Source or are you fine with the way it is?
Thanks for reading. Jan
Society was not ready for Open Source and society is is becoming less and less ready.
I think this is true for a lot of software in general. The average person is becoming less and less tech literate as time goes on. You'd think it'd be the opposite, since we're so saturated with technology now compared to 25 years ago. But we're moving so rapidly away from general purpose platforms, and more open ecosystems. A large number of my family don't even own a desktop or laptop computer. They have a phone and maybe a tablet, and that's it. And then you look at the state of the web and Internet, and how most digital lives revolve around a handful of tightly controlled walled gardens, with people being extremely reluctant to branch out to explore or experiment with other apps, sites, or services. I've seen people, even on here, say that they don't want another login to some app or service, so if they can't get what they want where they already are, then they're not interested.
Over the past 25 years of my life as a software engineer, I published both Open Source and commercial software. Only the commercial software has ever made a noticable return.
And this ties into the last point there: people simply aren't purchasing software anymore. Even a few bucks for a mobile app seems a bridge too far for a lot of people. Your average user doesn't spend money on desktop software. Unless they're a power user or a business user (where the cost might be shifted to the business), they're just going to use an OS's built in tools, or Google docs or something like that. PC gamers may spend a lot of a rig and on games, but they're a small market focused on very specific purchases. Even in the mobile space where everyone is now, the only ones making money are predatory subscription- or micro-transaction-based games.
The result is that fewer and fewer software is released as Open Source and instead distributed as Cloud-based commercial SaaS.
Exactly. And that only further decreases the control the user has over their computing lives. But the problem is: we as software devs are generally the only ones who care about OSS. The average user couldn't care less. They're not going to modify or redistribute it. They just want a tool or app or service that does what they want, and they don't care what happens behind the scenes.
I really think our shift away from general purpose computing toward locked down devices and walled gardens is driving a great deal of the problem. Add the problems of capitalism, the fact that it's so hard to get a small project off the ground without the dev burning out, and it really is a crisis. People like to think of the Linux kernel as an example a big project made by hobbyist, but it isn't. Companies like Oracle, Google, Intel, et al are the largest contributors. So what do we do when the most prominent examples of OSS are driven by companies who's primary goal is lockdown, lock-in, and control?
I don't know. I don't know what the answer is.
What I don't understand is why governments don't try to fund open source software.
Cyber is increasingly becoming an attack vector on key infrastructure and it would be so helpful to have a group of developers to be at government disposal while understanding what software is being run on.
I understand that China and a few other countries use Linux but this is not enough. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_adopters
Honestly any nation not named the United States should move to FOSS if they care about security. Imagine the keys to all important infrastructure being held by foreign companies.
German gov fund open source:
This fund supported the gnome-mobile desktop. The paid programmers (from the fund) created an stunning alpha and the community adopt and continue it.
Wow! Good for the Germans!
What I don't understand is why governments don't try to fund open source software.
Honestly, i think a lot of politicians are actually too old to understand even the slightest thing about cybersecurity and safety on the internet. Looking at my age group and certainly above that age, they often don't even know the difference between windows and a browser!
Account walled article
Bypass Paywalls Clean gets around most of this stuff without thinking too much about it. For this one it displayed a couple alternative links at the top which had the full article.
Much appreciated for that!
Open Source as a concept is kinda similar to fanfiction. They are both technically just statements of fact, either they are or aren't, but both of them are very much intertwined with political "The big man can't control me" kind of zealotry. Which, at least for the anti-corporation parts of it all, I can respect.
But... OSS has a problem that fanfiction doesn't have: maintenance. With a fanfiction, it either gets finished, standing on it's own as a self-contained cake to be consumed and praised over, or the writer gets bored and the cake is unfinished. Either way, no person or business ever relies on that cake for their own goals, other than small personal satisfaction. It sucks when a writer leaves it hanging, but that's just how the cookie crumbles, and the consumer moves on to another work.
Open Source has to constantly update and expand to keep up with the technologies that it's connected to. And guess what, most all of the major OSS success stories rely on paid workers to keep things up with the times, and make those crucial integrations that keep the software usable.
Linux has many developers paid by their Big Tech employers to make stuff that they can use for their products without hassle somewhere down the line. Same with OpenStreetMap. Even worse with Android.
Does anyone here really think there would be enough maintainment on these projects to keep it at the stability and feature-improvement they are now if all paid work vanished tomorrow? I certainly don't. And unlike fanfiction, you can't truly just say "well, we're not updating it anymore", at least, unless you don't care about your whole use case and functional existence being replaced within a year, likely with a more-supported corporate alternative.
There are two and only two ways to keep Open Source supported well enough:
- The governments of the world forcibly support them much the same way China invests in their companies, as a social good, replacing the corporate workers and funds with government ones.
- Luxury gay space communism somehow comes to fruition and these developers get all the free time in the world free from any other worry, ever, and the whole community forms so well that they all pick up each other's slack with their newfound infinite free time.
The first option violates the spirit of true open source much the same way as now, and the second one, actually, that'll happen... the day after the perpetual motion machine is invented, that is.
Reality hurts.
You're forgetting leverage. Open source is changing the way these businesses are forced to do business. And thats a start.
I can see one way that the first option would work. Back in the 1980s, the UK had a similar thing for artists, where they weren't required to produce specific works for the government, or were controlled by the government in any way. They just got the money so they could produce art. While there were definitely some abuses of the system, entirely because the government weren't really checking in on what anyone was doing with the money they got, it also led to a lot of successful artists who otherwise wouldn't have had the opportunity to just work on art, particularly working class artists. It's genuinely one of very few things the Thatcher government did that made the world better.
I'm very much a proponent of such a system existing again in the future. Essentially some form of unconditional income support for creatives, under the notion that their work is a social good that shouldn't be constricted by commercial incentives. I see no reason why that shouldn't apply to open source developers, since their work also benefits society as a whole. As long as the government remains hands-off in regards to what is made, and gains no rights to the work (ensuring that the open source software remains open source), it would in theory be more effective than relying on donations from the private sector. I suppose it still violates the spirit of open source, but it's also a model that has been successively used to support artists, who often share that "the big man can't control me" political leaning.
I did back of the envelope math a while back where if active users of large self-hosted communities (such as /r/selfhosted) put $5/month into donations to the most used self-hosted software projects, ~20 projects could get ~$75,000/year of income. Not enough to build a company around, but enough to live well on in many parts of the world as a sole developer or enough for a maintainer to pay for other developer contribution.
I think the open source community fails to organize around the fact that development and maintenance isn't free, but that as a massive user group, it takes minimal contribution from each to make an impact. Can better messaging and "structure" break the free rider problem?
What you are looking for is some sort of variant of quadratic funding. It is a mechanism that is specifically designed to overcome the free rider problem that public goods like FOSS suffer from. It solves it by matching private contributions to these public goods using a special formula that aligns incentives, so that everyone that knowingly benefits from a public good has an economic incentive to contribute to it because more contributors leads to a higher level of matching
I disagree that the 2 options are the only ones available. We could have a funding system with aspects of quadratic funding and artistic freedom vouchers, which allows the organizations developing the software to remain private organizations. Quadratic funding is basically a public matching fund for contributions to public goods such as OSS with a special matching formula that matches small contributions from many sponsors at a higher rater than more concentrated ones
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