re: Seven essential qualities of open source VIEW POST

re: He's on point insofar as "open source" is considered in opposition to "free software". And, to be fair, that's been the idea all along: Tim O'Reill...

To be a bit more broad, my interest in open source spiked due to:

  1. The React license controversy.
  2. The Clojure open source controversy
  3. The startups / open source controversy: lately more and more startups come up with products and services where the only and unique key selling point is "we are open source"
  4. The hijacking of open source node packages / repositories
  5. The need for a new open source licence which does not enable repackaging an open source product as a private SAAS business.
  6. Some open source companies are considering a more closed approach.
  7. RedHat got sold for $34bn. The open source contributors got $0.

And so on. The list is endless.

These issues made me think:

  • There is a hype around open source lately in the sense of many trying to take an advantage of it by exploiting.
  • The concept of open source is not fully bullet proof and is understood only by few.
  • It might work for some but it is clearly not working for everyone (see 2. in the original post)

In other words I'm very curious about the story of the open source.


The history is there for the reading; the Wikipedia entry for the FSM is a good starting point, especially the "subgroups and schisms" section.

But the bottom line is that open source is meant to be exploited. The FSM's practice of viral copyleft licensing prevents companies from profiting directly off of "free software"; you couldn't, for example, fork Mutt and productize it without releasing your own changes and extensions to its codebase, which largely makes productizing it pointless. You're allowed to make money on packaging or support, which is how Red Hat got where it is today, but it makes commercial software development a nonstarter.

There's a particular provision of the GNU copyleft license that makes it especially toxic to commercial interests:

parties under the terms of this License.

This means that if I were to release a useful library under the GPL, you couldn't link or depend on it in your own projects without releasing your own source code under the same license. That's the "viral" part, and it's why I had to sign a statement affirming that I won't introduce GPL or other copyleft-licensed code into my current employer's software ecosystem.

Open source licenses, meanwhile, contain no such provision, which allows companies to build and sell products on top of other people's code without having to do anything in return or pay anything forward. It's been great for those companies, and the ability to download and use ready-made wheels instead of laboriously reinventing your own each and every time has worked wonders for the entire software development landscape; but at the same time, it encourages a distribution of profit and power that flows more readily to corporations who build on freely available resources than to the individual developers responsible for those resources' availability.

Thanks Dian, exploited is the keyword I was missing on open source!

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