1. Open source libraries tend to be complement goods. You're more willing to pay for a good physics engine if you already have a good rendering engine and vice versa. But a sad truth of complement goods is that they are a centralizing force - it's actually better for everyone if the physics engine maker and rendering engine maker join forces and offer a bundle discount. But the most common strategy seems to be for them to just merge into one company, and this is why you see giant conglomerate products like Unreal and Unity instead of buying each component from a different vendor.

2. Since open source software is a public good (non-rivalrous, non-excludable), the "free market" cannot really incentivize its production nearly as much as would be optimal. Let's say there are 1000 people who would each pay $10 for a feature to be added, and the maintainer would happily add it for $5000. If 90% of those people each paid $6 they would get what they want and the maintainer would be happy too, but each individual has an incentive to be part of that 10% that gets to keep their $6 and still gets the feature, so what happens is that almost no one ends up paying.

These problems can't be solved without slightly modifying open source, but they can be solved by maintaining the spirit of open source I think. What you need is to have some kind of foundation that takes money and gives it to "quasi-open-source" projects, and then only allows businesses to use those projects if they contribute a certain percentage of their revenue to the foundation. Of course, now the foundation needs to decide which open source projects to give the money too. It's an extremely tricky problem, but there's been a lot of interesting research by Glen Weyl on that exact subject and I'm confident it could be solved in a satisfactory way.

I think this proposal would create a virtuous cycle once it got off the ground. The more projects licensed "quasi-open-source", the larger the incentive to pay the foundation to use them. The more the foundation is paid, the more money these "quasi-open-source" projects get, and so more people will license their projects "quasi-open-source", increasing the incentive again, etc.

Of course, it would only be "quasi-open-source", and not truly open-source. But there's no reason the license couldn't be extremely in line with the spirit of open source. For example, it could say "if you're an individual or small company, you can use our code for any purpose for free. If you're a big company, you can use it in a way that complies with the AGPL or you can pay us, your choice".

I think employees would also encourage their employers to become paying members of such a foundation, if it lead to those employees being able to determine where some of the money goes. Everyone at my current company is a Rust developer and so we naturally like Rust, but Rust jobs aren't always easy to find. As employees, it could be in our best interest to subsidize the development of Rust open source projects, if that increased Rust's attractiveness to other companies.

If you're interested in this idea, my email is in my bio :D

Well said and very true.

If I hate any specific business model that is used by a company that does some some open source suddenly I don't think people deserve to be paid for their work?

Yeah no, that's garbage. There's plenty of garbage business models and they aren't suddenly okay because one company uses it and 1% of their money funds some small bit of OSS work that underpins their business model.

This article came across as much less ranty than I expected based on his disclaimer. I think he pretty much perfectly articulated the noise around funded open source.

Open source guarantees to me, the user, that competition among vendors will be possible and fair in the future. This is exactly the point that many "fake OSS" licenses try to take away. Okay, maybe it's possible to fork for personal on-prem use, but god forbid someone creates a competing hosted solution that gives any customer more choice. Furthermore, these pieces of software are fucked the day that the company folds, or gets acquired by a malevolent buyer.

Open source guarantees a baseline level of respect towards me, the end user. By letting anyone fork a project that's gone too far in the wrong direction, I know that my software will continue working in the short run and of it's important enough, a competing alternative will emerge that continues without one-sided money or data grabs.

There's nothing inherently wrong with having someone from Microsoft or Google work on open source software, or any VC-funded company that will without fail turn against their users sooner or later. However, if a controlling majority of developers is employed this way, it provides an opportunity for what elsewhere is known as regulatory capture. If Microsoft's goal is to make people dependent on proprietary GitLab and VS Code Marketplace offerings, and Google's goal is to provide the greatest possible amount of ads and tracking to the largest possible user base, it does not matter if the software is open source or not. The end result is the same, I'm left without viable alternatives and big business gets to do with us whatever the hell they please.

Especially when this software becomes ubiquitous and entrenched, paying developers to work on company-controlled OSS instead of community-driven, user-respecting OSS is a net negative for everyone in the long run.

I'm only interested in OSS in so far as it protects my interests as an end user, and/or our common interests as a society, now and in the future. The collaborative aspect is nice, but that's not the reason that we should ask for better compensation for maintainers.

The "Open Source" label as such is indeed meaningless per se, and it doesn't always protect me either, as seen with BSD+MIT software allowing cryptographically-enabled control of devices that I nominally own, or GPL being useless when there is no actual distribution of software involved. That said, I have yet to see a case of non-OSI "open source" that doesn't try to tilt the playing field in biased, controlling and long-term unsustainable or user-hostile ways.

If you can't build a business on a level playing field, perhaps it's in everyone's interest that your business and software dies, or retreats into lower-intensity hobbyist maintainership, instead of leading everyone into a hard dependency on your oh so well-intended monetization of originally useful software. Then at least someone else can take a shot at doing it better.

I'd pay for an open source project that could filter & sort news by surprisingness-for-that-news-source. This opinion would rank high for jacobin.com. The story about Zuckerberg's preference for the Quest 3 over the AVP would disappear.

Knowledge is the resource that open source distributes which folks fight to control. It's like the fruit you'd grow on a farm. You could argue about whether or not the fruit should be distributed more to the city folk or the country folk, or ask questions about how much money the farm is making, but I'd say you should be focusing on getting the farm to grow more fruit, since that's the only way to be sure everyone becomes richer as a result.

Scientists do a great job discovering knowledge, but open source is what makes it useful and able to be used. Any open source project that's helping to elevate know-how is a project worth supporting.

It reminds me of the common writing advice to not hedge statements with a lot of "I think" and "I believe", because that's redundant, if it wasn't what you think, then you wouldn't be writing it, and it weakens statements, making it sound like the writer lacks conviction in the statement, and if you lack conviction in what you're writing then you definitely shouldn't write it.

That has always sounded right to me, but in the final accounting, I'm skeptical of it. Certainty just isn't all that natural, ambivalence is common, and I think hedging captures that reality more accurately in the tone of the writing.

And I think this case is the same. That paragraph is acknowledging a reality that many or most people reading the article will know, to the point that omitting any mention of it at all will seem notable. I think it is relatable and tactful to say "I know this isn't a popular view, but I care about it so here goes anyway". It doesn't imply that they are writing in order to offend. It only implies that they are aware of the situation.

I don't really get the thing about whether or not it impacts the credence with which you should take the opinions of the author... And frankly, I don't think it is the important thing; the important thing is the argument they are making. But FWIW, if it were the important thing, this particular author has an enormous amount of credibility in the space of working on a successful open source project...

Actually, I think it would be pretty easy to have a project for which none of the existing OSI approved licenses will do without even being all that different, ever since OSI approved AGPLv3.

AGPLv3 contains a distribution requirement that triggers for your program if you have users who are "interacting with it remotely through a computer network".

Now all it takes is wanting a license similar to that, but with the trigger being different. Maybe a project agrees with AGPLv3 that if you run their program on your server you should have to give the users source, but wants that to also apply to users who are interacting with it locally on a computer network, or are interacting via some method other than a "computer network" such as serial terminals.

If you define triumphs to include only 'popularity' and developer preferences, then sure, its triumphant.

> using a license like the Business Source License indicates a lack of belief in the vision of open source

The issue is that the vision of open source itself is lacking, because it doesn't recognize that it fails to provide a pathway to being compensated and rewarded, tangibly, for building, contributing, and maintaining open source software and the infrastructure that supports it.

Yes, that's what I'm saying, that people are interrogating whether that (inarguably) already established (arguably) "true meaning" is a good one.

I'm certainly sympathetic to the frustration people feel at new debates popping up over definitions that they feel are already perfectly good. But it's not up to you or anyone else individually; the way people use language broadly evolves all the time. It's useful to advocate for why the existing definition you prefer is the right one, but less useful to primarily focus on "we already have a definition of this, that's the only thing it could ever possibly mean!".

You surely meant to say it's a triumph of Free Software? /s

If what counts as "open source" can be anything the author says counts, there are potentially lots of projects not previously considered open source, and the developers paid to work on them as "paid open source" developers.

I think OP would say its better to work on open source at Meta than closed source at Meta, and we should celebrate someone being paid to write open source. We can also condemn their specific employer while not denigrating their open source compensation.

re your second point, looking at this thread, "what is open source" is taking up a lot of the brainspace.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLStaticVsDynamic

Now, I suspect that what you had in mind was the kind of restrictions like “you can’t use this if you work for the military”, but that’s exactly the point he was trying to make: there are a lot of opinions and interpretations swirling around, and his intention was to talk about something else rather than diving into the license debate which has been running since the Reagan era.

It's a bit ironic that people now wax lyrical about the "true meaning" of Open Source when the OSI described their origin like this (emphasis added):

> The conferees decided it was time to dump the moralizing and confrontational attitude that had been associated with "free software" in the past and sell the idea strictly on the same pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape. They brainstormed about tactics and a new label. "Open source", contributed by Chris Peterson, was the best thing they came up with.

http://web.archive.org/web/20071115150105/https://opensource...

Again, I do understand the other points. I have a lot of frustrations as a maintainer of (much smaller) open source projects (e.g. all those people that believe I work for them for free and who can come complain and pressure me because of a missing feature they don't even consider contributing). But I think that redefining "open source" is not the solution. On the contrary, IMO we need people to understand the meaning of those licenses better.

The fact that there's a clear definition for what an open source license is, and some licenses meet it and others don't, means I can make a statement like that, talking about a bunch of licenses as a group.

If it just means "licenses that make source available with whatever terms" then it's a less useful way of classifying and discussing licenses.

Most terms in the English language are fuzzy that way, but this one has a clear definition and I would like to stick with it.

Are they "condemning" the BSL by saying "it is bad, don't use it", or are they just saying "BSL is not open source"?

Because my understanding is that BSL is not open source. Rather it is a commitment of becoming open source (GPLv2) at a point later (maximum 4 years). So BSL is effectively source available until GPLv2 is added. Which does not make BSL open source: GPLv2 is.