Open Source has a problem only to the degree that getting paid is a problem.
I identify with the author - he's articulating what I know, what we've all known forever; there's no money in open-source (somewhat by design) so make your money elsewhere then donate whatever motivation you have left to open source.
Personally I like programming, but i also like eating, so I trade most of my skills for money. Pretty much like my electrician does. Or my baker. I'm completely comfortable with this.
I use lots of open source tools. I appreciate this authors. I assume they've sorted out their money issues in whatever way they choose. Clearly my donations, nor donations in general, make the slightest bit of difference to them.
To the Europeans who expect OSS developers to flood to your well-documented-solution, with have no funding, I say - good luck with that. That's not really how the world works, that's not how OSS works, (and to be honest doesn't fill me with confidence about your documents) but hey, you do you.
Sure OSS has a funding problem. Every month there's a new startup pitching their solution. Until one comes along that actually works, I'll stick to the funding model that works for me. Which, to be fair, is pretty simple. You pay me. I give you code.
On the other hand "open source means you're relying on the charity of anonymous volunteers" is in fact a standard talking point of those that compete with it.
It's probably a testament to the ongoing catastrophe that is enterprise software that some customers would absorb this propaganda at face value and still prefer it to locking themselves into an abusive relationship with people with a track record of not delivering functional software on time because they're too busy extracting rents from locked in suckers.
This is true. It also failed because the populous usually can't deal with being governed except the way they are accustomed. Probably why commies never managed to take over a Republic from the inside.
Yes, it's big tech to blame, but for different reasons: FLOSS works for PERSONAL computers, meaning the desktop model, witch it BTW the best computing model we have so far. FLOSS does not work on modernized mainframe model, where the mainframe is someone else computer or "the cloud".
People do not know how to go FLOSS because they do not know how to work on desktops. Even if we have IPv6 since decades, so we can potentially have a classic internet, with a global address per device, a family domain names with personal subdomains etc, people do not know how to use them, ISPs do their best to obstacle such deployments. As a result people start to trying copy big tech, with open platforms and fails because they can't be usable with profit at smaller scales.
Not only, we have to interact with the rest of the world that have largely forgotten the Desktop, now an "endpoint", or a modern dumb terminal, making things even harder.
That's the FLOSS problem: the fact that Big Tech have won against the classic tech, stealing classic ideas only when they discovered how to make such ideas anti-users, an a success at a time, now IT is anti-user almost at a whole.
Oh, that's not a special FLOSS problem, is a social problem, because with the actual trend we can only evolve in neo-feudal dictatorships.
I think this speaks more to the entitlement of government bureaucrats and less to a decline in open source, although the point is valid and taken. They do make another good point about the different types of open source projects, that about sums up the open source world.
Still, I don't think it's struggling at all. I build things I want to use for myself that don't already exist, or things I want to see in the world. I take donations, though I've never received any, but I have never complained about that. I'll get them when I get them, when something I want to build is compelling enough. The contributions I get are other people building things I use, or contributing to things I maintain. In fact, I have a policy of not maintaining things I build but don't use (besides pull requests), I think of it as giving a community of people who do use it a head start on their development, and if no community forms that wants it to continue to exist, oh well. I also have a policy of not adding features at user request, though I do build things to be feature complete within scope, even with features I don't personally use. My goal with everything I build is to show people what's possible and to give them a gift that can improve their lives if they want it, not to support some type of infrastructure for eternity. I'm happy with that. I'm not struggling, or chronically underfunded, or overworked, I'm just expressing my creativity and building for the sake of building. And I think there's enough of that in the world that this open source thing will continue to do just fine, so long as we take seriously the whole "no implied warranty or fitness for purpose, I don't owe you anything" ethos we put into our licenses.
Does anyone have a good reference to how much of the linux kernel is developed by the "charity of volunteers" and how much by commercial companies providing manpower to get the features that they want in it.
Article calls out FAANG completely missing one of the largest OSS players - Microsoft.
OSS always made sense in the commoditize your infrastructure/complements scenarios - everything else is going to be unreliable.
Donations - unreliable, open-core is even worse (the incentive is always to pull a bait and switch eventually). Academia and enthusiasts achieved a lot as well - but doubt they captured any value they created.
"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."
The only oss project that is funded by private individuals that comes up in my head is GrapheneOS, it has over 500 sponsors on Github.
Tor Project is over 50% funded by individual contributors and relatively smaller private foundations [1]. Their expenses are roughly 50% of the revenue, so they could actually survive without their biggest funder - the US government.
> For many people out there open source is a way to legally pirate stuff.
Huh?
In order to pirate open source products, assuming we are talking about copyright infringement, you have to release derivative products in a way that is not consistent with the licensing requirements.
Unless you are conflating open source code that is intentionally built for interoperable alternatives to commercial or closed products. In which case, that's not piracy, it's competition.
> They would be pirating those tools and libraries if they were commercial.
I think you are deeply confused about the role of open source tools and libraries. There is no shortage of cases where commercial tools have infringed on open source projects. There are also many cases where open source tools have infringed on patents or in some cases infringed on copyright, for example, where open source software is built based on reverse engineered or unlicensed access to source code. The preferred pattern is to have two teams, one responsible for reverse engineering a product and generating a specification, and another, separate team that implements the specification.
That is not piracy, and is a legitimate use of reverse engineering that has been litigated fairly extensively (at least, AFAIK, and IANAL, but I have worked with so, so many of them over the last two decades of my career).
> And on top of that they feel entitled to have their critical bugs fixed right away, again for free.
Well yeah. That's not unique to open source. There is a reason that "karen" as a description of certain behaviors has entered the pop culture lexicon. Hell hath no fury like an inconvenienced user of a free product.
