Item — HN Reader

Years ago open source was about companies collaborating on commoditizing an obvious solution AWAY from the market. The economic case for open source isn’t about value added product companies, but a kind of commercial pooling of resources to create cost reduction and easier software maintenance on stuff nobody wants to buy or maintain...

Of course orgs have lost site of this. The sad reality is 99.999% of orgs are OSS freeloaders or way too conservative and hence want to in house everything. Or happy with modestly priced cloud hosted everything that ends up taking away some of OSSs maintenance savings upside.

1 comments

You say that like OSS "freeloading" is a bad thing when it's basically by design. If the result of previous pooling of resources is that there is a lot of open source software that you (or a vendor) can just pick up and use, isn't that just things working out as intended? Isn't this what users and vendors being free to do what they want really means?

It seems like many of us are conflicted about whether open source software should come with obligations. It doesn't have any strings attached by design, but then we want to add fuzzy moral obligations instead.

That is what you get with two decades of brainwashing about how open source software being morally good and proprietary software being morally bad - at some point you have devalued everyone's work to nothingness and end up with both developers and users demanding your work and time to be free to them.

Not everyone might feel comfortable to keep working on their pet project when life gets thought and there isn't any money getting in.

Yes, others might pick it up, but it is seldom the case.