Communism Within Capitalism
The economic structure of open source software is similar to resource exploitation, in that companies use open-source software in generate money without paying the developers. Developers often offer paid support to generate income, but a company using, say, 20 open source projects would have to manage all of their individual support networks. Companies like IBM offer support for all projects at once, once again cutting off income streams to open source developers.
New laws such as the EU Cyber Resilience Act are also troublesome to open source developers, as corporations can supply regulation-compliant copies of open source projects much faster than the developers themselves.
The advantages of open source also abstract to the common user, who is more interested in picking applications that look good and have lots of functionality. Open source developers are often unable to design apps keeping the common user in mind, focusing on their own experience instead.
Can The Developer Experience Be Enhanced?
Hiring developers to write code, like Mozilla does, is possible, but innovation in open source mostly comes from what looks like wild goose chases, which isn't very compatible with the hiring model.
Post Open
Bruce Perens started an organisation called Post Open, which has slightly different principles from open source.
One of the core tenets of open source is non-discrimination, and a lot of open source licences give the same rights to everyone. This leads to a humourous licensing conflict with JSON, whose licence states that it may not be used for evil.
Post Open intends to distinguish itself from Open Source, thus respecting the sanctity of the term. The structure is that many developers will publish code exclusively under a Post Open licence or under a dual licence with both Post Open and Open Source licences. The Post Open organisation will provide support for users of all of these projects. Users with deep pockets will be given a paid licence to use all Post Open software, while small businesses will be given a zero-cost licence.
Governance is also intended to be run similar to a worker-owned cooperative, giving developers a substantial voice.
I find it ironic that this project is called Post Open when it is a stepping stone to the ideal open source world. Although, another way of looking at it is that it is a progression into reality from the dreams of open source.
Notable Notes From Slashdot's Interview With Bruce Perens
Slashdot is a discussion site for tech news. They gathered questions for Bruce Perens from their users and used the most popular ones in an interview. Here are my highlights (in my own words) from the transcript:
- A law firm has joined the project pro-bono, solving the open source legal defense problem.
- Ballooning pay for executives means less money for the actual change-makers, and the worker-owned cooperative model will hopefully prevent that.
- ID verification for all participants to prevent an XZ Utils type attack.
XZ Utils is a low level library used in many linux computers. Its ownership was handed off from its original developer to another developer as the workload was heavy. This workload turned out to be artificially inflated by social engineering, and the new maintainer was able to sneak in an encryption backdoor allowing remote code execution which was only caught when an early tester saw that he was having above-normal lag in SSH connections.
- Bruce Perens was part of a VC firm once. Many open source projects are backed by VCs, who then require some sort of monetization, often through a paid add-on to the core open source software. VC firms also falsely advertise old members as still-active players.