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No one cares about open-source, until

by mikro2nd on 2/16/24, 12:36 PM with 52 comments

• by landingunless on 2/16/24, 3:24 PM

  For most venture-backed open source projects, "open source" is and will always be a marketing tactic. It's a way to appeal to developers and beat out close-source competitors in procurement.

  Users of these projects should expect something like the Skiff sell to happen -- especially if the project is open core or does not use a truly permissive license.

• by neom on 2/16/24, 6:10 PM

  I'll always take a moment like this to point once again to Nadia Eghbal's fantastic report, it might be from 2016, but it's a good read.

  Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure

  https://www.fordfoundation.org/work/learning/research-report...

• by bdw5204 on 2/16/24, 5:20 PM

  The general public doesn't care about "open source" so marketing a product as "open source" is pointless unless you're marketing it to a purely technical audience. The ability to modify the source code of Linux or to run your own Mastodon server isn't appealing to most people. Most people don't even care that iOS has an App Store monopoly where Apple decides what apps they can and can't put on their iPhone and iPad, at least until Apple bans an app they want.

  With venture backed startups, the goal is to sell the company either to a large incumbent or to the public stock market. An IPO is a de-facto sale to large pension funds like Vanguard and Blackrock. Ultimately, their long term goal is going to be maximizing shareholder value not some kind of open source idealism.

  In fact, open source often stands in the way of profit so market processes will encourage companies owned by the stock market to go with closed source whenever possible. The most reliable way to keep software open source in the long term is to license it under AGPL or GPL and accept contributions from as many contributors as possible under as many different copyrights as possible. Permissive licenses like MIT and BSD allow companies to use open source for proprietary software without sharing their changes. Even GPL licenses, if the copyrights are all assigned to a single entity, permit that entity to re-license it as proprietary. The more copyright holders, the harder it is to get the necessary permissions or replacement code to re-license.

• by armchairhacker on 2/16/24, 4:04 PM

  > Skiff was presented as open-source, the back-end never was so it was not possible to self-host it. In addition, the type of license used (CC-BY-NC-SA) is meant for artworks and more geared towards showing the code than making the service operable by others.

  That’s not open-source, it’s open core. Calling it open-source is a straight-up lie. True open-source is useful even if a company gets acquired or changes their business model, because 1) the old version stays open-source so you never lose access, and 2) it can be forked and remain updated to compete with the now-proprietary version. Like when Terraform got forked into OpenTofu.

  1) should be enough on its own to make nobody care if the company changes the license, but we live in a world where people expect all types of software to have continuous improvements. Still, 2) means there’s a group can ensure the open fork has everything the closed original does, by putting in as much effort as the company. In practice the forks often fall behind and sometimes they die, but it’s for the same reason the companies move away from open-source: it’s harder to make progress without funding, and it’s harder to get funding with open-source.

  EDIT: I also get that the term “open-source” is diluted. But my understanding is that it means all of the source (i.e. code) is open (i.e. public). Otherwise, why even call it open-source in the first place? Non-code data like assets, training data, and keys can be private (provided the key isn’t encrypting any code), which lets people sell open-source products; a server can use a key to ensure that clients purchased the product (and a checksum to establish that the client’s source hasn’t been modified), but the server’s code should be open-source (so people can run modified versions locally but must buy the official game to play on the official servers).

  I suppose there’s some loophole a group can use to create something under this definition of “open-source” and revoke access to prior versions later (at a minimum they can exclude you from the official servers). But at least I don’t know any occurrence of this ever happening, and it’s certainly a lot harder and less likely than revoking access to “open core” (which is just, not publicizing the majority of your code, so that even calling it “open” is debatable).

• by pierat on 2/16/24, 3:24 PM

  FLOSS wasnt just about "free shit" in the form of programs. It was all about user ownership of their data and how they wish to do things.

  These days, closed source is also closed formats. And with cloudshit tie-ins, sometimes even means you never even see your data. It's just <hands waving> in the cloud.

  For example, the sooner you migrated from Eagle after the Autodesk acquisition to KiCAD, the better. Sure, KiCAD was less polished, but your data and way you work was completely open. If you stayed with Eagle, well, you bent over and took it.

• by PaulHoule on 2/16/24, 12:45 PM

  Sometimes I wonder if there should be some systematic punishment for acquisitions. I can only imagine when company X gets bought by Google, Competitor Y ought to have a big meeting with all its salespeople the next morning on the theme that that they are all going to get rich on commissions.

  In general there should be a broad movement that operates on several fronts that sends the message that you can buy the employees, you can buy the code, but you can’t buy the customers, at least not yet.

• by Aachen on 2/16/24, 6:42 PM

  I've rediscovered cryptpad last year. I thought it was (and was looking for) a client-side encrypted etherpad, but was surprised to see they had added spreadsheets, folders, forms, and everything. It's working towards a full office suite

  I wouldn't say it's quite there yet, my mom probably should wait a little to try it out, but if you're a bit geeky and looking for open source, live multiplayer spreadsheets or documents to use with other tech-savvy people, this would be the first thing to check out. With Nextcloud or LibreOffice cloud or whatnot, the server can always access your things. That's almost always fine, but if this exists, why not the privacy by default? I love the idea

• by jauntywundrkind on 2/16/24, 6:13 PM

  Computers without escape hatches seem destined to become infernal machines. Someday you'll find yourself misaligned with what's happening and you'll be very sad.

  This is the same thread we see with iot. It's either a system in your power, that you can work with, or it's a huge risk.

  Example article: Home Assistant: Three years later 273 points, 3 days ago, 190 comments. https://eamonnsullivan.co.uk/posts-output/home-automation-th...

• by jszymborski on 2/16/24, 7:29 PM

  Cryptpad is fantastic and totally replaces Google Docs for me when it comes to collaboration.

• by coldblues on 2/16/24, 3:02 PM

  The Skiff sell really annoyed me. I am at very least glad that they gave their users 6 months to switch instead of a few weeks.

• by patchtopic on 2/16/24, 11:21 PM

  I have been using Cryptpad the last few months (self hosted) and it's working great. Keep up the good work.

• by throwaway81523 on 2/17/24, 3:12 PM

  I wonder if it's feasible to reimplement the Skiff server so people can self-host it.

• by teddyh on 2/16/24, 3:58 PM

  Obligatory xkcd: <https://xkcd.com/743/>