I'm not surprised that these open source communities are dying. They were founded based on the ideals of free speech and selfless sharing of technology. Both of these ideals are dying.
The GNU project makes it very clear that they are striving for the freedom of the user to modify and adapt the software that they use. So every time a GNU tool is used in the private back-end part of a SaaS webapp, that's directly opposite to the spirit of the GNU project, because you, the end user, have no way of modifying said SaaS.
And it's not only free speech in source code, it appears to me that free speech in general is under attack, now that people have noticed that a twitter storm and a supposed code of conduct violation is enough to wield immense power, for example by destroying someone's reputation, job, and life. We have effectively handed loaded guns to random strangers on the internet and, predictably, the results were bad.
The spirit of selfless sharing is also dying quickly, which I would blame onto the greed of internet startups and onto the entitlement of users that don't understand that GMail isn't truly free, just because there's no credit card charge.
I myself try to stay away from open source nowadays, because it ruins my mood if I get an entitled email from some random stranger who is insulting me because my free app did not solve his/her problem. In my case, a big company was kinda guilty in creating this problem, because they advocated my FOSS module on their homepage as if it was part of their expensive paid offering. So some of their customers feel like it's my duty to offer support...
Also, I would be very hesitant to release anything valuable with LGPL or even GPL these days. Chances are, it'll become the next cool "service" that Amazon, Google, and Microsoft will offer in their clouds, and I as the author of the software actually providing the service, will get nothing.
Case in point, one of my consulting clients is paying like $30,000 annually to Microsoft for hosted PostgreSQL. But apparently, re-selling PostgreSQL as a service with presumably millions in revenue is not enough for Microsoft to become an official sponsor...
https://www.postgresql.org/about/sponsors/
Open source software is dying because software is dying. Once upon a time people lines up for hours to get the latest software. Boxes were and CDs were proudly displayed on office shelves. But software isn't the hot thing. Services are king. Facebook and youtube aren't software. TikTok isn't software. They are services and services are much harder to open source.
There are a few. Tor and Signal are good examples. They are software that enables an underlying service. So they get attention. People want to contribute. Imho if F/OSS wants to thrive it has to focus on those projects that provide services that people can proudly say that they use and to which they can proudly contribute time and energy.
Self-hosting. Otherwise you’re forever limited to whatever the service provider’s understaffed moderation team translated from the corporate email and plugged into the filters this afternoon.
While self-hosting is a good option for us developers, I'm pretty sure that most normal people will not do it. So to reach the critical mass needed to make an open source project financially viable, I don't think we can rely on self-hosting.
As an addendum, this is also where (extended-family-level or city-wide) community-hosting comes in though unless your services are federated or have other attractors, it's difficult to attract users.
You’re not wrong, but since service providers control what happens on their servers, and have no obligation to allow any particular speech, then self-hosting (or its close cousin, federation) are the only ways to assert publication control of your own posts.
> look into how one can adapt the "free speech" open source spirit to work for services
Unless you want to treat service providers as public utilities, which isn’t necessarily a bad idea, just an uphill battle.
Is Signal a good example? It is not federated and you can't connect to an alternative server from the Signal client. When I use signal I feel like I am using a free service.
well there are many services people use proudly. Previously authors of opensource projects used to run consultancy for their softwares. But now days, many such projects get ported to public cloud in no time. So for these projects, public cloud providers are only (direct) customers.
IT IS TIME TO UPDATE YOUR LISCENSE TO ADDRESS PUBLIC CLOUD PROVIDERS else sooner or later open souce gonna die
We seem to be slowly moving from an ownership model to a subscription model where you pay "rent" with money or data. Not just software but hardware as well. How long before smartphones are simply fused shut preventing you from opening it and you have to return the smartphone before upgrading to another.
That's a somewhat consumer-centric view of the software world. But it's true that, even in business, there is something of a shift towards managed services vs. on-prem software.
> The GNU project makes it very clear that they are striving for the freedom of the user to modify and adapt the software that they use. So every time a GNU tool is used in the private back-end part of a SaaS webapp, that's directly opposite to the spirit of the GNU project, because you, the end user, have no way of modifying said SaaS.
> Also, I would be very hesitant to release anything valuable with LGPL or even GPL these days.
The point of the AGPL is to close the loophole that allows this abuse. Just switch to it for your own projects.
As far as I understand, the AGPL still allows a service provider to use an unmodified binary internally, as long as the user of that service never accesses it directly. If my understanding is correct, that means if GNU were to switch to AGPL, it wouldn't help the users of SaaS webapps that internally use GNU tools at all.
The point of the AGPL is to require sharing of modifications to the software when that software is used in a service. If you're using an unmodified binary, then you haven't made any changes to the software. You won't be obligated to share changes if the changes don't exist, so you could use the unmodified binary internally or externally.
The AGPLv3 has a lot to say about patents, which is enough to scare off many companies from software that uses the AGPLv3, but I believe it won't be triggered if you never make any changes in the first place (and are therefore presumably not a 'contributor').
If the webapps themselves use AGPL software, that's not "internally." If the employees of a SaaS company themselves use AGPL software that isn't linked to the service that users access, that's internally; e.g. if a webapp uses an AGPL database, the users are accessing that database.
The details are somewhat unclear but basically yes, that's what a cloud provider/SaaS company would probably assume. So they probably just won't use AGPL code and if they do want to offer a service with the same APIs, they can (at least for now) recreate a compatible service that they write themselves.
Just myself, I saw an increase in FOSS activity seemingly due to the Great Recession leaving so many unemployed. People had so much time on their hands that contributing to a FOSS project made sense for all sorts of reasons. After years of recovery, people are (were?) back employed and don’t have such time on their hands.
FOSS is pretty interesting as a way for otherwise non-cooperatives to make something useful together. Also seems like something similar to academics. Unfortunately, our economic system might force it to be a fluke.
Yes I agree with this, and in reality nothing really stopping Companies from abusing the GPL, notice how almost all corporations avoid GPLv3 like the plague.
(edit, I meant easy to abuse GPL2, but GPL3 ias hard to abuse)
Personality I believe the final nail was the "coup" at the FSF with RMS. He could be a pain at times, but almost all his fears about the future of computing is slowly coming true.
I'd say GPLv3 avoidance demonstrates respect[fear] of the license, not abuse of it. To abuse it would be to use that software while not respecting the terms of the license.
GPLv2 vs. v3 seems to be more a matter of inertia. Yes, a few have concerns about the TiVo-ization language. But a lot of it is that projects like Linux were already under GPLv2 and Linus wasn't interested in changing--and, absent copyright assignment, doing so would have been at least somewhat controversial and would necessarily rely on legal theories not everyone would have been on board with.
> "It ruins my mood if I get an entitled email from some random stranger who is insulting me because my free app did not solve his/her problem [...] apparently, re-selling PostgreSQL as a service with presumably millions in revenue is not enough for Microsoft to become an official sponsor."
Aren't these part of the freedoms of speech and behaviour you were enthusing about a couple of sentences ago? And your freedom to stay away from open source is part of it, too?
"Open source with an ideal of freedom, where the users (corporate and personal) behave exactly how you want" sounds contradictory.
(Curious, are you happy that Microsoft is part of the Linux Foundation? Or do you see that as them exerting unwanted influence?)
Seems unnecessarily pessimistic. Just because there are a few rude looney folks out there doesn’t mean there isn’t an opportunity to make money. Gracious but firm negotiating can get you farther than simply giving up.
Of course it depends on the market value of the work.
The GNU project makes it very clear that they are striving for the freedom of the user to modify and adapt the software that they use. So every time a GNU tool is used in the private back-end part of a SaaS webapp, that's directly opposite to the spirit of the GNU project, because you, the end user, have no way of modifying said SaaS.
And it's not only free speech in source code, it appears to me that free speech in general is under attack, now that people have noticed that a twitter storm and a supposed code of conduct violation is enough to wield immense power, for example by destroying someone's reputation, job, and life. We have effectively handed loaded guns to random strangers on the internet and, predictably, the results were bad.
The spirit of selfless sharing is also dying quickly, which I would blame onto the greed of internet startups and onto the entitlement of users that don't understand that GMail isn't truly free, just because there's no credit card charge.
I myself try to stay away from open source nowadays, because it ruins my mood if I get an entitled email from some random stranger who is insulting me because my free app did not solve his/her problem. In my case, a big company was kinda guilty in creating this problem, because they advocated my FOSS module on their homepage as if it was part of their expensive paid offering. So some of their customers feel like it's my duty to offer support...
Also, I would be very hesitant to release anything valuable with LGPL or even GPL these days. Chances are, it'll become the next cool "service" that Amazon, Google, and Microsoft will offer in their clouds, and I as the author of the software actually providing the service, will get nothing.
Case in point, one of my consulting clients is paying like $30,000 annually to Microsoft for hosted PostgreSQL. But apparently, re-selling PostgreSQL as a service with presumably millions in revenue is not enough for Microsoft to become an official sponsor... https://www.postgresql.org/about/sponsors/