Maybe we instead need a model where FOSS is not about profits for anybody, and is just a passion of love, from a large community of amateurs doing it for the technology and fun.
Projects could still be funded by community users, but "venture funding"? That's how projects turn to shit.
I agree, but what I think is curious about the whole situation is that you can also see it strictly as a market failure.
It's a very pure example where parties in competition each that have a use for some kind of software can shortsightedly develop their own versions of it in-house, but that duplicates a lot of effort. They'd be better off getting together with their competitors and collaborating on a shared version that suits their needs, avoiding duplicating effort and all benefiting from each others' contributions. They could do this by direct collaboration or by funding an independent organization that fulfills their needs.
Sure, this can go badly if there's a large difference in scale between the different parties and some can muscle others around. But it and similar models do work out at the scale of the Linux Foundation, Khronos, down to Mastodon, GitLab, Blender, Krita, Forgejo, even arguanly projects like Bitcoin Core.
There isn't the structures to facilitate this kind of regime shift. But there should be.
In such a world most of the open source software you’re used to wouldn’t exist (or would be much less complete) and you’d be forced to work with and use proprietary systems most of the time.
>In such a world most of the open source software you’re used to wouldn’t exist
As part of that world, I also want livable wages and work-life balance for developers, so they can work on their passion FOSS off-call. And for students and programming enthusiasts to be more passionate about FOSS. Like in the 90s before the corporates took over FOSS.
If some FOSS still wouldn't exist then, I'm fine with that.
Developers need a salary to pay the bills. Let's say that covers the first 40 hours of the week.
Those who are searching for significance outside their day job offer free labor as their "hobby". Maybe 10 hours a week?
For projects that want to move forward with some velocity it makes sense to make some of that development into paid day-jobs.
As projects get very large, there's a fair amount of overhead in just "keeping up". That erodes the 10 hours quickly. Further reducing the time to contribute.
So where is all this cash to pay employees coming from? Certainly not end users (as anyone who's tried funding an OSS project from users knows.) No, it comes from commercial companies (MS, Amazon et al) or venture capital.
This is the cognitive dissonance that underpins OSS development. The very people OSS treat as the "enemy" are the people funding OSS in the first place. As much as say RMS rails against big tech, Linux and the rich Linux economy system only exist at the level they do -because- of big tech.
Of course, I painting with a broad brush, and there are exceptions, but the point remains. It's turtles all the way down, and those turtles are not funded by users.
Those turtles didn't need to use funding pre-doc-com-boom, they were passion projects and people with time devoted to the "cause" of FOSS.
>This is the cognitive dissonance that underpins OSS development. The very people OSS treat as the "enemy" are the people funding OSS in the first place. As much as say RMS rails against big tech, Linux and the rich Linux economy system only exist at the level they do -because- of big tech
Perhaps that's the problem: that they exist "at the level they do", meaning most of it is corporate focused, and not enthusiast and user focused.
Even ourselves, as devs, evaluate FOSS as to whether it's "useful" for our corporate/startup needs. This wasn't exactly the case, or at least not the main case for a FOSS project.
Gnome, for example, wasn't created to give RH and co a desktop shell for corporate installs...
The ‘cause’ of oss? I doubt many people ever were dedicated to a cause outside of GNU diehards. For most other people it was about curiosity or fun, a hobby etc.
>> Those turtles didn't need to use funding pre-doc-com-boom, they were passion projects and people with time devoted to the "cause" of FOSS.
Except they kinda did. The foundations of FSF are born by academics working at institutions, getting paid salaries. The were devoting time certainly, and certainly in the case of RMS with passion and cause, but that work was definitely funded - usually by the university.
>> Perhaps that's the problem: that they exist "at the level they do", meaning most of it is corporate focused, and not enthusiast and user focused.
I think we can drop the term "enthusiast". It implies tiny niche group with little practical value. I'm thinking of classic car "enthusiasts" who spend all their time under the car, and precious little driving it.
So let's talk about users. Users want full-featured reliable software. I would suggest all software, if successful, is user focused. (To he honest, I'm not sure what you have in mind with "corporate focused".) Firefox, to pick one project at random will seemingly live or die based on the individual user experience.
Equally take databases - there are s plethora of options to suit every use case. Need big powerful fast enterprise scale - Postgres is for you. Need small footprint with easy install - try Firebird. And a gazillion others. Surely such quality is a good thing?
>> Gnome, for example, wasn't created to give RH and co a desktop shell for corporate installs...
Um. Sure it was. It was designed to offer a gui desktop on top of Linux. Who did they think would use it if not Linux distributions? Given that for decades "the year of Linux on the desktop" was a meme, I'm not sure it's fair to claim that distributions using Gnome to create desktops for business users was a surprise.
Projects could still be funded by community users, but "venture funding"? That's how projects turn to shit.