“The slow evaporation of the free/open source surplus”
https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/the-slow-evaporation-of-the-foss-surplus/
Where I try to explain, as succinctly as I can (which isn’t that succinct), why I’m worried about where FOSS is heading
@baldur Good post. This has been a flaw with FOSS for a long time. You can't build a sustainable model on pure voluntarism. FOSS is a great idea, but it either needs public funding or a model where the users pay for the development. There are a few companies that rely on FOSS and also contributes to it's development, (ie the user pays model), but way too many just treat it as free (as in beer) software.
Public funding is probably a more reliable route. It could be a variant of user pay along with the "public money, public code"-principle, but (some) software should be treated as infrastructure that needs public investment.
No I don't have to declare my software open source, because all software is open source. You're just illegitimately bullying people into ignorance when you close it. Neither of us should be able to close our source code, whether we want to or not.
CC: @audunmb@todon.nl @baldur@toot.cafe
@cy @audunmb @baldur While I agree philosophically that copyright is not a legitimate system given the harm that it does, FOSS licenses do serve a real purpose in this context - they're essentially a legal hack that tries to subvert the copyright system. It existed before FOSS did, and continues to exist despite it.
That having been said, I am similarly bothered by how a lot of people seem to see FOSS as the 'ideological peak' of software, as if that's a long-term and complete solution to the problem, when it is really neither of those things and should be recognized as the temporary hack that it is. Useful, but still not a real solution.
