Free and Open Source Software–and Other Market Failures

The free/open-source movement has greatly benefited society by encouraging people to overcome their fears and start distributing their work in the form of source code rather than just precompiled binaries ("closed source").

However, the core idea of sharing source code is not exclusive to the FOSS movement. This concept aligns with the original intentions of the Berne Convention. The United States adopted the Berne Convention relatively late, in the late 80s if I'm not mistaken. Before this adoption, source code made publicly available without prior copyright registration procedures was effectively considered public domain. This situation allowed businesses and startups to exploit these sources to create closed-source commercial products without crediting the original authors.

The Berne Convention was a game changer. It introduced a new rule that simply making source code publicly available automatically grants the author exclusive copyright of their work, without any bureaucratic hurdles.

This rule opened up new possibilities for programmers to create open-source projects in the broadest sense. Nevertheless, due to historical reasons, it was not an easy task for the public to understand this new reality. The FOSS movement worked hard to convince people that publishing software in source form is perfectly fine.

However, the free-software philosophy can be quite restrictive compared to what the Berne Convention actually allows authors to do with their work. This ideology is so pervasive today that many programmers believe that publishing source code must involve using an OSI-approved (F)OSS license. Any deviation from this is often seen as supporting outdated business models and harming the programming community's ability to share their work with the public.

These misconceptions likely arise because the FOSS movement has taken the lead in promoting the principles of the Berne Convention, adding its ideological restrictions. The rarely acknowledged truth is that the Berne Convention offers a wide range of possibilities that could benefit the community of authors more than big-tech corporations. The Four Freedoms of Free Software significantly restrict these options for authors.

More importantly, big businesses have already adapted to this new reality and are utilizing this philosophy to their advantage.

> But we can figure it out, and we will figure it out—because we have the source code. We have all 562,227 lines of Perl5 source code for it.

I haven’t worked in OS development so I’m almost certainly naive here. But, the philosophy of minimal programs always seemed like the solution to this kind of thing? Ideally the program which breaks should be only a couple thousand lines long, so you can fit the whole thing in your brain and fix it, right?

> the frustrations and anger of IT in 2024 are entirely different from those of 1991.

Golly!

Software still sacks

Windows still used by default

Windows still dreadfully bad. Especially relative to FOSS

Consumers still getting g locked in to substandard products by vendor lock in

The modern frustrations are different, but not entirely different

Unfortunately, I don't understand what this article is trying to say, but I respect the author and made a diligent attempt.

Yes, open source is now common place.

But I sometimes wonder if it, too, is a market failure, in that many projects are governed by, or mostly funded by, single entities, e.g. Facebook (React), Google (Flutter, Go, Android), Docker (Docker), and so on...

Is C++ a better example of open source, with broad industry contributions?

What about WebAssembly? Major browsers (Chromium) can pretty much refuse to support some functionality, and that'll be the end of that. The power centralization has severe consequences for openness.

I'm not convinced that community/industry-driven public-good type of FOSS will continue to flourish. If anything, I worry that we'll end up with a bunch of "open source" projects that in reality have built-in limitations (or as the author said "a carefully engineered bottleneck"), that prevent truly open adoption (like HashiCorp preventing contributions that compete with their commercial edition feature offering).

I don’t understand the point of this article or what the author is trying to say.

By Poul-Henning Kamp

Hard to see what they want to say. I would imagine yeah current market practices are a failure when it comes to properly supporting libre and opensource software. So we need to surpass failures of the market system and come up with something better that has better support for FOSS.

I was hoping for an insight to glean in conclusion, but this ended up being a survey of the software delivery eras. Oh well.