So you want to compete with or replace open source

Excellent article. Some choice quotes:

""" While open source was proven to be incredibly profitable and profoundly useful for the software industry as a whole, the economics of making open source work for one business are much different. """

""" This logic [of "post-open"/"fair source"/"source available"] is rooted in a deeper notion of ownership ... The notion is that the software they build belongs to them. They possess a sense of ownership over the software, which comes with a set of moral and perhaps legal rights to the software, which, importantly, are withheld from any entity other than themselves. The “developers” enjoy this special relationship with the project ... and third-party entities who work on the source code are merely “contributors” ... """

""" My well-wishes are contingent on any movements which aim to compete with open source stopping short of calling themselves open source. """

To me, this article is pointing out the intrinsic "cursed" problem of providing a startup mentality to an open source product. FOSS relies on giving freedom to replicate while (naive) startups are almost by definition looking for moats or monopolies to become unicorns.

There are ways of providing FOSS products, say as a by-product or ancillary project, but if a startup's main product is the source, it's almost antithetical to the business proposition. I think this point is only ever obliquely addressed and this article tackles it head on.

I also appreciate the articles focus on "open washing", where the new breed of "post-open" or "fair source" movements either engage in or stop just shy of trying to redefine the term "open source" to mean "source available" and not one that respects freedom.

Title feels misleading - skip to the end:

> As for me, I still believe in open source, and even in the commercial potential of open source. It requires creativity and a clever business acumen to identify and exploit market opportunities within this collaborative framework. To win in open source you must embrace this collaboration and embrace the fact that you will share the commercial market for the software with other entities. If you’re up to that challenge, then let’s keep beating the open source drum together. If not, these new movements(source-available software) may be a home for you – but know that a lot of hard work still lies ahead of you in that path.

This article feels more like a critique of the new "source-available" trend in tech whereby existing OSS projects sell out and try to retroactively re-license themselves to be more closed-source friendly. I've been sort of aware of this phenomenon since there was a small upset when Muse Group bought Audacity, though it appears it is still GPL[1].

[1] https://github.com/audacity/audacity/blob/master/LICENSE.txt

The real issue is that people just aren't thinking through the effects a license brings. They'll release things under open source licenses like the GPL because it's the 'expected' thing to do, or because they want others to be able to contribute to it, or what not, without thinking through what it allows others to do in turn (use it without paying, rerelease it themselves, fork the project, etc).

So a lot of companies start up thinking they can open source their code, and treat their project like it was under a proprietary license with source available, then realise the hard way that's not the case. And a lot of authors release stuff for free when they don't see the value of it, then realise years later that they could be getting paid for their efforts.

And the article is right that it's probably not going to be possible to outcompete open source with any new license or incentive structure. Once people are used to something being free to use without any limits, any less free alternative is going to severely struggle to gain traction.

> The notion is that the software they build belongs to them. They possess a sense of ownership over the software, which comes with a set of moral and perhaps legal rights to the software, which, importantly, are withheld from any entity other than themselves. The “developers” enjoy this special relationship with the project – the “developers” being the special class of person entitled to this sense of ownership and the class to whom the up-and-coming source-available movements make an appeal, in the sense of “pay the developers” – and third-party entities who work on the source code are merely “contributors”, though they apply the same skills and labor to the project as the “developers” do.

That's... literally just proprietary software, with "source code available on request"?

It's pretty rare to see a post that I agree on so wholeheartedly.

The big question is though, how do you make business work in FOSS context. I'm glad that SourceHut is doing well, but I suspect it thrives partially due being small niche software. On the other end of scale you have FAANG style megacorps that do a lot of FOSS work too. But the middle-ground between these two extremes seems really difficult. Yet it feels desireable that non-niche FOSS development wouldn't end up being solely in the hands of megacorps.

> With the rise of GitHub and in particular the explosion of web development as an open platform, commercial stakeholders in software caught on to the compelling economics of open source.

It could also be that the grassroots of the dotcom era literally grew up and wanted to capitalize on their work, while still retaining their values. What we have today is something in-between closed source and open source. I.e. "commercial stakeholders" isn't a merged branch, but the linear evolution of the original one.

> Nevertheless, the revolutionary economics of FOSS are based on collaboration, and are incompatible with competition.

FOSS seems to mostly be about copying existing non-free work in some legal way. It only exists because it copies its competition.

As for economics . . . big players often back FOSS development but only in markets those companies aren't in yet and only insofar as the development directly benefits them.

If you want to compete with FOSS, just make something closed source that's successful. They will come.