The slow evaporation of the free/open source surplus

From one of the articles the article refers to: "[According to Harvard something] value of OSS to the economy is 4.15 Billion USD."

That seems ludicrously low - Linux itself, if you value it at $1 per install is considerably more that 4 billion USD. The various open source web projects powering all the large sites are more than billions. Banks may not pay for SSL but they receive economic value. Etc. etc.

And it's not a labor surplus except for those poor souls that are trying to make their fortune with an OSS "side project." It is a method of doing things where results are shared and improved upon, fundamentally the scientific way brought into applications. Unlike physical devices, it's essentially free to share software. Just don't put access controls on the git repos.

There is a tendency to overly productize things, but that's not the heart of open source; the heart is just to share results, perhaps in a hope that ones labor can contribute to the progress of humanity. I don't need to promise to fix issues ever for my source code to potentially have value to someone solving a similar problem.

Now, it's harder to achieve this way of working in corporations, and things have to split into "open source with some modular hooks for private things that aren't open source" (even just in-house logging or metrics systems), but it's not impossible, and does have the same advantage science has - it grows exponentially and eventually will figure out how to do anything that is doable.

If corporation x uses my thing to cut labor costs and doesn't pay me anything while actual employees get to sit around and make six figures adding fields to jsons, that's a shitty arrangement for me

If corporation x didn't exist, I probably wouldn't worry about it. But the second money becomes involved it changes the calculus

And I do think some projects like ad blockers are worth it because corporations don't benefit much from them, but regular people do

> We don’t yet know which parts of the FOSS system is sustainable,

Probably the parts that have been around for decades.

As someone who's created open source software in the past, I'm put off mostly the explosion in software complexity over the last two decades, the constant churn in libraries and tooling which places an unreasonable maintenance burden on a spare-time hobbyist, and the bad taste left in the mouth by Microsoft using copilot to license-launder the github corpus.

I still produce open source software and gateware on a recreational basis, but in quiet little backwaters of the noosphere which aren't going to change the world (or be tainted by AI) any time soon!

> OSS burnout. Very few FOSS projects are lucky enough to have grown a sustainable and supportive community. Most of the time, it seems to be a never-ending parade of angry demands with very little reward. When the software labour market was growing steadily, burned out maintainers often got replaced by fresh-eyed graduates or coders who relied on the project at work.

This is big not just because of angry demanding "gimme free stuff slave!" users but burn-out due to the realization that open source in 2024 is often just free labor for SaaS companies.

Open source should not be considered "free." It should be a kind of gift culture where one is expected to give something back. Showing up with angry demands for something someone made for free makes you a parasite and an asshole.

FOSS is an activity taken up by people who want a particular solution to a problem. When the tech and IT industry were vastly smaller than it is today, there was actually a larger number of high-quality FOSS projects. Today there are more FOSS projects than ever by number, but a good chunk are what I would call "throwaway" projects. Another large amount are projects that just exist to fill gaps in new ecosystems (a new language/framework/platform/etc appears, and now they need a lot of projects to provide libraries to fill needs). And there's lots of immature engineers who are growing up in a culture without documentation, and too quick to reference snippets than learn a tool completely. Tech itself is changing, and that will (and does) affect open source.

But the existence of open source is self-perpetuating at this point. There isn't really a bubble to burst. FOSS will continue to be here as long as the computer allows anyone to create and share a work for free that can be reused and there is a need for. It is not sustainable, because it does not need sustaining. Anybody with an internet connection can decide for themselves to create open source. As long as we provide an unimpeded means to share their work (newsgroups, mailing lists, FTP, mirrors, etc), there will be open source. And as long as somebody has leisure time, and there are nerds to be interested in programming during their leisure time, some will spend it on open source. It's like "sports": people will still play sports regardless of a business motive.

I think people are shocked by the whole "business source" license thing, but I'm not. Open Source was never a business model, no matter how much some of its proponents wanted it to be. It's taken a while for people to learn that lesson, but it's starting to sink in. The fact that fewer startups will be open source now isn't going to change the open source community at all. The community will be here regardless of what any business (or individual government) wants.

As far as "our reliance on open source", that's just a happy accident. It's free of charge and free of use, so business uses it. If for some reason it stopped being free of charge or free of use, then business would just pay for proprietary software like it used to. I don't see this happening anytime soon, though, unless somebody passes a law banning Copyleft.

I'm pretty unconvinced.

I think the author thinks the primary motivation for open source is companies making a donation out of the goodness of their heart.

While that does happen, i dont think that is the main cause. Most companies participate in open source for their own selfish reasons. Sometimes that is to attract talent, sometimes it is to attract people to their propreitary platform, sometimes it is to commodify the parts they dont want to compete on, sometimes its something else. The companies do get benefits here. They are probably going to continue so long as the benefit > costs.

As for non corporate open source. It may not be a healthy hobby, but i dont see anything changing here. If people have been doing it as a hobby for the last 20 years, why would they stop now?

> Short version: my mental model of FOSS is that it’s a function of industry and labour surplus

I believe that originally it was more a function of college students spending their free time on it. Of course, this results in addressing fewer enterprise-level use cases.

I generally try to stay away from responding to these posts but it's starting to feel like it's an astroturf concern trolling strategy.

I'm not sure I've properly digested the article but, just from a cursory look, it doesn't even mention the exponentially decreasing costs of compute. I'm not sure my model is correct by I suspect the main driving factor of why FOSS exists and is successful is that the tax imposed by current copyright/IP laws is too usury and FOSS provides a mechanism to circumvent it and provide/capture the value from the dropping costs of compute.

Is the FOSS surplus evaporating? Maybe, but my default position is no. I'd be willing to change that position if some evidence were provided. The article provides none.

Articles like "Is the Open Source Bubble about to Burst?" are click-baity titles that seem on the razors edge of bad faith. The author of that article claims to be a FOSS advocate so I don't know.

Maybe I'm reading too much into things and this is really fallout from some EU politics I'm not fully looped into.

Is there anything here that isn’t purely speculative?

What are the signs that OSS is actually in decline?

BTW, I’m not sure there’s anything wrong if OSS is in decline. Overwhelmingly, people do it not to get paid or help industry but because they love building things and solving problems. If people are generally finding better ways to do that, then good for them. Or if people have less time for OSS due to general economic circumstances, then that is a sad thing, but that’s not specific to OSS, so it’s a bit weird to frame it that way. That is, if people have fewer opportunities to find personal satisfaction in their lives, that’s bad across the board, not just for OSS.

I think the article gets this upside down.

When 100 companies have an identical problem, and it's not a problem that's in the domain of what they're competing over, then it's a tremendous waste of labor for them to come up with 100 separate solutions. It's just cheaper for them to allow enough wiggle room that the problem gets solved in the open so they can all get on to focusing on whatever it is that makes them different from their competitors.

lots of bullets in this blogpost but here are some gems

> OSS burnout. Very few FOSS projects are lucky enough to have grown a sustainable and supportive community. Most of the time, it seems to be a never-ending parade of angry demands with very little reward.

> People who are unemployed or jaded by the software industry have fewer side projects, because – let’s be honest – there are healthier hobbies available.

> There’s less funding for non-AI software startups, who are usually very heavy OSS users.

> Declining surplus and burnout leads to maintainers increasingly stepping back from their projects.

I've been doing and following OSS for over a decade now and this is the first time I feel like a piece on OSS excludes me. I started in the maker communities in Europe, and most OSS creators I know of are small hobbyists all over the place, not particularly "California rich devs with spare time". In fact I believe that demographic might be (relatively!) under-represented, they have startups to work on after all!

Open source is great! I use it all the time.

However, what I did not expect is how hard it is to get new open source to be used by people. You can have wonderful features but without a really large amount of marketing effort the pickup can be really slow. Unless you have help from the right influencers. And without traction it will either die or go in another direction, possibly close source/commercial.

What's also sad is the legal system can change, making the cost to entry for commercial use of software for small players much higher or risky. Some people will have worked for years on open source, possibly thinking it can be something they can do commercially after they retire for example, then governments bring out a law with a 15 million euro penalty if you are not compliant (Cyber Resilience Act).

I guess this is a big kudos to those whose persistence have made it succeed for them!

The article seems to deal only with FOSS coming straight from the enterprise world, also as a byproduct of professional developers' free time. This is sometimes the case, but it also misses completely what FOSS is for non professional developers: their best possible resume; and that is not going away anytime soon.

Wrote about this a few years ago.

> In giving companies a free pass to enter the “open source community,” however, certain hackers said “take what you want and give what you want” to a bunch of organizations built around maximizing the ratio of the former to the latter.

Like the author says, investment by these entities can balloon the (F)OSS ecosystem, but when they contract (as is inevitable in a boom-and-bust economy), the nonrenewable resources that actually write the stuff (humans) will burn out.

https://boilingdown.ghost.io/cooperation/

What about Blender? Is it not a canonical success story? I feel that science, art, and tools that provide personal agency are all compelling landscapes for open-source fruition.

Love Baldur's writings in general. Smart & insightful, great topics.

I do feel like the mental model here - industry & labor - defines away a lot of the currents that arose open source. These factors are the industrial/capitalist view of open source!

Perhaps I was just young and naive, but man, it was such a an exciting time to be alive, and it was so clear to young me that computers already could do anything you asked them to do, and that they were getting soaringly better all the time, and that we were building new world spanning interactive mediums and revamping how society communicated with itself.

It was a grand project, and the term I heard recently & love vocational awe barely contains the magnitude of interests & awe I had & still have.

And it was such an open accessible time. Reading ajaxian.com was a constant torrent of regular folk inventing futures. We were harkening always towards new better protocols and libraries.

It felt so much more than industrial. And the scale of activity was on such a more personal, small innovator level. There weren't huge teams maintaining React or Nextjs. There were a couple folks creating Comet, or BEEP, and sharing not just the output but more engaged in an arena of ideas, discussing on blogs and comments the tradeoffs & nitty gritty.

Lately, tech hasn't been accessible, and it hasn't been cool. Open source used to be the connection for cool and accessible, used to be endless blogrolls that would suck folks in and let them see & become part of that project of building the new world. Open source has, as it's gotten more economically important and larger scale, become just a taken for granted tool, not something that was going to alloy & enhance our lives or expand our thinking.

The motivations matter, the image matters, the cause matters, the drive matters. We can look at industry and labor from a rationalist economic view, to assess open source, but the philosophy and motivations to me are more interesting, define the energies or lack that create the awe & passion that drive this amazing open source world, that impel people in.

There's also uneven concentration of the open-source effort.

In the past 15 years, companies, or at least the companies I worked for, loved open sourcing their systems for better reputation, for larger community support, and for not getting left behind by competing solutions.

I sense that the tide has changed. Now we have a lot more mature solutions than a few years ago. Few companies are growing so fast on a new domain that calls for brand new systems, either. So, the cost of open-sourcing a system may outweigh the benefits. Nowadays, it is more often than not that a system startup open-sources their systems to gain user traction, and soon makes their systems only source-available. And rightly so. They have a business to run anyway, and they certain don't have any obligation to open source their bread and butter.

There is another factor: the fun is always in new challenges, yet a lot of software development has more chores than challenges. I remember many years ago a pretty popular blog explained why Linux did not have a nice UI compared to Windows or MacOS. The main reason, the author argued, was that tweaking UI was not necessarily fun, and we achieved great UI from thousands and thousands of incremental improvements, more often than not painstakingly. An engineer who worked on open source in her spare time most likely did not have incentives to make such improvements. I mean, what's the fun in that? In contrast, people work for free to create amazing libraries in the field of deep learning. I'd venture to guess that's because there's tons of fun in working the "sexy" part of the engineering: deep understanding of optimizations and healthy dose of mathematics, chances to apply or even invent all kinds of engineering tricks, very cool results, potentially huge impact, cheering from a large community, and etc. Such projects are deep, are personal, and are super fun to work on. On the other hand, I'm not sure how many new fun projects (at least in the area of distributed systems) are out there that have outsized impact to the community, compared to 10 years ago.

A test to try out whenever these blog posts show up describing the burnout that is purportedly endemic to "open source":

If you ignore GitHub, how many of the problems described go away (and of the ones that remain, how potent are they)?

The problems are not intrinsic to "open source". Conflating GitHub culture with open source is like conflating being on Twitter with using the Internet.

I think the factors listed in the article will result in less commercial OSS contributions. Also as investment dries up, software folks will have more free time to do hobby development.

Reduced commercial interest may also allow new GPL projects (a.k.a Free Software) rather than the recent trend toward "commercializable" open source.

Unpopular take here on HN, but I’m not sure that this is a bad thing.

Non-zero interest rates do not equal “high” interest rates.

Open source people don't know how to market themselves, and those who do are accused of exploiting FOSS for - GASP! - personal gains.

If every owner of every semi-important open source project set up a business license with support they would not only make money, but they could also leave their current job that holds back their development time and make an even better piece of software.

But no, most open source will always be considered as gratis and side-project worthy because the authors themselves treat it as such

I think that if you use OSS projects as much as the typical HN user, you should be giving money to at least some of them.

If your OSS contribution budget is $0, you're part of the problem.

The same of course applies to companies but 1000x more.

The counterpoint would seem to be that OSS now more plentiful than ever and accelerating.