Pop Goes the Open Source Bubble
Recently I’ve noticed some remarks and conversations about how unfair it is that some open source projects are not getting funded by the wealthy, large companies that use them extensively. Here’s a Twitter thread on this topic that I participated in, and here’s another with the same idea about a different project that I came across today.
Something about these complaints reminds me of the politics of fairness and wealth distribution. They assert that there is a moral imperative that successful big companies should support and nurture the open source software upon which they depend. That argument does feel nice, but it suggests that the big mean corporations owe something to the poor, underprivileged open source developers. They don’t! Open source developers weren’t born that way, they made a choice. We’re all (with the exception of women, ethnic, and other true minorities) privileged to be software engineers. Open source developers have the luxury of free time to create things that require a fantastic education to produce. They are not people that need special status in our community.
In this case the politics of open markets and positive sum exchanges are sufficient to make things fair for everyone. There are lots of examples of open source projects that grew too big for the maintainer to keep up with the bug list in their spare time, and wide-eyed, clever maintainers worked up a business model to extract some of the value out of the thing they had created — be it via specialized enterprise licensing or professional services.
And also, who’s to say that big companies aren’t actually paying back what they receive in open source value? Would we have Tensorflow without a team of highly skilled engineers at Google giving it away? According to GitHub’s latest data, Microsoft has surpassed open source stalwarts like Facebook and Google to become the world’s top open source contributor with 16,419 contributors. So it seems that big companies are paying it forward rather than simply paying for it. Let’s take this a step further: this is the point of open source software. The idea was never that you could work on open source until it got popular and then get paid for it. The idea was always that the software should be free. It’s fundamentally better for the world for there to be more free software than that big companies start paying for the free software they use.
I realize my point of view may come off as rather callous. I completely understand how awful it must feel for a person with a popular open source project that is burning the candle at both ends to try to keep it alive. I also think there’s no place for even one tiny gram of entitlement on the part of open source users to expect fixes and responsiveness from open source maintainers. I just will say that those of us that have some experience making businesses work should nudge them in the direction of seeking compensation through normal channels rather than getting disgruntled and asking for handouts.
I’d also like to see leaders in the community — particularly JavaScript — gently nudge open source maintainers to open up control of their projects to more people that can help. Not so gently put, if they wanted to control their source code, open source was never the right model to begin with.
