I donât see a solution being proposed for companies like ElasticSearch and Redis. What are they supposed to do if the value from their products is reaped by other entities affecting their ability to continue developing those products?
âWe had to fire these people, but at least weâre OSI OSS!!â, âThe company died but at least weâre OSI OSS!â, âWe canât make a living, but at least weâre principled!!!â.
Whatâs the suggestion here? Ignore whatâs going on to satisfy a definition?
Here is my understanding of authorâs position: Stay away from companies like Redis and ElasticSearch. They are building software with a proprietary mindset (the fact that they have tight control over product strategy and development demonstrates this) only to realize that they are being devoured by bigger fish. Itâs a business model problem, not an open source problem.
Sorry, I donât follow your reasoning. Why would a company not making money be a relevant problem for the advocates of FOSS? FOSS is about freedom. It never had an opinion about money. Money has always been irrelevant. Some people may not like it, and they are free to not use non-free licenses. And FOSS advocates will warn users about that (as they did in the past). FOSS doesnât have an obligation to offer a solution to every problem in the software industry.
This is the point. In the real world, money matters. Comments from an org like OSI on companies not being principled are akin to the church making comments on abortion. To these orgs itâs a black and white issue: either you adhere to their beliefs and are âgoodâ or you donât and you are âevilâ.
Articles like these sound like out of touch preachers screaming about queers and family values. And people who blindly follow them with no arguments but âit was written by Xâ or âitâs written in Yâ are just appealing to authority.
Thatâs an unnecessarily strong reaction. Money clearly matters for some things. But thatâs not all that matters. There are many people releasing FOSS without any financial expectations. Clearly, money doesnât matter to those people on that context. Trying to argue that âmoney should matter also for those people on that contextâ doesnât make too much sense to me. Nobody is forcing anybody to release FOSS.
As it always is in software, it depends. Theres a lot of small, core, open source utilities maintained by a single person (the recent xz utility, as a recent example).
But major software projects (Redis, another recent example) requires far more than 1 developer