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From many of the comments in this thread, one might think that FAANG companies invented the concept of open source software or that software doesn't exist outsi

by shawxe 6y ago

From many of the comments in this thread, one might think that FAANG companies invented the concept of open source software or that software doesn't exist outside the context of a "profit model." Whatever is going on at Mozilla right now, the notion that a piece of open source software even needs to be profitable (let alone supported by a single large company) in order to continue existing is ridiculous. I'll concede that there are unique challenges associated with developing a web browser (it's certainly a moving target) and that there need to be several people working on it full time, but is that really something that can only happen when one big company/organization is funding the project? As for Rust, maybe someone could point me in the direction of the one benevolent large company that's backing GCC/G++ or CPython or Ruby? I'm not saying what's going on with Mozilla isn't absolutely terrible, but the notion that Firefox or Rust are going to somehow just go away (and that this is what was destined to happen all along because Mozilla is not profitable) just doesn't really make any sense.

maccard 6y ago
> but is that really something that can only happen when one big company/organization is funding the project? Have you any examples of any large OSS projects that don't have this problem? > As for Rust, maybe someone could point me in the direction of the one benevolent large company that's backing GCC/G++ or CPython or Ruby? gcc [0] has a list of maintainers, which features a lot of redhat email addresses. The ruby maintainer is employed by Heroku. CPython is maintained by a RH employee. The linux kernel is mostly comprised of people paid to develop by their employers. [0] https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/blob/master/MAINTAINERS https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/blob/master/MAINTAINERS
- 1MachineElf 6y ago
  To the parent commenter's credit, none of those companies own the rights to the GCC/CPython/Ruby trademarks like Mozilla does with Rust.
- jpgvm 6y ago
  PostgreSQL is probably the best example. It's maintained by many people from many different companies.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - maccard 6y ago
    That's a really good example of the opposite, thanks! I wasn't aware of it!
coldtea 6y ago
>Whatever is going on at Mozilla right now, the notion that a piece of open source software even needs to be profitable (let alone supported by a single large company) in order to continue existing is ridiculous. Large FOSS projects requiring specialists (like Rust does) all seem to supported by companies paying, and often it's a large single company too, whether that's like PHP and Zend, RedHat and various projects, Mono and Xamarin, and so on. Else you get something that takes fovered to develop further, releases are sporadic, people go on and off, etc. Heck, GTK+ is/was one of the most adopted FOSS libs, and a dependency for tons of applications, distros, etc. And yet it just had a single dev working on it at some point (like, e.g., a person doing 300 commits each month, and another 50 persons doing 100 comits a year combined).
- narag 6y ago
  It seems that projects are adopted by companies not because they control the software but because they could if needed: the code is FOSS and mature so in case of main maintainer quitting, they could pay someone to take over. Also I wonder if browsers really need to be large projects requiring specialists or they've become this way because organisations making them are happy with such an entry barrier.
jlokier 6y ago
> invented the concept of open source software or that software doesn't exist outside the context of a "profit model." To be fair, the existence of open source software that is very expensive to develop has always dependend on big companies paying for it. Firefox could be funded by several companies in collaboration, but as of right now, do you know any collection of companies with deep pockets that aren't happy enough sending users to Chrome instead?
- joepie91_ 6y ago
  > To be fair, the existence of open source software that is very expensive to develop has always dependend on big companies paying for it. I think you're getting the causality wrong there. A lot of the "open-source" (often barely) software built and funded by large corporations has a tendency of accumulating endless technical debt and complexity, and being inaccessible to outside developers. Not dissimilar to much proprietary software. Does that mean that serious open-source software requires big companies paying for it, to maintain? No, it just means that big companies produce expensive-to-maintain software. And to top it off, often when they do so in open-source, it's actually an unnecessary reinvented wheel! And quite often simpler, just as serious software exists that isn't so damn to expensive to maintain and that does just fine without big-corporate funding, because it hasn't suffered from the same organizational bloat and office politics.
  - jlokier 6y ago
    A reasonable argument, and so I've upvoted. But even taking into account removing unnecessary complexity, a web browser that users will choose is still complex, and has a very high compatibility bar, which is also a moving target. You might say, does the browser need to much in it? Well, for users to choose it as a daily driver, it needs to work with web standards, formal and informal, and with nearly all sites. The web standards accrue complexity due to commercial development too. So do expectations, e.g. for smooth rendering, running games, etc. An open source "small" browser which avoids that complexity is certainly possible to write, but few people would, or could, use it as their daily driver. (Case in point. I used an open source-ish phone for a few years, a Nokia N900. It was great fun. But ultimately I had to stop using it because the browser increasingly couldn't handle ordinary sites.) Do you know of any "serious open-source software" of comparable scale, which does not require big companies paying for it, even taking into account the argument around unnecessary complexity? Not much comes to mind. Linux kernel, GCC, RISC-V, things like that are predominantly developed by paid workers, whether from companies or by government & academic grants. Debian comes to mind as a possible exception but I'm not sure, because so much of it is on the back of big projects which are themselves funded.

by shawxe 6y ago

maccard 6y ago

> but is that really something that can only happen when one big company/organization is funding the project? Have you any examples of any large OSS projects that don't have this problem? > As for Rust, maybe someone could point me in the direction of the one benevolent large company that's backing GCC/G++ or CPython or Ruby? gcc [0] has a list of maintainers, which features a lot of redhat email addresses. The ruby maintainer is employed by Heroku. CPython is maintained by a RH employee. The linux kernel is mostly comprised of people paid to develop by their employers. [0] https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/blob/master/MAINTAINERS https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/blob/master/MAINTAINERS

1MachineElf 6y ago
To the parent commenter's credit, none of those companies own the rights to the GCC/CPython/Ruby trademarks like Mozilla does with Rust.
jpgvm 6y ago
PostgreSQL is probably the best example. It's maintained by many people from many different companies.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- maccard 6y ago
  That's a really good example of the opposite, thanks! I wasn't aware of it!

coldtea 6y ago

>Whatever is going on at Mozilla right now, the notion that a piece of open source software even needs to be profitable (let alone supported by a single large company) in order to continue existing is ridiculous. Large FOSS projects requiring specialists (like Rust does) all seem to supported by companies paying, and often it's a large single company too, whether that's like PHP and Zend, RedHat and various projects, Mono and Xamarin, and so on. Else you get something that takes fovered to develop further, releases are sporadic, people go on and off, etc. Heck, GTK+ is/was one of the most adopted FOSS libs, and a dependency for tons of applications, distros, etc. And yet it just had a single dev working on it at some point (like, e.g., a person doing 300 commits each month, and another 50 persons doing 100 comits a year combined).

narag 6y ago
It seems that projects are adopted by companies not because they control the software but because they could if needed: the code is FOSS and mature so in case of main maintainer quitting, they could pay someone to take over. Also I wonder if browsers really need to be large projects requiring specialists or they've become this way because organisations making them are happy with such an entry barrier.

jlokier 6y ago

> invented the concept of open source software or that software doesn't exist outside the context of a "profit model." To be fair, the existence of open source software that is very expensive to develop has always dependend on big companies paying for it. Firefox could be funded by several companies in collaboration, but as of right now, do you know any collection of companies with deep pockets that aren't happy enough sending users to Chrome instead?

joepie91_ 6y ago
> To be fair, the existence of open source software that is very expensive to develop has always dependend on big companies paying for it. I think you're getting the causality wrong there. A lot of the "open-source" (often barely) software built and funded by large corporations has a tendency of accumulating endless technical debt and complexity, and being inaccessible to outside developers. Not dissimilar to much proprietary software. Does that mean that serious open-source software requires big companies paying for it, to maintain? No, it just means that big companies produce expensive-to-maintain software. And to top it off, often when they do so in open-source, it's actually an unnecessary reinvented wheel! And quite often simpler, just as serious software exists that isn't so damn to expensive to maintain and that does just fine without big-corporate funding, because it hasn't suffered from the same organizational bloat and office politics.
- jlokier 6y ago
  A reasonable argument, and so I've upvoted. But even taking into account removing unnecessary complexity, a web browser that users will choose is still complex, and has a very high compatibility bar, which is also a moving target. You might say, does the browser need to much in it? Well, for users to choose it as a daily driver, it needs to work with web standards, formal and informal, and with nearly all sites. The web standards accrue complexity due to commercial development too. So do expectations, e.g. for smooth rendering, running games, etc. An open source "small" browser which avoids that complexity is certainly possible to write, but few people would, or could, use it as their daily driver. (Case in point. I used an open source-ish phone for a few years, a Nokia N900. It was great fun. But ultimately I had to stop using it because the browser increasingly couldn't handle ordinary sites.) Do you know of any "serious open-source software" of comparable scale, which does not require big companies paying for it, even taking into account the argument around unnecessary complexity? Not much comes to mind. Linux kernel, GCC, RISC-V, things like that are predominantly developed by paid workers, whether from companies or by government & academic grants. Debian comes to mind as a possible exception but I'm not sure, because so much of it is on the back of big projects which are themselves funded.