Ask HN: Is open source, as we know it, dying?

[akswamy]

Yesterday IBM acquiring RedHat was all over the news just as Microsoft finished formally acquiring Github. Last month Alphabet announced it is investing heavily in Gitlab.

Apart from high profile acquisitions and investments in open source projects by tech companies such as the above, open source projects are merging as well. The node.js and the Javascript foundation, for example, announced a merger.

On the culture front, there has been a renewed interest in making communities more welcoming to all resulting in high profile OS projects like the Linux kernel revamping their code of conduct. This has not been without backlash from some existing community loyalists who see the move as politically driven rather than community driven. On a slightly tangential note, Python lost its BDFL owing to burnt out that resulted from managing such a massive project for years. Once again highlighting how the culture does not even spare people at the top.

All these trends seem to point towards a move for professionally managed communities that value scalable stability over a close-knit passionate communities driven by individuals.

What do you make of all this? Is open source dying? And are these worrying times or exciting times?

[RickSanchez2600]

Open Source is evolving not dying. It takes a lot of money to develop something from scratch in the corporate world, in the OSS world people do it as a hobby. Red Hat sells a server version and Fedora is free, but CentOS is the free version of Red Hat Server.

OSS companies are the new Bell Labs inventing the new software to be used by the masses. The thing about Linux is if you don't like one company you can easily switch to another Debian instead of Mint Linux or Ubuntu for example. IBM is only going to buy Red Hat but the source code is still open sourced and free to use and compile.

IBM got out of the PC and Server markets for hardware and had to find a new market, Linux, to get into in order to bring more money to shareholders.

[akswamy]

Rightly pointed out. Thanks Rick.

But do you think there is a likelihood of the new management influencing projects that RedHat should or shouldn't prioritize?

Essentially, the goals of open source organizations and for-profit businesses have diverged at least in one way: Open source tends to tinker, explore and take the long-term view just as you've pointed out 'they are the modern bell labs'. While businesses, on the other hand, are driven by growth and profit, often ruthlessly chasing them for their investors - evident from the quarterly earnings calls. Google is famous for dropping its products over time, even if they have a loyal user base simply because they don't make financial sense anymore. Is there a danger of this myopia rubbing on OS?

Businesses are great at extracting efficiencies. Do you feel open source could do with more of leaning down and setting of ambitious commercial goals?

[krapp]

I suppose if you require "open source" to only be composed of "close-knit passionate communities driven by individuals" who coalesce around some particular anti-progressive ideology and the cult of personality of a BDFL, then... still probably not.

Because as you mention, these trends seem to apply to "professionally managed communities that value scalable stability," which is itself a legitimate concern for some projects and not antithetical to open source as a concept, and an outlier in regards to open source as a whole.

It's like the oft-cited argument that "the internet" is becoming corporate and centralized because out of the billions upon billions of sites on the web two or three are really popular... it's a failure to see the forest for the trees.

[sytse]

I want to clarify that last month the main investment in GitLab in our series D was from Iconiq. Google Ventures (GV) did our C round and did (part of) their pro-rata in the D round, similar to other investors like Khosla Ventures.

GV is part of Alphabet but independent of Google or Capital G. The $100m D round GitLab raised is intended to get us to an IPO on November 18, 2020. We see a multi-cloud future and no public cloud has a controlling stake nor a board seat in GitLab.

[pictur]

I think it's alarming times. large companies want to monopolize the open source. I do not think that open days are waiting for good days in the future.

[informatimago]

They cannot monopolize it: anybody can always write yet another program, and distribute it with a copyleft license. Anybody can fork an existing free software, and make his own derived version, with his own features. And when I say anybody, that includes any group of persons too.

Of course, this would be truer, if we didn't talk about open source, but about freedom-giving software licenses.