[cangeroo]

Unfortunately, I don't understand what this article is trying to say, but I respect the author and made a diligent attempt.

Yes, open source is now common place.

But I sometimes wonder if it, too, is a market failure, in that many projects are governed by, or mostly funded by, single entities, e.g. Facebook (React), Google (Flutter, Go, Android), Docker (Docker), and so on...

Is C++ a better example of open source, with broad industry contributions?

What about WebAssembly? Major browsers (Chromium) can pretty much refuse to support some functionality, and that'll be the end of that. The power centralization has severe consequences for openness.

I'm not convinced that community/industry-driven public-good type of FOSS will continue to flourish. If anything, I worry that we'll end up with a bunch of "open source" projects that in reality have built-in limitations (or as the author said "a carefully engineered bottleneck"), that prevent truly open adoption (like HashiCorp preventing contributions that compete with their commercial edition feature offering).

[inhumantsar]

I don't think it really matters who governs or funds open source projects as long as they're under a permissive license. Those companies can't control the software if others are able to fork it and part ways with the company.

The important part though is that people have the freedom to use, modify, and learn from them. Imho it would only be market failure if that freedom disappears.

[cangeroo]

Yes, in theory.

In practice, however, the source code can be overwhelmingly large or complex, e.g. Chromium.

And yes, even if you're blocked from contributing to the project, you could 'just' fork it. But it would be incredibly hard to maintain a fork, and to get users to use/support it.

It is therefore important to distinguish between community-owned projects (e.g. Linux Foundation) that aim to be inclusive, and those that are privately-owned, and can easily have political behaviors (e.g. intentionally ignoring contributions, e.g. VSCode, because it goes against your interests, e.g. .NET, Copilot, etc.).

[Eliah_Lakhin]

> Imho it would only be market failure if that freedom disappears

There is nothing inherently wrong with Facebook making React open-source. React undoubtedly benefits everyone.

However, the issue lies in the fact that this practice doesn't create a true "market". Facebook has made a relatively small and insignificant portion of their source code available for free, which doesn't impact their business significantly. Meanwhile, they have encouraged thousands of programmers around the world to develop React extensions and publish them for free under similar terms. For an individual programmer, unlike Facebook, this means giving away 100% of their work effort without charge. While this benefits society in terms of knowledge sharing, it almost always financially benefits businesses and big tech companies.

Overall, this model creates a situation where most programmers end up doing part of the job for businesses for free, and they have to earn their living by working for these companies as well.

This model exploits programmers' labor in two interconnected ways. Simultaneously, there is widespread public promotion that publishing under OSS licenses is moral and the only way to go.