Open Source Changed
My journey into Open Source
In 2004, I got my first computer. Not because I “deserved” one, but because I had ruined the family computer with a rootkit and my dad did not want to deal with me doing it…again. Then a family friend introduced me to knoppix with a CD-RW disk, and my journey into Linux, open source, and learning how computers work launched.
All credit to Randall Munroe / XKCD
I quickly adopted Ubuntu as my main distro on the system. I enjoyed playing the games and learning more about the software. I dug into terminals, sudo, and eventually into customizing my operating system. Years later, I applied all that to create a complete Lord of the Rings themed gnome configuration when Gnome 3 came out. The open-source world was a playland for teenagers with limited social outlets.
As a teenager with a healthy dose of religious guilt, stealing software was not a real option so I also spent my time trying to eke out from open source what money could have bought (if I had some). Photoshop? Try Gimp. Dreamweaver? Try Notepad++. Once again, I was shown the power of open-source communities building something. Was it as elegant as the proprietary versions? Not always, but it was good enough for an amateur…whatever I was.
Other Side of the Coin
When I switched from amateur and made it into the professional world, it took all of 6 months to understand where open source can fall short of expectations with enterprise sustainability.
Warranties.
Professional services.
Support.
It is hard to call up a random, pseudo-anonymous library maintainer and complain about your enterprise at 2 AM in the morning — especially when they are not getting paid. Even if they are getting paid, unless you paid them to be on call, they are not on call for you.
That said, there are noted open-source tools that do provide limited open-source versions with access to premium add-ons or support contracts. It allows people with limited budgets to get access to quality tools and enterprises to have the reliability they need for their sustainability.
And then I got into development
Proprietary tools are great for what they are. What they usually are not is something that uniquely covers your company’s needs. The 80/20 rule is great most of the time, but sometimes that 20% of functionality you really need is worth the squeeze. This is where I have made a lot of personal career advancements.
At first, I saw proprietary tools and thought “wow, it’s amazing someone could think to put this all together” with an assumption that it was all 100% developed internally. Then I started to get into the world of frameworks, shared libraries, and registries like NPM. I also started to see how sometimes “proprietary” meant “open-source project that was reskinned, closed, and a lot more expensive.”
Source and Credit: Randall Munroe / XKCD
In response to that last concern, the open-source community created GPL 3. Software that was “free” to use, came with a mandate to make any derivative works open source as well. A very intentional IP threat to ensure that open-source software could not be used to create proprietary products off the work of the open-source contributors.
The worst was yet to be learned
Getting down to the reason I wrote this blog in the first place, I wanted to talk about recent conversions of once open-source tools to “source available” or even closed all together. You do not have to go past the first pages of Google to learn about OpenAI, Hashicorp, and others going down this path. It turns out, open-source commitment is tied to the original license holder’s intention to remain open. And money can change commitments.
Do I blame people for needing to make a profit? Not at all. I have written proprietary software and made a living doing it. I needed to do it to help support the employees and their families who were depending on us doing it successfully. However, it was clear from the outset that my work was closed source. There was never an option to go open.
The more recent “rug pulls” by large organizations feels different. Several examples spent years getting input on their tools from the community, including feature/bug/security contributions. These were critical to tool adoption and success — and the community bought into it. Now that period is over, and the contributor’s thanks is cemented in obsolescence.
So what?
Exactly. There is not much we can do about it — and I support the right to choose which method of source sharing is right for your business. However, the terminology of “open source” will forever be tainted for me in a way that I do not think I can ever trust fully again.