![]() ![]() ![]() They're definitely "getting their way" but: I actually think google is a good illustration of the full spectrum of OSS projects. > if companies have their way they'll do the same to any captive open source project, turing any public parts into nothing but minimum viable bait to try and get people to pay for something. But I think that's distinct from the OSS project-capture problem. Wrt (b) I do think that when google displays content on the search page in a way that stops most users from continuing on to the page from which the information was sourced, that does seem effectively extractive. Wrt (a), I think site owners that had useful content weren't for the most part pushed to remove it, but were often pushed to pad it to the point that it feels less valuable to users (like recipe sites where every recipe is 12 paragraphs of prose before the actual recipe, IIUC), so I think this still fits in with the "dilution" framing, rather than removing valuable material in a way that excludes others from its use. If you're making a different kind of assertion, please elaborate on it. > Like google has strip mines the internet and left a toxic pit behindĬan you clarify what you mean? I think there's a sense in which sometimes people say that google ruined the internet b/c (a) their prominence and their algorithm induced the creation of awful content farms, and (b) they pulled ad revenue away from some businesses that create content leaving us with a more impoverished web experience. Both of those were critical ingredients in the project getting to its current well-funded state. YMMV )ĮDIT: Probably obvious, but I should note that this didn't all just "happen"-there were (and are) extremely passionate people on both sides of the sale and in the project's open source community who worked hard & advocated loudly for years, ensuring that both the nonprofit built a compelling product and the open source project thrived. TL DR: Start off as a nonprofit, build a valuable product, sell the product, and then use the money to continue the nonprofit. The online course business is edx.org, the buyer was 2U, the source code is Open edX and the nonprofit started as edX Inc and was renamed to Axim after the sale. It kept the copyright to the open source code, and the remaining staff now use the proceeds of the deal as an endowment to pusue the original philanthropic mission, which includes being a sort of core team for that open source code. The project started as nonprofit with both a business goal (sustain itself by selling online courses) and a philanthropic vision (essentially: increase education access by disrupting the degree market & also open sourcing the code).Ī decade later, the nonprofit sold the entire online course business, its brand, and most of its staffing to a for-profit company. Happy to share, although I don't know how applicable the journey is to most. Communities should evaluate whether diluted support is worthwhile, or at what point it should be considered abusive, or at least separated into distinct companion projects. If the choice is between project development being discontinued at time T with core feature set F, vs continued through time T+K with extended feature set F + G + H where H is proprietary, but G is not, users who won't use the proprietary features may still benefit from G, and are still better off with continued development - but we must acknowledge that it's at a slower rate than if H had not been added. The issue of adding proprietary features to OSS projects I think we should acknowledge as diluting value, not subtracting it. To the contrary, building off the OSS ecosystem can make it healthier, if for no other reason than they are cultivating more engineers that know how to use these tools. "Extraction" in the literal sense of pulling something out, when dealing with physical material means that others cannot have what you've pulled out it's gone.Ī company (VC-backed or otherwise) that starts from OSS tools (operating system, languages, build tools, application frameworks, etc) to build their own offering doesn't (need to) remove that value in a way which excludes anyone else from enjoying it. Strip-mining is a loaded term because it uses destructive means to acquire exclusive access to physical resources, in a way which leaves literally less than there was before, and which can be literally lethal to a literal biological ecosystem and literally toxic to physically proximal human communities. The scale is for extraction.Īs with so many things, I find this analysis suffers for using metaphors about the physical world with software. > From this perspective most VC investments aren’t about creating value but about strip-mining FLOSS projects and communities. A majority of the value created by modern software ultimately comes from free and open source software. ![]()
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