Well, it’s early, I’m caffeinated, it’s on a topic I’m interested in, here are some takes

The author’s approach feels fairly abstract and I feel this undermines his analysis.

• It’s easy enough to psychoanalyze the scarcity mindset instilled from 5,000 years of class society, but also, actual individuals who are prisoners of class society still have to pay rent.

• He ignores the collective economic and political project of building a software commons – the “pay it forward” incentive of free software is that you know future work on your code will be public in a society that otherwise places absolutely no value on this. Seems kind of weird to act like capitalism’s approach to the commons isn’t a problem.

• He ignores that companies all over the world, as long as companies have existed, have rapaciously exploited to the point of exhaustion every single common resource they can figure out how to tap into. The risk that open source as such could become untenable because all it does is create value for shareholders is very real.

• This guy dismisses literally everybody’s ideas other than his own as irrational, psychologized reactions and tbh it’s kind of gross. His critique of Richard Stallman’s essentially libertarian take on why free software would matter is fair enough – who really wants to spend time defending Stallman anyway – but he ignores that even within the FSF Stallman is just one guy and that much of GNU and most of Free Software in general is not written or maintained by Stallman.

• He also misses the exploitative dynamic – parallel to dynamics in the non-profit industrial complex and in more traditional workplaces – wherein open source software developers are guilted into maintaining core infrastructure for hundreds of software companies for free or a pittance because of everybody relying on their ever-so-important code. This is also the same tactic used against workers who might consider withholding their labor for improved working conditions – has anyone ever observed the reaction to nurses or schoolteachers going on strike? “Won’t someone please think of the patients?” “What will families do?” etc etc etc. The end result is the same – some poor person with bills to pay generates vast amounts of wealth for private capital but still barely scratches a living by.

• But he also ignores the impacts on users, who are also victims of the exploitation of open-source, when companies skimp on R&D by using someone’s spare-time volunteer project without spending a dime to make sure it’s up to par and not spending a dime to make sure it’s being adequately maintained. This is how we end up at disasters like log4j. This affects working-class people’s lives literally because they have to interact with businesses that are built on top of volunteer projects that don’t have the resources to do Q&A needed for use in production. Because, again, disturbing amounts of important or critical infra are held together by volunteer projects. Why did this guy forget this aspect of the whole discussion? What companies do with their code matters because they monopolize social production.

• Dismissively psychologizing any effort to resist exploitation within capitalism as “trauma from 5,000 years of class society” necessarily presupposes the people considering using a proprietarian framework (within an oppressive class society that violently coerces all of us into participating in a proprietarian framework to survive) are not being exploited and are not struggling to survive

• You know who else takes the perspective that they don’t care if some company makes a fuckton of money off their work and gives nothing back? Well, academics with a bit of job security seem to be fine with it, because they keep creating permissive licenses named after their institutions – MIT, BSDL, etc – that them for their work. They don’t have to directly hack it on the market like the rest of us, so they can afford to be generous.

EDIT – also, this guy co-owns a privately held company with $7.9m in annual revenue and one of their main projects is maintaining Ruby on Rails so he is explicitly speaking from a position of like, extreme privilege and does in fact appear to be being paid for open source

It’s the way of Stallman and the GPL license. Walking around with the scowl that someone might take your software, and do things with it you wouldn’t like (such as extending it without sharing those extensions). Which has just never seemed like a very appealing temperament to me. I’m not interested in making software together with people or companies who’d rather not. Who are extorted into collaboration by a software license. Maybe that worked for Linux, but it seems like a pessimistic, angry, and, frankly, counterproductive way to entice, and actually respect, people.

While I think this article raise some good points, I think he is mistaken about the GPL (Vs. MIT). The GPL was created in a time when the default was not sharing (or rather not sharing anymore), and had the purpose of nudging people back into the sharing by default mind-set. There IMHO isn’t really any bitterness in that contrary to what the (much younger) author seems to think.

This is different from today, when “open-source has won” and the default usually is sharing code (again). And I think this is largely due to the fact that GPL software has shown that this is hands-down the better development model and thus even MIT license software benefits from this indirectly these days.

Really interesting to have his insight. But I couldn’t finish it. Too long :/

We went full circle.