> You should be on board if you want Open Source to win against proprietary software. But those companies are still doing what is, essentially, proprietary software: like the proprietary software companies of the 80s, they very much consider the software being produced as their exclusive property. They still intend to capture all the value that derives from it. And thanks to copyright aggregation or permissive licensing, they still can change the license any time they want. So it’s still proprietary: they just choose, for now, to release their software under an Open Source license.

This brings to mind two questions: why does open source need to "win" (why can't there be multiple options) and re: things being produced as their exclusive property, what is the issue with this? They did the work to make the thing, therefore it's their property (unless they choose to release it otherwise).

Sadly, a lot of the arguments I hear around OSS sound like the "you didn't build those roads" argument when they should be "thank you for making your work accessible to me." It's no surprise that most OSS work gets abandoned due to developer burnout when "open source" is often misinterpreted as "100% free for me to do literally anything I want, whenever I want, and you're evil if you disagree with my entitlement to your efforts."

The ideology around OSS has serious NPD vibes. It's worth people revisiting Rich Hickey's "Open Source is Not About You" [1].

[1] https://gist.github.com/richhickey/1563cddea1002958f96e7ba95...

The author completely neglects the "non-open-source/open collaboration" quadrant as if it didn't exist. Best examples are games with easily accessible modding communities. While development is centralised and you definitely don't have any kind of open source licence, collaboration is generally open in terms of releasing mods to the game.

They also bash the Commons Clause purely using the definition (zero mention on why they think the restrictions are bad, it's just handled with "not OSI" and that's it)

Of course this position can be understood better when you look at who are sponsoring this organisation. (in a short way, opensource.net is an OSI front, and OSI is lobbied heavily by the software industry)

Single-vendor is not proprietary because I can fork VSCode and I can't fork Microsoft Word.

Single-vendor open source is the balance some companies have found between sharing their software with the community and capturing the value of their employees' labor. It's less free than openly developed FOSS and more free than proprietary software. It's unrealistic to expect all software to be openly developed FOSS with today's economics; the hundreds of thousands of contributors to single-vendor open source projects all need rent money, and you can't build a business on providing the open-source backend for AWS managed services.

Companies will move up and down the freedom gradient depending on their needs at any given time. Sometimes they do it well, and sometimes they handle it in a kludgy and myopic way (I'm looking at you, HashiCorp). LinkedIn open-sourced Kafka, and Elastic restricted their license for ElasticSearch. Software doesn't always go from "more free" to "less free."

If it is, then Open Source has won, right? And we can disband the OSI, right?

I suspect that's not the message they intended to send.

(I read the article, btw.)

As the author of source available software, this article merely seems to be screeching from big players that they can't exploit some software anymore.

The article itself is rather, hmm... Melodramatic? Not sure that's the right word, but it is close. That said, the overall idea that "open source" projects that are controlled by a single vendor have problems is true.

I think that having a for-profit company controlling an open source project is a major conflict of interest. Open source does not always result in profit. Often the opposite. And I think we've seen the results of that with all the different open source projects that have re-licensed into pretend open source licenses.

There are ways to run open source projects that support both the open source culture, and allow for for-profit companies to make a profit. But most of those ways mean allowing competition. Which is where the single vendor project conflict of interest becomes apparent. Yeah, big tech will leech off any successful project. Yes, that means less money for the "single vendor". Yes, that is not fair. But I'd say re-licensing is worse than leeching, so...

The other side effect of "single vendor" I've run into a lot, is simply that their paid options are always priced for organizations with very deep pockets. So the smaller orgs (and individual developers) that jumped on the bandwagon early because the project was open source (and they actually could jump on the bandwagon), have no chance at supporting the project. And end up have to find something else because the project stops supporting open source.

I somehow still don’t get what single vendor open source code is, even after reading the article.

Is it code that is open source but the license says “no forking.” And maybe the license says they are allowed to fork it and chance the license to proprietary?

Or is it code that is open source, but nobody has ever bothered to fork it. With the potential spin that sometimes code is just so specific that nobody would bother forking it because it is super tied to some platform or hardware.

The former, that just seems like looming proprietary code. The latter, I dunno, can’t blame people for implementing niche projects I guess.

I wonder how one would view late 90s gcc in this light? Single vendor compiler that made everybody so mad they finally forked it and basically restarted with a new team.

For what it's worth, speaking in terms of free software rather than open source (since the author of the featured article might be receptive to the moral ideals of free software rather than merely the business-pragmatic ideals of open source): if the vendor lets you download the source code of free software already in your possession without an excessive burden (one valid option being letting you download a zip/tar.gz of the entire necessary codebase; one invalid option being forcing you to copy files one at a time) then the software is free software regardless of whether the vendor accepts any third-party contributions.

FOSDEM 2024 talk by the author, https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-2190-sing...

> explain the origin and value of the permissionless innovation that we currently all enjoy, and reassert the virtue of software developed in open collaboration, compared to single-vendor software

This article is dramatically simplifying the state of software markets.

>Single vendor isn’t a reasonable way to do Open Source and resist evil proprietary software. It’s just another way to do proprietary software.

>proprietary software is not evil. It’s just inferior.

Based on these statements the author would have you believe there is no value in commercial/proprietary software and we should just never develop it. All software should be open and collaborative. That is obviously silly. While open source software is great, many incredible software innovations and truly valuable software comes from proprietary companies. In fact, these companies are typically the ones that make the large open source ecosystem possible by making massive donations in developer hours as well as cash to orgs like linux foundation.

The interesting discussion is in whether commercial software should be closed source or source available with restrictions. The days of building propriety, VC backed infrastructure software with a traditional permissible license are over and likely never coming back.

My quaint dinosaur view is that all of the single-vendor stuff I can think of is aimed at data farming at a scale that is itself presumptively evil. The need to do what these pieces of software do at the scale they do them is a filter for the kind of organization you get becoming involved with them.

I read this article and feel no further informed on this topic. Avoid.

> On one axis, the license used is either Open Source (as defined by the Open Source Initiative (OSI), which I would summarize as coming with all freedoms necessary to enable the permissionless innovation I mentioned earlier) or it’s not. On the other axis is the development model: it’s either developed as a commons, by a community working in open collaboration, or it’s developed (and ultimately owned) by a single entity.

Is SQLite "the new proprietary"? It seems to fit the description perfectly: very permissive license, very closed development process.

And this is why we need copyleft.