The Value of Open Source Software

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4693148

by ksec • 2 years ago

36 23 2 years ago

papers.ssrn.com

Open source is the very worst thing currently going on because it is so incredibly exploitative, it's far more exploitative than any actual company is of the workers who work at the company.

Even the people who are getting paid in open source are getting massively underpaid to do it compared to how much the people who are using their code are making, it's nothing compared to the power that is accreted by the people who have co-opted that work thanks to the open source model. And then mark zuckerberg gets to define how the internet works despite having paid for almost none of the software that his company actually needed to make that work.

It's like feudalism or serfdom, these people did the work and got nothing for it. It's like you took the worst aspects of capitalism for workers and the worst aspects of socialism for workers and put them together, that's open source. You get no power and you get no money.

It's exploitative whether the people chose to be exploited, just because someone chooses to let you exploit them does not meant that you didn't exploit them. And for the record that's how most exploitation works; convincing people to do something that turns out to be very bad for them and very good for you, and that's exactly what the open source movement has turned out to be.

I really don't see the "we post stuff on github under a gpl2 or lgpl or apache or mit license", all that is to me now is just exploitation. You can say that there's solutions but until someone demonstrates that those solutions work, it's the standard "real communism has never been tried" argument. AGPL is the only thing that I've seen so far that's an attempt to fix these fundamentally unfair compensation practices.

yesbut3• 2 years ago

All software created by private companies should be created by worker owned enterprises so they aren't forced to hand over the lions share of profits to separate owners. Instead the employees are the owners. They decide how to use the profits collectively and democratically among themselves.

bruce5113• 2 years ago

Nothing stops like-minded employees from banding together, and forming a collective. Indeed these exist.

As you feel strongly about this, might I suggest you post an ad to find other like-minded individuals to align with and start said collective. (Seriously, I'm not being sarcastic. Collectives exist and do well.)

On the other hand you gloss over the role that owners play - perhaps because you've not been an owner? The obvious one of course being capital - developers like to be paid -while- creating, and not just "maybe later if it sells".

What you call "profit", some owners might call "return on investment". If your collective is prepared to invest time, or money, then indeed they should share in the return (if there is one.)

For better or worse, owners also have responsibilities. As much fun as collective decision making is, decisions do need to be made. What to build. When to hire. When to fire. Who to sell to. How to reach them. How much to spend reaching them. It takes a lot of right decisions to make a success, and only a couple of bad ones to sink the whole enterprise.

But, and this is my point, there are lots of models to choose, and everyone should pick thd one that suits them best. Employer or employee or man-alone. Open Source or Commercial. Hierarchical business or collective.

With software (unlike say, building roads) anything goes. Your future is the one you choose.

throwawayqqq11• 2 years ago

You are correct when taken your value definitions of compensation and power, that FOSS is exploitative but i think you miss some important aspects here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33298158

This great article depicts some "loosers" as voluntary, that simply want to have a fulfilled life. FOSS is in itself a product of passion, no exploitive sociopath could ever bootstrap this. The free accessibility of software and knowledge is what enables the FOSS enthusiast and the profiteurs alike. Reducing FOSS to the latter is a valid perspective and your concerns are reasonalbe but even if there was no exploitation/corporate use of FOSS software, i assume, the maintainers would still do their unpaid thing. The expoitation comes second and is not inherent to FOSS. I wouldnt call it "worst thing on".

Also, steven balmer disagrees with you :)

Edit: Maybe some kind of GPL-like infectious form of enterprise could be a solution, where such a non-exploitive/worker owned company is bound to prefer business partners/suppliers that adhere to it too. Just a throw-in.

rapnie• 2 years ago

i assume, the maintainers would still do their unpaid thing.

That's a broad generalization. Sure, there are pure-passion maintainers doing voluntary work and can afford that by living on savings or alongside a paid job.

samatman2• 2 years ago

Poor me, getting paid better than 99.9% of the world to provision public goods.

Why, I'm benefiting people at the 99.9999% level in the process! Clearly this is the very worst thing currently going on, because it is so incredibly exploitative.

erik_seaberg• 2 years ago

Much of this is inherently interesting self-directed development work, and there already seems to be an ample supply of people who want to do it. If you’re looking for a market that would clear better by increasing compensation, look to gaps like documentation and live support and security patching that go ignored because they aren’t fun (for nerds).

boberoni• 2 years ago

"We first estimate the supply-side value by calculating the cost to recreate the most widely used OSS once.

We then calculate the demand side value based on a replacement value for each firm that uses the software and would need to build it internally if OSS did not exist.

We estimate the supply-side value of widely-used OSS is $4.15 billion, but that the demand-side value is much larger at $8.8 trillion. We find that firms would need to spend 3.5 times more on software than they currently do if OSS did not exist."

If programming is "theory building" [1], then OSS is sharing our theories of how to program computers. It makes sense that sharing our ideas is more valuable to the aggregate economy than keeping them secret.

[1] https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf

cperciva4• 2 years ago

We then calculate the demand side value based on a replacement value for each firm that uses the software and would need to build it internally if OSS did not exist.

Presumably in the absence of OSS, companies would write far simpler software than the OSS they presently use. What fraction of the code in the Linux kernel do most users ever run?

metadat• 2 years ago

What leads you to presume company devs would be able to pull this off? Go write your own queuing solution from the ground up in real life. You'll learn it's non-trivial to cover all necessary edge cases while simultaneously avoiding tight/brittle coupling. Insane amount of work compared to dropping in battle-tested (or even modestly used) OSS, with stackoverflow/gpt solutions at your fingertips for nearly anything imaginable.

Most companies core competency is in delivering business value, which means shipping useable products and features. This most often boils down to building atop a thick stack of open-source technologies (e.g. Dropwizard, Kafka, Postgres, MySQL, Opensearch/License, the vast Java and Golang ecosystems, Python, Django, RoR, PHP, and on and on). Without that, devs would need to spend $$$ licensing privately owned solutions, or do a ton of work developing homegrown spaghetti frameworks and platforms from scratch before even being able to start considering addressing core functional use cases. This would be very bad for startups with limited runway to get off the ground.

What can be in days to weeks through OSS resources would take months to years, or costly licensing.

samatman2• 2 years ago

Why would you presume that?

There's plenty of proprietary software to test this assumption against: Microsoft sells it, Oracle sells it, IBM sells it.

Are their wares simple?

cperciva4• 2 years ago

The authors are talking about a counterfactual of companies building software internally, not buying it from a publisher.

ensignavenger• 2 years ago

There wares have to meet the needs of a diverse customer base. Custom software developed for in house use only needs to implement the features you need.

Though without OSS, I suspect a lot of companies would opt for purchasing off the shelf solutions, which would quite possibly be a worse fit than the OSS solutions.

Or, they may just go without.

bruce5113• 2 years ago

The opposite of OSS is not "write your own", it's "buy commercial".

And while (clearly) that would "cost more", the difference would be insignificant. In the sense that lots of companies already buy everything commercially, and the software budget is trivial compared to just about everything else. We buy a lot of software that we use, and our software budget is still smaller than our coffee budget.

OSS delivers many benefits, but I'd argue that "price" is not the primary one. (It just feels that way when you're a student.)

cperciva4• 2 years ago

The opposite of OSS is not "write your own", it's "buy commercial".

I agree, but that's not the counterfactual the authors considered. They asked how much it would cost for everyone to independently rewrite the same software. It's not surprising that such a ludicrous concept produced an absurd estimated value.

yjftsjthsd-h• 2 years ago

Presumably in the absence of OSS, companies would write far simpler software than the OSS they presently use.

Simpler, but also worse. Part of the beauty of sharing common code is that you only need to prevent a problem once and then it can be fixed for everyone. If you write it in-house, it's easy to say "oh it's fine, nobody will ever attack this, it'll only be used under boring conditions, we'll never hit those edge cases" which is great right up until the day when it suddenly becomes very painfully untrue.

cperciva4• 2 years ago

Simpler isn't necessarily worse. Having fewer features tends to make software more reliable and secure.

wmf• 2 years ago

Related blog post criticizing this study: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39340146

atoav• 2 years ago

One thing we now had come up three times during the past year was commercial closed source software we had in our eye or were using, where the company was bought, went bust or whatever and took their product down, ceased to do updates etc.

With open source software you at least could pick up the torch yourself or pay someone who does. A particularly bad case involves the software running on our core switches, which we now need to swap out because there won't be any updates soon.

Which is why we want everything to be open source if possible.

The Value of Open Source Software

Related Stories