To give some context about my age, I got exposed to the Internet at the university when it was common to fill a 1.44 MB floppy disk with downloaded “shareware” from FTP sites in about an hour or so from the student computer center.
I got overwhelmed with the ideas of this decentralized network, where connections were voluntarily built by actors like universities, research institutes, governmental and non-governmental institutes. RSA had been just “liberated” by Phil Zimmerman and he was going from trial to trial and got bad mainstream media and the hacker scene wore shirts with his face.
Linux was going mainstream and I spent endless hours installing and configuring RedHat and S.u.S.E distributions on my Intel 486 machine at home. I was reading publications from Richard Stallman and became a fanboy of the GPL. I was convinced that this freedom and cooperation between clever people turns society into a better one, more resilient to centralized power.
Fast forward some years and we see national firewalls, Snowden revelations and some countries making “strong” end-to-end encryption illegal. The backbone was built from tax money in most countries, still it is privately owned. People are using google, gmail, youtube, facebook, twitter and other walled gardens like medium.com and I cannot (easily) ssh into my router from the WiFi on the train, because “Internet access” is defined as dns(udp/53) + http(tcp/80) + https(tcp/443) for the public access points.
But there is another strange artifact: Microsoft open-sourced the interesting part of their .NET framework. Linux Foundation and Apache Software Foundation are sponsored and steered by huge multinational companies. They are not fighting open-source any more, but are paying thousands of developers to toss millions of lines of code into several time-tested open-source projects.
Do not get me wrong, but this is a different open-source community than those people doing vanity projects as a hobby after work which I admired some twenty years ago. I actually went on reading open-source code to learn new tricks and get ideas for my work. And it was readable. People working on a payroll have different goals. They are not being paid for ironing out the last wrinkles in maintainability. Or they are not spending timeless hours discussing design trade-offs that had to be made on IRC, the project wiki or a mailing list.
This is not person-to-person open-source, but company-to-company open-source. It works, but only if you have the money to afford several developers on a team investigating a shiny new technology for months before they understand what that piece of software is capable of and dismiss it. I must admit I do love the freedom of choice. 20 years ago I could not dream about something as big as npm, the central marketplace for Javascript libraries. Or cargo for rust. Or maven for Java. Or… Or… Still, deciding whether to learn and use Angular, Ember, React or Vue became impossible for a small developer team. It is a religious war, because it is so expensive to make an informed decision.
And I am left with nostalgia, longing for trusted relations to fellow developers. Also, I revealed some hidden frustrations about myself: why I cannot do the same things alone that a company with 50 developers can. In my free time. As a hobby.
