Reading 08: The Magic Cauldron

Listen, I don’t know any more, okay? I don’t understand economics. I’ve tried. It hasn’t worked. Money is fake, we all know this, but we can’t accept it because then everything goes down the toilet and we’re screwed.

I can’t say for sure what magic is behind the continued success of the open-source community. I don’t know whether it still makes sense, because a lot of things in this world don’t. I personally love not having to pay for things, but I have thought myself whether or not that kind of business model is sustainable. Maybe it’s not and maybe open source will crash soon. Maybe we’ll all have to start watching ads before we can clone other people’s repos. Maybe soon github users will be asking us to “like and subscribe” with every commit message.

But the question of how we haven’t gotten to that point yet is definitely interesting. If I had to guess, I’d say that it’s because the driving force behind the open source community is passion. Open source has sustained itself to this day because people feel that they need certain features for certain products, and when they see that no one else is working on it they roll up their sleeves and do it themselves. And when enough people with that mindset come together sometimes they make really great software. The donation of people’s time is extremely valuable to open source, and it’s obviously the reason the community can keep going. For example, the open-source fiction publishing website Archive of Our Own is maintained entirely by volunteers, and it just got nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Related Work and achieved their goal in their maintenance fundraiser. Although this a great example of people contributing an open source project in their free time and getting much-deserved recognition for it, but that doesn’t mean that this kind of model will be sustainable forever.

I do think that ESR made a good point about how it still benefits business to have the software itself open source as it “sets up conditions for independent peer review,” while still allowing the business to charge for services. While there are certainly some companies that depend on keeping the actual software secret, this idea of using the wisdom of the crowd to maintain enterprise-level software seems like a sustainable way to keep up this culture of open-source software while still generating some kind of revenue. But then, of course, everything is still coming back down to money, which is definitely pretty sad. I think I just wish capitalism wasn’t a thing. Or was less of a bad thing. I don’t know, okay? Like I said, I have said, I don’t understand economics or open source. Obviously I have benefited for years from open source without really contributing time or money to it, and I don’t know what life would be like if certain projects started disappearing behind paywalls.