You miss the point. "Open source is not a business model" but also the OSI has made it increasingly clear it doesn't want it to even be possible to make a business model on top of open source software.
That means companies will be, regardless of the desire otherwise, forced into proprietary models, and proprietary development will continue to be the most effective way to put food on the table.
Open source will forever be a niche volunteer thing plus some predatory abuse by monopolies because the OSI is not interested in open source being the default way to make software.
>the OSI has made it increasingly clear it doesn't want it to even be possible to make a business model on top of open source
The OSI's definition of open source was worked out in the 1990s and has changed almost not at all. That stability in the meaning of "open source" (or "OSI-approved", if you want to be precise) is a good thing. If you want to experiment with software licenses that (like open source) don't lock the user in or that (like open source) allow forking, but that are better than open source at allowing the maintainer to earn money, then please do -- just don't call your experiment open source. Coin another term.
It is not some awful tragedy that those who want to experiment with software licenses cannot use the reputation of the "open source" label to market their offerings.
Parenthetically, "nice volunteer thing" is not an accurate description of AOSP, Chromium, Firefox and most Linux desktop software.
All exploitative projects entirely funded and mostly operated by a monopoly found violating the law or awaiting judgment for such in almost every single first world jurisdiction.
Also neither AOSP nor Chromium are used in the real world in practice, over 99.99% of users use proprietary forks.
In other words, thank you for supporting my statement entirely.
>Also neither AOSP nor Chromium are used in the real world in practice, over 99.99% of users use proprietary forks.
I didn't think it needed spelling out, but OK: GrapheneOS would not exist if AOSP didn't have an open-source license. Electron, Microsoft Edge and Brave browser wouldn't exist if Chromium hadn't been released on open-source terms.
Surely it is not your claim that because Google has done bad things, nothing that Google has ever done has ever been positive?
Going back to your previous comment, where you write, "the OSI is not interested in open source being the default way to make software."
Do you actually believe that if the OSI had been smarter or more ethical or had listened to your advice (sent back in time perhaps) then open source might have become the default way to make software?
I consider it obvious that that was never a possibility.
OK, my previous comment was clumsy (and I concede that most of the software on the machine I'm using to write this is open source). What I meant to do with my previous comment was point out that my interlocutor seems to believe that the situation in software is just terrible, which implies that if things had gone different, it could be a lot better. But I'm not able to imagine a realistic evolution in which software ends up in a much better place than the current status quo.
it's been much worse in the past, so we know it can be much worse. probably at the time it was hard to imagine the evolution to where we are now, so maybe it can get much better too. certainly i had no idea 30 years ago where we'd be now
OK, then let's focus on the fact that my interlocutor seems to believe he can see how to make it much better than it is now, which is very different from its being possible, but none of us in this conversation can see how to do it with any confidence.
i think it's reasonable for him to try different things to try to make it better, but i share your lack of confidence in his proposed course of action, particularly since he seems to have such a hazy understanding of what has been tried already ;)
> GrapheneOS would not exist if AOSP didn't have an open-source license
First, Graphene OS is used by... less than 0.01% of Android users, so again, thank you for confirming my point. Furthermore, GrapheneOS is harmful for the ecosystem. Similar to VSCode, proprietary services are essentially gated out from alternatives to the default proprietary Android. And the big problem with Graphene and other AOSP forks, is they waste developer effort while protecting monopolies. Every developer-hour wasted on Graphene is a developer-hour not spent on a truly open mobile OS, and that's sad.
> Electron
We could live without it. Nobody needs a whole browser to ship a single page app. But also...
> Microsoft Edge and Brave browser wouldn't exist
So remember that whole part where I said 99.99% of use is the proprietary forks? Edge is, of course, completely proprietary. (Brave is just a cryptocurrency grift, will focus on Edge here.) Microsoft is a monopoly in several respects still, and Edge adds several anti-features like ads on the start page and shopping "features" which collect your shopping behavior. Furthermore, the switch to Chromium for Edge makes the Internet ecosystem worse. Because one of the largest independent web rendering engines disappeared overnight... further contributing to Google's monopoly stranglehold over the web ecosystem, and it's ability to essentially force standards bodies to comply with it's choices or become irrelevant.
> if the OSI had been smarter or more ethical
I think time travel conjecture is sort of pointless, obviously there are dozens of conditions on when good licenses got approved, what projects adopted them, etc. But if SSPL was approved, as the viral copyleft license it is, less open alternatives would evaporate overnight. Without the risk Amazon would lift your product, wrap it in a proprietary platform, and simultaneously undercut you on cost, I think at least for SaaS, there'd be very little reason for a business to launch without providing their code on fair terms.
All that being said, the discourse around the OSI and open source is toxic enough and compromised enough, I think shifting to new terms is ideal anyways. I saw https://fair.io/ "fair source" recently, which seems quite reasonable, though I'd love to also see an expression of it more focused around labor and sustainability in addition to just business case. Developers deserve to get paid for their work, and I feel the primary goal of open source at this point is to cultivate free labor for the tech monopolies backing the OSI.
the osi was founded by people who built their businesses on open-source software, with whom i talked about it in detail at the time. despite entrenched resistance from, among others, proprietary software vendors and the iranian government, open source became the default way to make software about ten years ago. in large part that's because it's much better at limiting predatory abuse from monopolies than proprietary software is, so large users commonly choose open-source software even when proprietary alternatives look better on paper
i think you're missing not only the point but actually reality as a whole
That means companies will be, regardless of the desire otherwise, forced into proprietary models, and proprietary development will continue to be the most effective way to put food on the table.
Open source will forever be a niche volunteer thing plus some predatory abuse by monopolies because the OSI is not interested in open source being the default way to make software.