I read recently Corporate Open Source is Dead by Jeff Geerling, which elaborates on the fact that is there is a noticeable pattern in corporate open source, that is turning proprietary and adding to the list of formerly open source or free software:
2024 is the year Corporate open source—or at least any remaining illusions about it—finally died.
It’s one thing to build a product with a proprietary codebase, and charge for licenses. You can still build communities around that model, and it’s worked for decades.
But it’s totally different when you build your product under an open source license, foster a community of users who then build their own businesses on top of that software, then yoink the license when your revenue is affected.
That’s called a bait-and-switch.
The list of formerly proprietary software now open source is longer, but that can be explained because often times a project that is dying commercially, becomes open source and community managed.
And someone shared in mastodon a post from a couple of years ago drones run linux: the free software movement isn’t enough by Jes Olson, that mixes probably too many things –including ethics that have been never part of free Software, and perhaps they should–.
Not a verbatim quote, I formatted the text (go and read the original post):
Groups of capital formed, and two libertarians started the open source movement as a corporate-friendly free software alternative.
And they won.
And later on:
The accidental benefits of the free software movement: a global community working asynchronously, sharing code without pay. These important, critical benefits, which were responsible for the absolute dominance of things like gcc, the gnu coreutils, and Linux - have been hopelessly devoured. All they had to do was strip away the pesky moral movement that all of these efficiency gains carried with it - and voilà. Money.
The post is very negative and defeatist and, although I don’t agree with all the points, it resonates with me in I way I wasn’t expecting: from how hard is not using non-free Software –although less today than 20 years ago–, to how the mainstream mood is aligned with the corporate view of open source –every open source project must be a product produced industrially and exploitable by businesses–.
Yes, the free Software movement was colonized and, at the end, we only have GitHub and permissive licences. And they told us we had won because “even Microsoft is doing open source”. But, did we?
I haven’t given up, yet. Like I said a year ago: write free software.