thanks, these are some really interesting thoughts. some comments:
For every example of someone making a great outsized contribution (Bitcoin, Linux), arenāt there thousands of examples of people starting small projects that never get finished or attain wide adoption?
i think this is true. but i think itās true for most career choices /ā endeavours that they only make sense for people who have the right skill set, drive, personality and so on.
i found some estimates for the eu (pdf) -- around 8% of around 3.1 million programmers are involved in open source, however spending on average less than 10% of their time on open source. iām guessing this more or less follows something like the pareto principle, where only a fairly small number of these spend significant time and effort on open source (the sort of time and effort thatās needed to create a project of significant ambition from scratch).
You seem to be saying that FOSS software development is helpful because it will advance overall economic growth (moreso than software development at a private corporation).
i think i think itās good more because it enables technological development and innovation than because it aids economic growth.
that same eu report seems to think it can be both:
Starting at the generic level of the impact on GDP in the EU including the UK, a significant and large impact of up to ā¬100 billion per year by OSS contributions has been calculated [...] OSS can be seen [...] as a public infrastructure generating massive positive network externalities supported by the high rating by the stakeholders of the benefits of open standards and interoperability provided by the use of and the contributions to OSS. Therefore, OSS has also a further growth enhancing impact in the dimension of the previously quantified impact of the stock of technical standards. Furthermore, OSS contributions are increasing the labour productivity in the EU, which can be explained by their labour cost saving effect reported as major benefits in different surveys among companies, but also being rated as very relevant in the stakeholder survey.
next, you write:
Also, arenāt there many examples of private software projects becoming equally large and important (Microsoft, Google, etc)? [...] You seem to be saying that FOSS software development is helpful because it will advance overall economic growth (more so than software development at a private corporation). This is certainly plausible, although Iām not sureāI feel like the most of the software that I use was created by private companies rather than FOSS efforts.
this is really surprising to meāin all the projects iāve worked, i would say the majority of the infrastructureāeverything from programming languages, frameworks, libraries and so onāthat weāve used are open source. (i think platforms and tools are somewhat more likely to be proprietary, but even those are often open sourceāthink git, unix shell programs, editors, etc.) itās likely that aerospace engineering is different (more conservative?) from web/āmobile/ācrypto which is where iāve worked.
(i am talking about the non-surface layers of the tech stack of courseāthe stuff thatās built on top is obviously proprietary.)
At the same time, the FOSS movement has been around for a while, and it has not taken over the world (I suspect most software is still developed privately), so it must be naturally limited in some ways.
here is the introduction of an ieee software issue that literally opens with the sentence āOpen source software has conquered the software world.ā:
You can see it nearly everywhere, from Internet infrastructure to mobile phones to the desktop. In addition to that, although many OSS practices were viewed with skepticism 20 years ago, several have become mainstream in software engineering today: from development tools such as Git to practices such as modern code reviews. In the programmer community, OSS has become so prevalent that some companies now expect potential employees to have an active GitHub profile that showcases their OSS contributions. [...] OSS has spread its philosophy well beyond software engineering and inspired many other movements and initiatives, such as open innovation, open hardware, open government, open content (e.g., Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap), and open educational resources. Even the way researchers publish their research has changed, with many attempting to have their publications available under open access and following open science principles.
though to be clear, i agree that foss is limitedāthere is certainly space for proprietary software, mainly in creating (non-programmer-)user-facing applications, where for-profit firms are better at identifying and fulfilling customer needs.
Why does the FOSS movement arise in the first place? [...] Modular software can build upon other pieces of modular software, like knowledge, so it would be socially beneficial if almost all software was FOSS. But there are usually few private incentives for software to be FOSS, since you could always try to make a buck by having the software be proprietary and charging for it. The FOSS movement seems to have evolved as a way to partially correct for that imbalanceāto provide social incentives that make up for the lack of financial compensation intrinsic to FOSS development.
that is interestingāi think thereās probably a competitive advantage to foss, where people are much more likely to use it all other things equal, it being free, introspectable, extensible, etc.
thanks, these are some really interesting thoughts. some comments:
i think this is true. but i think itās true for most career choices /ā endeavours that they only make sense for people who have the right skill set, drive, personality and so on.
i found some estimates for the eu (pdf) -- around 8% of around 3.1 million programmers are involved in open source, however spending on average less than 10% of their time on open source. iām guessing this more or less follows something like the pareto principle, where only a fairly small number of these spend significant time and effort on open source (the sort of time and effort thatās needed to create a project of significant ambition from scratch).
i think i think itās good more because it enables technological development and innovation than because it aids economic growth.
that same eu report seems to think it can be both:
next, you write:
this is really surprising to meāin all the projects iāve worked, i would say the majority of the infrastructureāeverything from programming languages, frameworks, libraries and so onāthat weāve used are open source. (i think platforms and tools are somewhat more likely to be proprietary, but even those are often open sourceāthink git, unix shell programs, editors, etc.) itās likely that aerospace engineering is different (more conservative?) from web/āmobile/ācrypto which is where iāve worked.
(i am talking about the non-surface layers of the tech stack of courseāthe stuff thatās built on top is obviously proprietary.)
here is the introduction of an ieee software issue that literally opens with the sentence āOpen source software has conquered the software world.ā:
though to be clear, i agree that foss is limitedāthere is certainly space for proprietary software, mainly in creating (non-programmer-)user-facing applications, where for-profit firms are better at identifying and fulfilling customer needs.
that is interestingāi think thereās probably a competitive advantage to foss, where people are much more likely to use it all other things equal, it being free, introspectable, extensible, etc.