I started reading this article about Microsoft's dominance of modern software development, and I'm increasingly convinced that regulatory action may be needed.
Here's the quote: "The future of software development tooling that is being built is closed as fuck, and people seem to be okay with it because select components meet the OSI definition whilst missing the bigger picture that the compositional graph of components does not." #dev#devops#code#opensource
The omnibus article itself is here.
It's a call to arms for the open-source community, and I think it has new relevance due to the integration of AI tools into coding pipelines through the GitHub pathways.
Without regulatory oversight, we are one corporate decision to raise rents away from losing large parts of the open source ecosystem de facto, as Geoffrey notes extensively. https://ghuntley.com/fracture/
For a long time now, I've been wondering if governments should ultimately step up to the plate and fund open source software to enable an open source ecosystem that is both sustainable and safe. We would be ahead on security grounds alone, given the harms and risks inherent in the ecosystem.
We were "lucky" in the 2010s because of near-zero interest rates. The asset-value-increase-supported free money meant that firms like Google an Microsoft could quietly fund a ton of OS development while not being evil and trying to take it over (although Microsoft was always low-key evil with the whole "clone language and diverge" pattern they used for twenty years now.
Now that the free money train is off the rails, tech firms need revenue. With Bing chat, Microsoft is trying to coup Google at search using GPT in its offering out of the box and by transparently gamifying search to drive internal metrics so the Bing team can make good on their coup promise. It's been worth +300 billion in market cap to Microsoft and -100 billion to Google so far.
With tightening belts, the commitment of tech titans to fund no-strings open source development or even participate in it as an honest actor is waning, and the whole ecosystem is threatened.
Don't get me wrong: Microsoft's UX teams are the best there is, and they have raised the bar for everyone in terms of usability. We all benefit from innovation anywhere. I love me a good benevolent dictatorship, they can do a lot of good.
But I can also read the tea leaves. The free everything community that we have grown up with in the 2010s was ultimately paid for by expectations of growth, and those growth expectations came ultimately from zero interest rate policies by governments. So you paid for it in the government's drive to restore growth at any cost.
Now houses are unaffordable virtually everywhere, and many economic actors are seeing the downside of zero interest rate policies.
The tech boom is deflating, and open source will feel it, too. Licensing is a very strong power if you have the lawyers to prosecute it, and we in the open content community should begin to think through how we can make our community - who is doing amazing things for very, very cheap - can be made sustainable.
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