My condolences, you’re now the maintainer of a popular open source project
This is one of those articles that reminds you why we should prefer the term &#x27;free software&#x27;.<p><pre><code>  &gt; First, a conclusion from the 2015 Future of Open Source survey:
  &gt; “Seventy-eight percent of respondents said their companies run 
  &gt; part or all of its operations on OSS and 66 percent said their
  &gt; company creates software for customers built on open source. This
  &gt; statistic has nearly doubled since 2010.”
</code></pre>
The 2015 survey on this website was responded to by 1500 people.   (0.0000002% of the population)<p>They don&#x27;t provide numbers for the 2010 response set.<p><pre><code>  &gt; Second, Nadia Eghbal, who is doing really great research into
  &gt; the economics of open source, calculated that “open source was
  &gt; worth at least $143M of Instagram’s $1B acquisition.”
</code></pre>
Likely wrong, but my feeling is most HN readers aren&#x27;t thinking Instagram valuation is the best way to judge the <i>value</i> of free software.<p><pre><code>  &gt; I think there are a few reasons for this Cambrian explosion of
  &gt; open source usage:
  &gt;
  &gt; 1. Open source is free to use, which means a company can spend money
  &gt; on people (aka innovation) instead of software licenses.
</code></pre>
Everything I&#x27;ve read in the past 15 years suggests that free software&#x27;s value proposition isn&#x27;t founded on capex (in fact it&#x27;s probably misleading to look at these numbers)<p><pre><code>  &gt;  2. There are now a critical mass of reliable open source
  &gt; components, which accelerates your product’s time to market.
</code></pre>
Assertions without evidence.  Plus a lot of us probably have thought a critical mass was achieved a long time ago.<p><pre><code>  &gt;  3. Open source produces quantitatively better software.
</code></pre>
Assertions without evidence, despite popularity of opinion.<p><pre><code>  &gt; 4. Near and dear to me personally, open source permits
  &gt; companies to collaborate on common problems without
  &gt; complicated business agreements.
</code></pre>
In my experience some of the most exhaustingly complicated licence discussions have been around the various free (or similar) licences on various lumps of code.   At least with non-free licenced code you know nearly precisely where you stand.<p><pre><code>  &gt; &quot;Open source&quot; now means two things.
  &gt;
  &gt; Clearly, there’s the official definition, a permissive
  &gt; license which grants certain freedoms to the end user.
</code></pre>
Clearly?   No citation provided.   Worse yet, &#x27;open source&#x27; was <i>clearly</i> a rebellion by esr against the idea of emphasising the freedoms to the end user.<p>Eric&#x27;s related rant at <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.catb.org&#x2F;esr&#x2F;open-source.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.catb.org&#x2F;esr&#x2F;open-source.html</a>  is often provided ... but read it critically and you realise there&#x27;s very little of substance there, other than negating the extant &#x27;free software&#x27; position, and a call to authority fallacy.<p><pre><code>  &gt; But when people use &quot;open source&quot; today, they’re probably
  &gt; referring to building and collaborating in public. In fact,
  &gt; they may not care about the license at all — over 80% of
  &gt; projects on Github don’t have an explicit license.
</code></pre>
80% of github projects don&#x27;t include a licence  ... qed ... &#x27;open source&#x27; equates to building and collaborating in public?<p><pre><code>  &gt; Why are so many people involved in open source? Well, for
  &gt; all of the business reasons covered before. I also think it’s
  &gt; joyful to get to work with people of a variety of cultures
  &gt; and backgrounds. Additionally, open source has given me a
  &gt; sense of permanence to my career, where the job I’ve taken
  &gt; from year to year has not.
</code></pre>
I&#x27;m empathetic, but this sounds like a plea for help.<p>More importantly it precludes the more common, and nuanced, reasons that people generally provide for why they spend so much time and energy contributing to the free software movement.<p>The rest of the post feels a bit facebooky, with lots of 3-8 word pithy aphorisms encoded in a 1024x576 pixel image.