The culture war at the heart of open source
(I&#x27;d like to note that most of these thoughts that follow are not directly tied to the article or aimed at Steve Klabnik; the article is good but it doesn&#x27;t seem to make an assertion about what&#x27;s right or wrong.)<p>I still hold strong that this &quot;war&quot; is getting silly. This whole thing seems so antithetical.<p>Open source is being chosen by developers and startups because it has technical benefits, it&#x27;s appealing, it attracts attention, etc. The reason why it is all of those things is exactly because of what open source <i>is</i>. If you control the monetization strictly, it&#x27;s not open source, and it loses the appeal. Simply having source <i>available</i> isn&#x27;t appealing to me. Contributing to a project like that is just free labor. I see few mutual benefits.<p>In my personal opinion, SaaS is not exploitation. Being able to do this is the point. The difference today is that there are people releasing software as open source under licenses that permit others to monetize their software... and then are shocked when they actually do it. Last time I made this argument, I mentioned Linux, and being the quintessential open source project it&#x27;s a super good example of how open source can be collectively beneficial. I stand by this, and I would presume Linus is not bothered by the massive monetization of Linux. Since that&#x27;s the point.<p>If someone wants to build proprietary software, please do. The open source community can survive without another NoSQL database, I&#x27;m sure, and nobody will blame you. Few will do this, though, because many want to eat their cake and have it too. Whatever. In any case, please don&#x27;t attempt to conflate &quot;open source&quot; with &quot;shared source&quot; in the meantime. I&#x27;ve said it before and I will say it again: You aren&#x27;t saving open source. You are saving your profit model. And nobody blames you for that. I say this as a continued user of Caddy, Redis, etc.<p>Disclaimer: I&#x27;m an employee of Google, these are my personal opinions and not those of my employer.<p>P.S.: Steve, I&#x27;m really curious about that Gender bit. Are you going to clarify your thoughts on that?