On “Open” Distros, Open Source, and Building a Company
It's interesting that the HN collective results seems to be complaining about the letter from either party.<p>When Amazon wrote their letter, the [HN response](<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19363961" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19363961</a>) seemed to tip towards not liking what Amazon had to say or was doing.<p>When ES writes effectively a response, the initial comments don't like ES's response or what they're doing either.<p>It may be that the collective HN vibe is critical no matter what. But also maybe "we" in aggregate legitimately don't like either option given.<p>I know open source devs need to make money somehow. I also wish there was a way to do it that was open source. I'm not sure there is. I'm not sure what it means for the continued viability of open source.<p>In the original period of open source, people generally worked on open source on the clock at their existing jobs, a building tools they needed for that job, a job not dedicated to that particular product but to getting something done that product helped with. People were getting paid to write open source, but it wasn't by "productizing" it. The results were still shared freely.<p>(this is how/where apache httpd, for one, came from; people with jobs who needed an http server writing one on the clock, even though their job was not "writing an http server." They needed an http server to accomplish what was needed for their employers, but their employers had no desire or capacity to be in the business of selling an http server. Why not collaborate on one we can all use?)<p>But those days are gone, software has just gotten _so much more complex_ and time-consuming to develop. The open source software we have and need can't be developed in someone's "spare" (even on-the-clock spare) time.  Some open source is still written by people working for a large employer, who pay them to be <i>dedicated</i> to that product. But we see the perils of that when an employer decides "wait, why aren't we making money selling this? Why are we contributing our employee's time to it?" (thanks Oracle).<p>So that leaves people trying to productize it one way or another. It is not clear to me how to have a healthy open source ecosystem in that market environment. I don't think "proprietary layer on top" is actually good for open source, especially if it's gonna lead (naturally) to rejecting contributions from outside to add those same features as open source (why would we want to spend time working with a contributor to make the feature solid, when we _already wrote it_, and when accepting the contribution would _harm our business model_ because that feature is what we want to charge for?), and then resistance to the "right to fork" which I consider the fundamental basis of open source freedom.