this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2024
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This is probably a minority opinion, but I think OSS prospers most when there is corporate muscle behind it.
A company with paid engineers that puts engineering time into fixing and bettering open source software can possibly be a good company.
Closed source ends up being the worst of all worlds. If there is an issue, you're stuck waiting for someone else to possibly fix it. At least in open source, either you can try to fix it, or you can pay someone else to try to fix it.
At the end of the day, I think a lot of the Linux success actually comes down to this.
It's much better to fund projects using a nonprofit foundation. There are plenty of examples of this. The problem with corporate muscle behind it s that development priorities end up being driven by the corporations doing the funding. In some cases, like the Linux kernel, there can be enough alignment so that it's not problematic. However, Chrome is an excellent example of how corporate backed open source goes horribly wrong.
Like I said your mileage may vary, also even a good business like Steam can turn bad over time. That's the fundamental problem with privately owned businesses. A lot of utterly deplorable companies today started out with the best intentions.
That relies on donations which may or may not come. I understand in a perfect world that makes sense, but in the real world even those foundations often rely on corporate muscle. Without that enterprise money, I'm not sure how they'd stand.
Aren't you basically just describing FOSS and framing it as a complaint? Valve for example has a vested interest in improving their software stack, and they do just that by donating both money and engineers to various projects. If these open source projects did not exist, they would have to spend the same or even more money on a proprietary licensed alternative, or to develop their own solution.