<story><title>Open Source Is Winning, and Now It&apos;s Time for People to Win Too</title><url>https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/open-source-winning-and-now-its-time-people-win-too</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>partiallypro</author><text>Unpopular opinion...but imo open source has, completely by accident, caused the centralization of the internet. Because software licensing is less profitable, we&amp;#x27;ve since gotten all the big software makers into the server game, and their infrastructure becomes what you are licensing instead. Their infrastructure could be based on something OpenSource, but you might still be vendor locked into AWS, Azure, GCS, etc.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mythz</author><text>Turned out to be a very popular opinion [1] that OSS having commoditized the cost to develop Software to near zero that the primary benefactors are the major cloud hosting providers who are able to extract rent from hosting OSS software. Which are using their consolidation of wealth to build out their billion dollar infrastructure moats ensuring barriers of entry that no-one else will be able to participate in.&lt;p&gt;The richer and more powerful the Cloud Hosting Oligopolies get, the worse off it will be for Indie OSS developers who will be unable to compete with their network lock-in, paid resources, marketeers + advocates, advertising, etc.&lt;p&gt;What&amp;#x27;s worse is if you release OSS software the Cloud Vendor network monopolies naturally stand to make more revenue then any attempts in trying to host it yourself, making it impossible to compete against given the more effort you put into development, the more revenue you will create for them which they in-turn can use to fund their competing efforts.&lt;p&gt;Personally I&amp;#x27;m all for companies like Redis Labs, Elastic, Confluent and MongoDB who realize the threat and start distributing their future investments under &amp;quot;OSS free that&amp;#x27;s free for everyone else except major cloud vendors&amp;quot; to force the cloud oligopolies to revenue share back some of the money they&amp;#x27;ve made from hosting their software. Hopefully we&amp;#x27;ll see more of OSS follow which will force them to implement a system for revenue sharing back to OSS software they&amp;#x27;re getting paid to host.&lt;p&gt;Even when they&amp;#x27;re unable to license it they still have the luxury to sit back and wait to see what software becomes popular and proves itself in the market before instructing their army of paid devs to clone it as they&amp;#x27;ve done with their MongoDB clones that implement the MongoDB protocol (also requires a lot more effort to create something with constant customer feedback + iteration, then it is to clone it). Thanks to the integration with their ecosystem ensures their investments will have better ROI and popularity then the original authors could ever have.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=19431444&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=19431444&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Open Source Is Winning, and Now It&apos;s Time for People to Win Too</title><url>https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/open-source-winning-and-now-its-time-people-win-too</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>partiallypro</author><text>Unpopular opinion...but imo open source has, completely by accident, caused the centralization of the internet. Because software licensing is less profitable, we&amp;#x27;ve since gotten all the big software makers into the server game, and their infrastructure becomes what you are licensing instead. Their infrastructure could be based on something OpenSource, but you might still be vendor locked into AWS, Azure, GCS, etc.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mlinksva</author><text>Imagine universe in which open source does not exist. Would the internet be less centralized? What&amp;#x27;s the mechanism?</text></comment>