Is Open Source Doomed?
September 6, 2024
Open source cheerleaders may need to find a new team to route for. Web developer and blogger Baldur Bjarnason describes “The Slow Evaporation of the Free/Open Source Surplus.” He notes he is joining a conversation begun by Tara Tarakiyee with the post, Is the Open Source Bubble about to Burst? and continued by Ben Werdmuller.
Bjarnason begins by specifying what has made open source software possible up until now: surpluses in both industry (high profit margins) and labor (well-paid coders with plenty of free time.) Now, however, both surpluses are drying up. The post lists several reasons for this. First, interest rates remain high. Next, investment dollars are going to AI, which “doesn’t really do real open source.” There were also the waves of tech layoffs and cost-cutting after post-pandemic overspending. Severe burnout from a thankless task does not help. We are reminded:
“Very few FOSS projects are lucky enough to have grown a sustainable and supportive community. Most of the time, it seems to be a never-ending parade of angry demands with very little reward.”
Good point. A few other factors, Bjarnason states, make organizations less likely to invest in open source:
- Why compete with AWS or similar services that will offer your own OSS projects at a dramatically lower price?
- Why subsidise projects of little to no strategic value that contribute anything meaningfully to the bottom-line?
- Why spend time on OSS when other work is likely to have higher ROI?
- Why give your work away to an industry that treats you as disposable?”
Finally, Bjarnason suspects even users are abandoning open source. One factor: developers who increasingly reach for AI generated code instead of searching for related open source projects. Ironically, those LLMs were trained on open source software in the first place. The post concludes:
Best case scenario, seems to me, is that Free and Open Source Software enters a period of decline. After all, that’s generally what happens to complex systems with less investment. Worst case scenario is a vicious cycle leading to a collapse:
- Declining surplus and burnout leads to maintainers increasingly stepping back from their projects.
- Many of these projects either bitrot serious bugs or get taken over by malicious actors who are highly motivated because they can’t relay on pervasive memory bugs anymore for exploits.
- OSS increasingly gets a reputation (deserved or not) for being unsafe and unreliable.
- That decline in users leads to even more maintainers stepping back.”
Bjarnason notes it is possible some parts of the Open Source ecosystem will not crash and burn. Overall, though, the outlook seems bleak.
Cynthia Murrell, September 6, 2024
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