Free and Open Source Software–and Other Market Failures
The “F” in FOSS was never silent.
In retrospect, it seems clear that open source was not so much the goal itself as a means to an end, which is freedom: freedom to fix broken things, freedom from people who thought they could clutch the source code tightly and wield our ignorance of it as a weapon to force us all to pay for and run Windows Vista.
But the FOSS movement has won what it wanted, and no matter how much oldsters dream about their glorious days as young revolutionaries, it is not coming back; the frustrations and anger of IT in 2024 are entirely different from those of 1991.
One very big difference is that more people have realized that source code is a liability rather than an asset. For some, that realization came creeping along the path from young teenage FOSS activists in the late 1990s to CIOs of BigCorp today. For most of us, I expect, it was the increasingly crushing workload of maintaining legacy code bases. But the thing that will convince anyone is that one single server still runs OS version N-4, because we have not yet found out why it stops working when we attempt to upgrade it.
But we can figure it out, and we will figure it out—because we have the source code. We have all 562,227 lines of Perl5 source code for it.