To make money in FOSS, build a business first

I’ve written about making money in free and open source software before, but it’s a deep topic that merits additional discussion. While previously I focused on what an individual can do in order to build a career in FOSS, but today I want to talk about how you can build a sustainable business in FOSS.

It’s a common mistake to do this the wrong way around: build the software, then the business. Because FOSS requires you to surrender your sole monetization rights, building the software first and worrying about the money later puts you at a huge risk of losing your first-mover advantage. If you’re just making...

Gmail is a huge source of spam

5× as many spam registrations on sourcehut are from gmail than from the second-largest offender.

# SELECT
  SPLIT_PART(email, '@', 2) as domain, count(*) as count
  FROM "user"
  WHERE user_type = 'suspended'
  GROUP BY domain
  ORDER BY count DESC;
          domain           | count
---------------------------+-------
 gmail.com                 |   119
 qq.com              ...


						
						Drew DeVault's blog
						

							Posted at 2021-02-25 00:00:00 | Software | read on
						
					

A great alternative is rarely fatter than what it aims to replace

This is not always true, but in my experience, it tends to hold up. We often build or evaluate tools which aim to replace something kludgy^Wvenerable. Common examples include shells, programming languages, system utilities, and so on. Rust, Zig, etc, are taking on C in this manner; so too does zsh, fish, and oil take on bash, which in turn takes on the Bourne shell. There are many examples.

All of these tools are fine in their own respects, but they have all failed to completely supplant the software they’re seeking to improve upon.1 What these projects have in common is that they expand on the ideas of...

Status update, February 2021

Salutations! It's officially a year of pandemic life. I hear the vaccine distribution is going well, so hopefully there won't be another year of this. In the meanwhile, I've been working hard on free software, what with having little else to do. However, I'm afraid I cannot tell you about most of it!

I've been working on todo.sr.ht's GraphQL API, and it's going quite well. I hope to ship a working read-only version later this month. There have been a number of bug fixes and rote maintenance work on sr.ht as well, but nothing particularly exciting. We did upgrade everything for Alpine 3.13, which went off without a...

How to make your downstream users happy

https://asciinema.org/a/nzBvuMXjUMsoewLnrbTm7E28O/embed?

There are a number of things that your FOSS project can be doing which will make the lives of your downstream users easier, particularly if you’re writing a library or programmer-facing tooling. Many of your downstreams (Linux distros, pkgsrc, corporate users, etc) are dealing with lots of packages, and some minor tweaks to your workflow will help them out a lot.

The first thing to do is avoid using any build system or packaging system which is not the norm for your language. Also avoid incorporating information into your build which relies on being in your git repo — most packagers prefer to work with tarball snapshots, or...

Use open platforms — or else

The ongoing events around /r/wallstreetbets teaches us, once again, about the value of open platforms, and the tremendous risk involved in using proprietary platforms. The economic elites who control those proprietary platforms, backed by their venture capital interests, will shut us down if we threaten them. We’re taking serious risk by casting our lot with them.

Discord, a proprietary instant messaging and VoIP platform, kicked out the /r/WSB community yesterday. They claimed it was due to spam and abuse from bots. These are convenient excuses when considered in the broader context of Discord’s conflict of interest, between its retail investor users and its wall-street investor backers. However, even if...

Open source means surrendering your monopoly over commercial exploitation

Participation in open source requires you to surrender your monopoly over commercial exploitation. This is a profound point about free and open source software which seems to be causing a lot of companies to struggle with their understanding of the philosophy of FOSS, and it’s worth addressing on its own. It has been apparent for some years now that FOSS is eating the software world, and corporations are trying to figure out their relationship with it. One fact that you will have to confront in this position is that you cannot monopolize the commercial potential of free and open source software.

The term “open source” is broadly accepted...

Spooky action at a distance

Einstein famously characterized the strangeness of quantum mechanics as “spooky action at a distance”, which, if I had to pick one phrase about physics to be my favorite, would be a strong contender. I like to relate this to programming language design: there are some language features which are similarly spooky. Perhaps the most infamous of these is operator overloading. Consider the following:

x + y

If this were written in C, without knowing anything other than the fact that this code compiles correctly, I can tell you that x and y are numeric types, and the result is their sum. I can even make an educated guess...

Elasticsearch does not belong to Elastic

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/-zRN7XLCRhc?start=2483

Elasticsearch belongs to its 1,573 contributors, who retain their copyright, and granted Elastic a license to distribute their work without restriction. This is the loophole which Elastic exploited when they decided that Elasticsearch would no longer be open source, a loophole that they introduced with this very intention from the start. When you read their announcement, don’t be gaslit by their deceptive language: Elastic is no longer open source, and this is a move against open source. It is not “doubling down on open”. Elastic has spit in the face of every single one of 1,573 contributors, and everyone who gave Elastic their trust, loyalty, and patronage. This is...

2021-01-19

scroll 0.1 released: download