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I don't know what happens when the youngest generation now grows up... Will they say, "This is bullshit!"? "This is not how we were raised to see the internet." |
**Karl Fogel:** They'll say "This is bullshit", but they'll say it on Facebook. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Right! And that's the hard part, is sort of like you have this tyranny of ... yeah. |
**Karl Fogel:** I think that point about network effects is really important. What happened as an increasingly large percentage of humanity got internet connections was that the payoff ratio for building a proprietary system changed. It used to be that if you were building a system there was some reward for making it a... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** And oddly you see, like on Snapchat for example, where people are... Snapchat offers tons of things to make people essentially modify around them, like stickers, drawing on things or whatever. So it's that same behavior, but it's still on Snapchat's platform. |
**Karl Fogel:** Right, and they control it and they track... Like, you can't fork Snapchat and make your stickers in the forked Snapchat, let alone do something else. |
\[59:41\] The uncharitable way to say it is that everyone's creative and environmental improvement impulses are being coopted and redirected into limited and controlled actions that do not threaten the platform providers. Basically every platform provider's business model is "I wanna be like a phone carrier. I just wan... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I have a hard time thinking that that is necessarily... That these things have to be in conflict. I don't think that users are ever gonna... I don't think that you can sell a product to users in a competitive market based on the values that will attract a community around people hacking it. You have ... |
Look at the one success story that we have, for a short period of time, which was Mozilla. They won for a while and took a huge amount of market share away from Microsoft - enough that Microsoft actually came and participated at Web Standards again - because they made a better browser for users, and not just for people... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** And it's because it's better, not necessarily because of those... |
**Karl Fogel:** Oh no, my doom and gloom is not a moral condemnation, it's an observation of economic reality. I think what you're saying is correct, but it's still not good news for open source. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** No, and I think that's what's so interesting about right now in even how people are using the term open source, and a lot of people say something is open source when it's not actually. So the term itself has been sort of being coopted into different definitions, and for a lot of people now that are ju... |
**Karl Fogel:** Well yeah, that coopting has been going on. Ever since the term was coined, there have been groups and people using it in ways that don't mean what it originally meant. There have been people coopting the term since it was coined, but there's always been counter pressure to preserve its original meaning... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Well, I think it's as strong now to a set of people that still hold on to that term really strongly, but to be frank I think they're almost putting blinders on to how so many other people are using it. We've talked about this - at what point does that new definition just become the definition because ... |
**Karl Fogel:** Yeah, that's how the language works and I'm totally on board with that, but I guess what I'm saying is I try to see that happening - and a number of people do, and then they actually go where possible... When it's an organizational source of terminology dilution, they'll go to that organization and say,... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** \[01:04:08.23\] That's a nice recap of the problems of people misusing the term or using it for something that's not within the scope of what open source means. But there's also a fair amount of - I don't know how to say this without being mean... |
**Karl Fogel:** Oh, go for it. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Corporations or projects that are open source within the definition of open source, but aren't what we would call open. |
**Karl Fogel:** Actually, I think that's okay and I don't care. In other words, if you're forkable, you're open source. And if you run the project as a closed society and even the developer's names are kept top secret, as long as the source code is available and its under an open source license and it could be forked, ... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** You're thinking more about the future of it, rather than the current reality. Like, even if I can't get anything done now, if it becomes a big enough problem, I have that option, right? |
**Karl Fogel:** Well yeah. I mean, the fact that you have that option affects the behavior of the central maintainers, whether they admit it openly or not. The knowledge that your thing can be forked causes you to maintain it differently, even if you never respond to any of the pull requests, you never respond to any o... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, that's a good question, Nadia. I do think that some people put blinders on and try to ignore it, but they tend to get reminded of it. \[laughs\] |
**Karl Fogel:** I didn't hear Nadia's question, I'm sorry. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I really wonder whether some companies actually see it that way, or whether they're actually acutely aware of the fear of a fork. Because again, like we talked about network effects, where even if nobody likes the thing anymore, if everybody is using a certain thing, it's very hard to actually switch ... |
**Karl Fogel:** Well, it just requires... I mean, for business-to-business open source. Again, Android is a classic example. Google is very aware of the potential for forks; they are very aware of the business implications, to the extent that those are predictable, depending on who might fork it. And indeed, some forks... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** From what I understand of your views, you see it as like the license and these guaranteed freedoms are what makes it open source and that's all it really matters, because you're saying if need you could always fork it. |
**Karl Fogel:** I'm not quite saying that that's all that really matters, I'm just saying that it's a main thing... And sure, I would much rather have a project be run by a community, but that potential is always there as long as the open source license is there. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah, the reason why I think collaboration and community is so intertwined is because, again, network effects... And it doesn't really matter whether something can technically be forked if there is actually no ability to change it, so I worry that relying too much on that core definition could act... ... |
**Karl Fogel:** \[01:08:04.11\] Well, but I don't think that network effects in an open source development environment are quite the same... Let's take a couple of examples. GCC got forked years ago. It had a core group of maintainers, and then it had a bunch of revolutionaries who were not happy with how those maintai... |
EGCS started accepting all those patches that the GCC copy wouldn't take, and eventually it kind of blew past GCC in terms of technical ability to the point where the FSF said "Well, I guess you're kind of where stuff is happening now, so we're just gonna take the next version of EGCS and call that GCC and merge the tw... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah, I see your point, it is different. |
**Karl Fogel:** Yeah, but Facebook, on the other hand, that's a whole different kind of network effect. I don't mean to completely argue your point away because I think it's a good one, which is that there are network effects, and it is a lot of effort to fork a popular project that has a successful or at least a cohes... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** And you need to have a community that cares enough to fork it. Again, fast-forwarding to some sort dystopian future that I don't actually know is the future or not, but if open source projects become more about users than about contributors, and people are just sort of using the thing, then it becomes... |
**Karl Fogel:** Well, the degree... The ease with which it is possible to motivate people to make a fork or to change something will always be directly proportional to the amount of need for that change. If no one's motivated to change anything, that just means it's not important to someone for something to get changed... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah, I don't know if--People can hate using something... There's a ton of legacy open source projects that are used in everybody's code and it's just really hard to switch out because everyone uses them. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I think the difference though is that there's just not enough people... Yes, people hate using it, but there's not enough people that want to be developing on it that can't, that would then fork it and fix it. And think that there's a tension here between the people using it and the people that wanna... |
**Karl Fogel:** \[01:12:00.15\] Unfortunately I don't know the details of that particular fork, it sounds like you do. If you think there are interesting lessons to draw from it, please explain more. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** So I've said this on a couple occasions, but I think the size of the user base is proportional... There's some percentage of that that would contribute, that wanna contribute in some way, and if they're enabled to, you'll have a thriving community. If you don't, you eventually will increase the tensi... |
I think that where that starts to pare down is that when you look at Android, the users of the Android code base are not the users of Android. The users of the Android code base are companies that manufacture phones, for the most part. |
**Karl Fogel:** And indeed, they started forking Android. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yes, exactly. So they have the resources to do that, and their needs do not necessarily line up with the needs of Google. The problem is that their needs are in many cases counter to the users of Android, so it puts Google in a strange place where they're not satisfying the needs of the users of the ... |
**Karl Fogel:** Well we are, but just to make a quick point about that, in theory, in some sort of long ark of software justice, there should be a link between what those companies are doing with their forks of Android and user's needs, because otherwise they're not gonna sell phones. Of course, I would love all those ... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** So when you're looking towards the future though, do you see that tension rising, and users starting to come more in conflict with that model, or are you more pessimistic about it and you feel like the surface is going to continue to be dominated the way that it is now? |
**Karl Fogel:** I wanna give the optimistic answer, but I have no justification for it. Because software is increasingly being tied to hardware devices, and the hackability for a hardware device is so much... Like, the hacktivation energy, the threshold for hacking on something other than a normal laptop or desktop com... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I think unfortunately we have to leave it there with this view of a dystopian future... \[laughter\] |
**Karl Fogel:** Always happy to make it darker for you. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** ...but we'll be back next week. We're gonna continue with Karl and talk about some much happier things, like contributions and governance models... |
**Karl Fogel:** Oh, I'll turn that dark, too. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Oh, okay. \[laughter\] |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Can't wait! |
• Shifts in open source communities and governance due to rising activity and casual contributors |
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