I get why the OSI published this post. They have a vested interest in the conversation and I agree with their points.
But the battle for the narrative has already been lost when people consider this to be a problem with 'open source'. Rather, it's a problem with software that's being given away for reputation brownie points. Here, the author showed exceedingly poor judgment towards users of their software, and this should result in the loss of goodwill and respect towards the author and the forking of their works if the license allows.
Open Source didn't enable this behavior. The author's poor judgement and the author's lack of need to care for the users of one's software is what didn't dissuade this behavior. In this case, it was giveaway software causing harm. In other cases, it's commercial software pushing hamfisted changes users don't want, because the users aren't empowered enough to fight it. The reason commercial software would avoid this particular type of stunt is because it's poor business sense to harm one's direct customers.
So what of Open Source? Open Source allows anyone to review or modify the software that engages in this behavior. So the community can salvage the author's good contributions and better custodians can carry the software forward.
Open Source also allows anyone to discover these cases proactively. Of course, almost nobody does this, because we as an "industry" have gotten used to four troubling trends, and ridicule those who aren't on this "bleeding edge":
* thinking that software that costs $0 to obtain incurs no additional costs
* not auditing our dependencies
* being unconcerned about the sheer quantity of dependencies
* blindly updating dependencies
It's a sad but predictable development that the field of Open Source software has basically merged with the community of authors actively looking to give away software for $0 (for fame or to upsell advanced features). Basically, the Open Source movement was too successful (in its advocacy and in raising the demands of the customers of software), and it has largely subsumed and supplanted the formerly-separate fields of shareware and trialware software.
This development is what truly hurts Open Source: so much software but too little emphasis on (or even demand for) curation, massive imbalance of contributors to users, the decreasing influence programming-language-specific spaces, and increasing dominance of the "move-fast-and-break-things" culture.
The way forward is to achieve stronger curation, more focused maker spaces, tighter (as opposed to larger) communities, and an outreach effort to re-establish the philosophical distinctions between Open Source and freeware.
But the battle for the narrative has already been lost when people consider this to be a problem with 'open source'. Rather, it's a problem with software that's being given away for reputation brownie points. Here, the author showed exceedingly poor judgment towards users of their software, and this should result in the loss of goodwill and respect towards the author and the forking of their works if the license allows.
Open Source didn't enable this behavior. The author's poor judgement and the author's lack of need to care for the users of one's software is what didn't dissuade this behavior. In this case, it was giveaway software causing harm. In other cases, it's commercial software pushing hamfisted changes users don't want, because the users aren't empowered enough to fight it. The reason commercial software would avoid this particular type of stunt is because it's poor business sense to harm one's direct customers.
So what of Open Source? Open Source allows anyone to review or modify the software that engages in this behavior. So the community can salvage the author's good contributions and better custodians can carry the software forward.
Open Source also allows anyone to discover these cases proactively. Of course, almost nobody does this, because we as an "industry" have gotten used to four troubling trends, and ridicule those who aren't on this "bleeding edge":
* thinking that software that costs $0 to obtain incurs no additional costs
* not auditing our dependencies
* being unconcerned about the sheer quantity of dependencies
* blindly updating dependencies
It's a sad but predictable development that the field of Open Source software has basically merged with the community of authors actively looking to give away software for $0 (for fame or to upsell advanced features). Basically, the Open Source movement was too successful (in its advocacy and in raising the demands of the customers of software), and it has largely subsumed and supplanted the formerly-separate fields of shareware and trialware software.
This development is what truly hurts Open Source: so much software but too little emphasis on (or even demand for) curation, massive imbalance of contributors to users, the decreasing influence programming-language-specific spaces, and increasing dominance of the "move-fast-and-break-things" culture.
The way forward is to achieve stronger curation, more focused maker spaces, tighter (as opposed to larger) communities, and an outreach effort to re-establish the philosophical distinctions between Open Source and freeware.