Open-source software is an interesting phenomenon. It’s the complete opposite of the giant commercial corporations. Open source is seeking to provide you with everything for you to own, improve, and use. While the corporation will strive to keep you as far as possible from “what is under the hood” and leverage all possible ways to make money from you using their software.
Having proprietary commercial software is a progress driver. People are willing to invent when they know that they can be compensated for it. On the other hand for the user to need for every single thing on their computer is not nice. While the programmers can enjoy much higher than average salaries and tech corporations are richer than anything else, the average Joe needs to pay a fee to these companies to have the ability to use even basic typing, printing, and browsing. And even files storage.
The open-source software in this regard is a tool to make the average Joe more free in terms of both money and freedom. If a corporation is selling you very basic software, the community of open-source enthusiasts can make it available for free. For some simple programs, it will be impossible to charge many for them anymore.
Though one can argue that normal market competition will do the same and eventually make simple tools free and cheap.
Well, there is another advantage. If everyone will start writing their own MS Office from scratch in an attempt to compete with Microsoft we will end up with a bunch of raw unfinished attempts. All closed source. And Microsoft’s solution will still be the best one with only Google being able to keep up with the competition. What open source does, is it enables others to build upon the existing knowledge. All who otherwise would be starting their companies, can get together and collaborate on a single solution that will give more freedom to the average Joe.
What is also important, all open-source codebase is open to Humanity. Anyone can use it to learn how to code. Anyone can use it as a building block for their own thing. There is a whole separate discussion about licensing though. And another even bigger discussion on how the open source codebase has been used to train AI to write code and wheatear this is good or bad.
Overall, I would conclude that open source is not great for technical advancements and progress as it’s hard to get rich from it. But it’s great to balance out the tech companies’ monopolies and make “not cutting edge” tools available to General Public for free. If will be caring and supportive (donations) about open source and able to maintain this culture, it will make all our everyday tools available and open for everyone as Collective Human Knowledge, and you will pay only for Advanced, Cutting Edge software. If we don’t, we will end up paying subscription fees for absolutely everything to giant corporations if not with money then with our data.
Let me know what you think about it. Leave your comments.
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