Driven by License

I think there’s a case for writing a paper (or maybe even a book) that reviews the social and economic impact of open source licensing.

Why is software eating the world? Why is Big Tech becoming so powerful?

While there are many reasons for the dominance of Big Tech, I suspect few people would look at it from the perspective of software licensing. I think it would be rewarding to investigate not only open source in general, but the impact of transitions we gone through: specifically how the developer community at large moved from “freeware” to “shareware”, then to “GPL”, and finally (for now) to the more permissive licenses like MIT and apache v2.

The narrative of the tech community to outsiders is that “innovation” drives growth. That’s mostly bullshit. Everyone knows that “selling free stuff” makes the most money. We take free software, add value to it and sell it to the masses at a premium (still cheap enough to out-compete the non-software world!). One hypothesis worth checking out is that the revenue in tech is driven by the quantity and quality of free and open source software, which by the way, in recent years, has largely moved from GPL to permissive OSS licenses due to $many_reasons (*cough GPLv3 cough*).

If that hypothesis has any merit, this Richard M. Stallman dude, certified PC-non-compliant creep/weirdo, closet socialist advocating for a communistic vision for software copyrights, seems to have provided essential fuel for growing the largest multinational corporations we’ve seen in recent history that permeates (almost) everyone’s lives. The way his vision partially succeeded – OSS being ubiquitous ultimately ending up in the form of “leftpad”; and the way his vision partially failed – the divisive nature of GPLv3 led to new projects largely abandoning the whole GPL brand altogether in favor of more permissive licenses, allowed Big Tech to exploit “selling free stuff” and grow faster than ever before.

I’m not saying that it’s a Good Thing or a Bag Thing, but it sure seems like fate likes putting an ironic twist on things.