Critique of Open Source culture

By Khaleel Al-Adhami at April 21, 2025.

Origins of the movements

It is hard to pinpoint a specific one reason for the FOSS movement. Would the movement exist in its current shape without Richard Stallman? Maybe, but that is not what I am particularly interested in. Nonetheless, in the world we live in, the early making of Free Software Foundation in 1985 defined most of what we know today as free software. Later, the Open Source Initiative defined and trademarked the "Open Source" term that is most commonly used today. The difference between the two is largely irrelevant to anyone who is not on the board of directors of either organization.

Software at the time was distributed usually by mail. Internet was only starting out. Companies that sold software were concerned about people copying their software and reselling it at a cheaper price or in ways the original company did not approve of. Other companies did not sell software per se but sold devices that had software in them and generally were afraid that competitors would extract the software and lessen their competitive advantage in the market.

Some (Richard Stallman) wanted to modify the software of an office printer to notify the office when it gets jammed. However, due to not having the source code of that printer, it was prohibitively difficult to do so. After asking the company for the source code, they refused, and the rest is history. Or is it?

While the Free Software Foundation was founded in 1985, it was not until 1989 that they released the first version of the GNU General Public License. One of the main features of such license is that it is copyleft. Meaning, any derivative of the work must carry the same license.

Copyleft is a compromise on the freedoms given to the end users to make sure later works remain free software. It is a kind of paradox of tolerance; one must not extend their tolerance (free software) to the intolerant (proprietary software) to prevent intolerance from winning over. We must understand that this is a form of removing freedom to achieve a higher goal of more freedom, and anyone not acknowledging that is operating at a level of cognitive dissonance.

While copyleft is controversial in some circles, it is widely accepted or tolerated in the general community. However, I do not believe copyleft was enough to preserve free software. For one, we have seen a decline of the use of copyleft software as years passed. Although I am more interested in arguing about something else: Business.

Free software does NOT make financial sense

That was a bit of a strong statement, huh? Let me tune it down a bit. For most companies, releasing their software as free or open source would bring them more harm than good.

This should not come as a surprise; free software as envisioned by Richard Stallman and others was not about making sound financial decisions as much as preserving the freedoms/rights of the end users. The message was not "release free software because it is good for you" it was "release free software because it is good for the rest of us". While this is an understandable message, it does not work in a capitalist system where money rules all. The only path for free software to succeed then would be regulation and not pure incentives.

But wait! Free software did succeed. Take a look at everything around us!

You might have said. I do recognize that within my argument, the success of free software cannot be explained. I adjust my argument to indicate that a large group of individuals, acting sometimes outside the incentives of capitalism, did work to advance free software. However, I assert back that such individuals cannot build free software without food on their plates.

In fact, I am so correct here, that when we say "open source culture" we think of volunteers not asking for money working outside of their traditional jobs. Such proliferation of ideas makes it difficult to imagine a world where free software is the norm without living in a post-capitalist world. How did we get here?

If we want to build sustainable free software, we have to make it financially sound to build it. Although, would it not be contradictory? Free software, again, is not about money, it is about Freedom! Please then understand that, "make free software and starve" is not a message that appeals to developers.

We do value "Open Source" as a label

For this section, I will primarily be using the term open source as opposed to free software.

Developers have largely liked open source software. Why not? It is free stuff! As such, the open source term started being a positive thing that people wanted to use over those scary "proprietary" software. Although with this, the distinction between free as in freedom and free as in free beer started to basically fade away. Licenses made it difficult to build a pure open source business without having some oddity that makes the business safe from competitors.

These oddities became somewhat creative, so let us go over some of them:

Make the software extremely difficult to run on your own. Complicate build steps. Do not write documentation. Open source de jure but not de facto?
Only keep some portion of the software open source. Some refer to this as open-core. The "core" here is arbitrarily defined and at sometimes very much unusable.
Forget the whole business part. Wait what? Some companies simply develop open source stuff in the hopes of figuring out a way to develop something monetizable later once they have established their foot in the market.
Sell hosting. This is predicated on you not being that successful that competitors will undercut you or your customers being extremely loyal. This did not work for the likes of Redis or Wordpress.
Sell support. Although I have seen fewer and fewer businesses doing that.

Those oddities exist because open source term is valuable, but open source business model is not.

Are there alternatives?

Here is what I am advocating for, and hear me out. Commercial restrictions on free software should have been more accepted as a way to keep free software free the same way copyleft has. Both the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative disagree with me, so I do understand this is a hot take, so let me make it make sense here.

Commercial restriction would go against the freedoms we do recognize, but it is very clear that to maintain free software we need to make more compromises. To make sure that those compromises make sense though we should figure out:

How to delegate who is allowed to financially benefit from a project. Saying all contributors equally is too simplistic and will drive projects into rejecting new contributors. So there should be some formalized way of saying "Those are the people who are behind this project, and this is how financial profits are split among them".
There should be clear limits to prevent projects from holding the source code forever. This is usually done with what are so called "delayed open source publication".

The nerd in you might have figured out that I am advocating for what is called "Fair Source". This is partially true, a fair source license does apply what I am saying above, but I want to reword what I am saying here.

Fair source is not open source nor free software. It takes a compromise on the freedoms we recognize as essential. Although it is one attempt at figuring out a way to make free software monetizable. I do not think it is perfect. I think we should try to think of more ideas that do something similar.

I am not going to relicense my software under fair source, because I do not particularly care about money for my projects. I do not expect the majority of open source software that currently exists would benefit much from a fair source license or something similar. I think we would be opening ourselves to more such "free" software though. I believe that if we viewed reasonable commercial restrictions in licenses as a form of free software, we would improve the landscape of things. I personally prefer using a reasonable fair source software over open source ones that are only open source as a technicality.

For one thing, a community that is so dedicated to honoring volunteer work is putting commercial interests over the sustainability of the software it uses. I think we ought to reorient our priorities, but I am merely one person.