I love free and open-source software (FOSS). The whole movement is one of the best things in the world of technology and computers as a whole. I’ve been an open-source advocate for most of my life at this point, but that doesn’t mean it’s perfect.
There’s a weird tendency to paint open-source software as more virtuous than it is, and as a solution to every problem, rather than a solution that’s better suited to some problems than others. So I thought it was as good a time as any to listen to what the devil and angel on each shoulder have to say about open-source.
The FOSS Angel: Innovation Through Collaboration
When you open up software, and allow anyone to contribute to the source code, you gain access to the biggest pool of labor in history. When it works well, it means that software can be improved rapidly and with the bug-hunting ability of thousands of coders. No matter how many employees a company like Microsoft or Apple has, they simply can’t match the sheer number of potential contributors.
In fact, these large software companies contribute their own programming workforces to open-source projects, whether officially or unofficially. It’s to everyone’s benefit, because these large shared codebases help prop up the industry and organically form standards. The infrastructure that our technology runs on is largely open-source, after all.
Having open-source codebases also provides unique security benefits. While it’s an (often repeated) myth that open-source software is inherently more secure than closed-source software, what is true is that open-source projects enjoy different security benefits. For example, because the code is something you can check and compile yourself, you have the opportunity to ensure there are no nasty surprises like backdoors in the code. On the flipside, having the entire source code exposed makes it easier to come up with exploits, because you can see the inner workings of the program.
Nonetheless, on average, the transparent nature of open-source software is a positive thing. After all, FOSS and closed-source software exist together, and can make up for the shortcomings of each other.
The FOSS Angel: Accessibility and Freedom
Lucas Gouveia/How-To Geek | thenatchdl/Shutterstock
When I was a postgraduate student with teaching duties, I wrote a little pocket guide on open-source software. The goal was to show students that they didn’t need an expensive computer, with a paid Windows license, and a bunch of expensive software to get their studies done.
That’s one of the most important aspects of open-source software. Software is expensive and labor-intensive to develop, so having thousands of programs available for free, and with code that you can adapt for your own needs, is a huge boon for anyone starting up something new. Without having Linux, or the various server applications, or the many niche apps and modules on GitHub we wouldn’t have as many new apps, or robotics projects, or anything really. Proprietary software makes it slow and expensive to try anything new.
Take just about any successful (or at least interesting) tech startup, and you’re going to find open-source code somewhere in there. I’m willing to bet a thousand years into the future when all the humans are gone and only AI survives, there will still be open-source code doing its thing behind the scenes.
The FOSS Devil: Fragmentation and Fork Wars
The freedom of FOSS is a double-edged sword that cuts, well, not just both ways, but wildly in any direction it wants. Because there’s no central authority, and it’s all communal, you get the same sorts of issues that exist in any open society. People will form factions, every time someone doesn’t agree with the direction an open-source project is going, they’ll “fork” it into its own project.
So you get a lot of duplication of effort, or competing projects that do the same thing. I would argue that this chaos engine might ultimately give us better software. However, there’s no denying that the process is messy.
It also means that some things just aren’t compatible with one another, leading to a proliferation of kludges, patches, and fixes just to make the whole taped-together system work.
While most FOSS isn’t user-facing, the software that is user-facing tends to have a distinctly rough user experience. Say what you want about the license model for Adobe Photoshop, but it’s miles ahead of something like The GIMP, and none of the many Linux Distros have really nailed it either. Maybe it’s the culture of FOSS or maybe there just aren’t that many UI pros willing to work for free, but either way you can feel the difference without always being able to explain it.
The FOSS Devil: Sustainability Problems
Contribution to FOSS is voluntary, and its usually done by people who just inherently love coding or have another intrinsic motivation to be part of it, but the truth is that a lot of FOSS is now critical to technology we all use every day. That’s a heavy responsibility, and in the end many of these projects are maintained by a small, dedicated, but extremely overworked group of volunteers.
It’s one of the reasons companies with paid staff have to step in sometimes and “altruistically” let their coders contribute on the clock, but for the most part this is unpaid labor that’s no less grueling compared to developing any other type of software. As always, there’s a perfect XKCD comic that describes a situation where just a few people are propping up layers of critical code for no money, and often without thanks.
When those people eventually (and understandably) give up, it can lead to a crisis, though so far we’ve largely been OK. Fingers crossed!
Then, of course, there are many for-profit organizations that make millions using FOSS as part of their operation, but who never contribute anything back to those projects. Either in the form of coding contributions, or just money.
Some FOSS projects may also end up being insecure, because they simply lack the resources to properly secure their code. It’s the flipside of the “FOSS is more secure” myth.
The Double-Edged Sword
Open-source software is one of our most valuable and important resources, that drives progress across the board, but it’s also chaotic. The same traits of freedom and flexibility that serve as its strength, also create weaknesses of fragmentation and sustainability.
It’s all very Dickensian, being the best of times and the worst of times, but it’s certainly a massive net benefit. We just need to be mindful while riding this particular bull that it doesn’t buck us off.