In Defense of Open Source Software (Despite its Corporatization)

I was recently talking to a friend that I consider to be much smarter than myself. For one, he's an actual developer, as opposed to someone who's always just fiddled around with technology such as myself. He also always seems to be working on one project or another, and when he shows them to me and how they work, my eyes will sometimes glaze over—not because they are boring projects, but because my brain simply can't function at his level.

And during this conversation, I was excited to tell him about my home server, because I knew that A.) He would understand what I meant by self-hosting, which most people in my life don't really understand or care and B.) I thought that he'd relate to how cool I felt these open source projects were.

However, despite the fact that he's an avowed leftist who often complains about the negative impacts of the corporatization on technology, he said something that really surprised me. He said, he's not into the idea of open source software.

His argument went a little something like this: Open source software often has an overall negative impact on the world because it allows major companies to use it to better their proprietary products, which makes it that much harder for smaller developers to catch up. He also expressed that because of these companies budgets, they will often fund the development of open source projects and use their resulting influence on the project to push their own services and products above any others—all while getting kudos from the community at large for their supposed technological philanthropy.

I have to admit: when he was telling about this, I had no idea to respond. I think I mostly found myself in shock that someone that considers themself on the left could be against the idea of what is basically the medicare -for-all of the software world. So I simply nodded and said "I could see that" and we moved on to the next topic at hand.

But in the days since then, I've been thinking more and more about the conversation. I will say there is definitely some truth in what he was saying. Overwhelmingly, however, I think it's a take that seems to be missing the forest through the trees. Is that not like faulting public roads for evil factories using them to their advantage? Would ending open source software not be like throwing the baby out with the bathwater?

In the open source world, it's easy to find examples of undue corporate influence on development, affecting a project's goals, timelines, even development philosophies. From the fact that 80% of browsers seem to be based on Google Chromium (an open source version of the Google Chrome browser that seems to have been built with the singular vision of making the entire internet revolve around supporting Google web product's ambitions), to Fedora, a Linux distribution that is largely funded by Red Hat, a division of IBM. Even Firefox, an open-source browser that is generally considered to be less influenced by Google, is said to get the vast majority of it's funding by its users searching the web with Google.

So, maybe it is true that, while open source software often starts with the goal of making the world more just and equitable, it sometimes ends up perpetuating the same power systems of the proprietary software universe.

However, I think that, even in the worst examples of the corporatization of open source software, the world is still better off with open source projects than without.

Take for example, the example from earlier, the Chromium browser. While yes, Chromium has been implicitly built to give Google and it's parent company, Alphabet Inc., more control over Web Standards overall, it has also given rise to many other projects that often raise their middle finger towards Alphabet—in their own ways and to the extent they are able to while still surviving. Examples of such browsers include Ungoogled Chromium, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, Arc, the Duck Duck Go browser, and more.

Had chromium been built behind closed doors with no open source alternatives available, who would be the victor that controls web standards today? I can tell you that it certainly wouldn't be the community or the public. In that sense, proprietary software

Open source Software is perhaps the only possible option for community or public directed software.

Open source generally gives smaller developers a leg up.

Open source is essentially democracy applied to software.

Anyway. I think I've had my cake for the night. I'm aware that this post was not very well-thought out or expressive of my opinion, but I'm going to call it a night for now.