I don't think the problem is the money. Neither of them provides a long term stable API, let alone ABI. So progress gets reset on a regular base.
Gnome is further hampered by no respect for user choice. They provide an appleish UI, with an Enterprise, one size fits all experience.
KDE is better, but they are not the official GNU/Red Hat choice. They will choose practical above esthetica.
A big part of the Linux success is POSIX, a standard to provide direction. The UI world never had anything line it, so it is very fragmented. A real solution could be a complete enough UI standard, used by OSX, Windows, Gnome and KDE.
> don't need a backend unless for social sharing reasons
Sync between devices is a compelling reason to have some backend. But I prefer it the way Super Productivity does it: integrating a bunch of third-party storage services like Dropbox. Usually, you already use one anyway
Unlike Firefox, Safari has another huge corporate backer (Apple). Apple is drowning in cash. They don't need Google's money to keep developing Safari. It's "just" a good, low-effort deal for them. Apple doesn't have a competing search engine, or an intention to develop one, or an intention to promote a free web and "save" their users from a search engine monopoly.
Disclaimer: I haven't been following any of these projects.
Based on quick googling, they all follow a very similar pattern. The original is permissively licensed. After a decade of growth and popularity, it's relicensed as source-available to prevent AWS from hosting it and harming the financials [1][2][3]. Copyleft community forks fail to get traction. A permissive, corporate-funded fork gets traction. It's adopted by the Linux Foundation and is provided on AWS. Enough users and contributors switch to make it relevant and active to this day. In the few years that pass, the permissive fork doesn't die, but it doesn't overthrow the "official" fork either. The "official" fork makes money and is still widely used. Later, it becomes dual-licensed under a copyleft license [4]. The CEOs say that they've always wanted to stay open-source, and the goal of the license change was to force AWS to fork [1][2].
It's hard to tell whether the permissive forks will overthrow the "official" dual-licensed forks in the future. We need to wait for a decade to see.
So far, at least in this space (dev-oriented tools that started as permissive), it seems like:
- Permissive corporate forks get vastly more investment and interest, and quickly beat copyleft community forks (confirming the article).
- Companies prefer more community-friendly licenses over full-on proprietary licenses (confirming the article). The originals are relicensed as source-available to cause the fork without alienating the community too much. The AWS forks are permissively licensed to get outside contributions and attract the community.
AWS, obviously, profits the most from permissive code. That's because it doesn't really care about the code itself, and profits from hosting it instead. It reminds me of this timeless post about "commoditizing complements": https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/. Now I see the connection between this idea and the original post. Permissive code "unlocks" more of the "adjacent value", and that's why it's more desirable by most entities.
Unless it's a heavily-modified proprietary fork, the cloud providers are only "eating" your profits. Not the share of the project itself. Profit isn't the top priority for everyone. I just want to have quality free software that I can use for my tasks. The more companies contribute and support it - the better.
And even regarding proprietary forks, the article makes a point that, long-term, those are prone to enshittification and/or abandonment, while the open fork is always there and keeps changing maintainers and maturing unstoppably
> And even regarding proprietary forks, the article makes a point that, long-term, those are prone to enshittification and/or abandonment, while the open fork is always there and keeps changing maintainers and maturing unstoppably
No, I can't remember any dead proprietary forks that would support that idea.
But somewhat, I can't remember any counterexamples either. I mean, a proprietary fork killing the permissive original. I can only remember:
- AppGet vs WinGet. But that's one permissive program killing another.
- The proprietary build of VSCode. But it's basically "a set of patches" on top of a still-maintained permissive base. And its popularity is at least somewhat dependent on the existence of that permissive base.
They don't tend to "kill" the original, they just force them into "source available" licenses. Wikipedia has stuff like MariaDB, MongoDB, Sentry, Redis, etc. as some examples.
If I understand correctly, Redis-the-permissive-project wasn't threatened by any proprietary fork. What happened is that the financials of its original authors were threatened by AWS hosting Redis as a service. It's not the same as a modified proprietary fork becoming more popular than the original.
Redis was relicensed as "source available", and then that license change led to a fork. But the most prominent fork isn't proprietary. It's a permissive one, called Valkey: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44653130. That's actually a good example of an in-demand permissive project changing maintainers and staying relevant under a permissive license.
An interesting thing to see in the future is whether Redis ("source available" + AGPL) or Valkey (permissive) "wins" in the long term.
Too lazy to google the details regarding the other projects.
Anything hosted on a cloud service is necessarily a proprietary fork: they have to in order to integrate it into their infra. It's not the case they're just loading the docker image and calling it a day.
> all of the big, successful open-source projects are either GPL, or can't be GPL because of the GPLs murky legality around linking (the article mostly hinges on such a case - LLVM).
Firefox is controlled opposition, paid $400 million per year by Google. They would have died long ago if it weren't for that little detail.
Chrome is 100% owned by one corporation, and its very existence is a freemium gimmick to acquire users, and it was only open-source because Google was the "do no evil" company and wanted to stand on the high ground. Do you seriously think they LIKE Brave and de-googled Chromium existing?
It's actually hard to find organically-grown large FOSS projects, that weren't funded as part of some company's corporate moat.
But my argument is, if you find them, they're mostly GPL.
That's a different argument, unrelated to the one that I originally responded to:
> > all of the big, successful open-source projects are either GPL, or can't be GPL because of the GPLs murky legality around linking
I don't see how your argument is relevant to that, or how it disputes the article. The article is not about funding or "organic growth". It's about survival characteristics and winning the mainstream. Blink, WebKit, and Gecko are all a mixture of permissive and weak copyleft licenses. There are no popular GPL browser engines. There are no popular proprietary browser engines. That's exactly the outcome that the article predicts! (Of course, it doesn't need to "predict" the most popular browser engines specifically. In 2015, they already looked similar and had a similar moat).
Although I have to admit now, we'd probably see proprietary browser engines if it wasn't for the "weak copyleft" part. Now I think that it's actually the most long-term competitive license type for some projects!
If we continue with the topic of web browsers, then we'll see a seemingly strong counter-example: the most popular browsers are proprietary, and have been for a long time. But that's a thin layer on top of a larger open foundation. A thin layer is easy to replicate and compete against. Thus, Chromium and Firefox shells are maintained (and kept competitive) just fine. They are less popular than Chrome or Edge, but not because they are less maintained or broadly inferior (they may be for specific tasks). They are long-term viable options that aren't going away.
> Firefox is controlled opposition, paid $400 million per year by Google. They would have died long ago if it weren't for that little detail.
Depends on how you define "died". Broadly, I disagree. Too many developers are interested in the existence of Firefox. According to an Igalia employee [1], during the first half of 2024, 10.71% of contributions to mozilla-central came from Igalia, and another 8.74% came from Red Hat. I wanted to see an aggregate share of Mozilla employees (which must be even less than the remaining 80%), but I couldn't find that.
But anyway, even if Firefox died, that wouldn't be related to its license (and this article) at all. Chromium and WebKit have similar licenses.
> But my argument is, if you find them, they're mostly GPL.
That may be true if you artificially limit yourself to non-corporate-driven projects. But that's not what the article is about. And that distinction is irrelevant to me, too. If the "official" corporate-driven fork turns into something that I dislike, I have the freedom to switch to a community-maintanied fork (for popular projects, usually there is one) or fork the project myself. Or, I put up with the non-ideal corporate project if it's still the most attractive option. Being community-driven isn't a guarantee that the project will always be maintained and that the maintainers will always agree with you and put your use cases and needs above others.
As I think about it, the article has actually predicted the death of proprietary web engines used in Internet Explorer and MS Edge Legacy!
According to Wikipedia, in 2015 IE was still bigger than Firefox and Safari (on desktops) [1]. I should've googled the stats before saying that the situation in 2015 was similar to today.
I think my point is a bit different. Consider this: There are many areas where corporations have no interest in building a FOSS product. One such area is CAD, another is word processing. And what do we see? GPL projects abound. None of them are successful, true, which could be seen to agree with (a perspective of) the author's point. The difference is, the author is saying that the license doesn't matter no matter what which just ignores the reality that corporate sponsorships dominate the equation.
Indeed, MPL/LGPL are often a better tradeoff than GPL.
But, in theory and according to the article, they should experience same effect. Just slower. When a (law-abiding) company finally has a strong reason to make some modification and keep it private, a proprietary replacement is coming. (Sometimes, as a "thin" fork of a permissive project, which then gets an engagement boost, reinforcing the point of the article)
Ok, I have thought more about the topic. I was too concerned with "theory" in the above comment. Disregard it.
Web engines are a huge practical example in favor of MPL/LGPL. They suggest that MPL/LGPL may indeed have the best survival characteristics.
Companies love proprietary browsers. If there were a good-enough permissive web engine, a proprietary fork would happen and "win", even if as "a set of patches" on top of a permissive base maintained by the community for free. Luckily, the creators of FOSS web engines seem to have understood that and chose MPL/LGPL. This goes against the article.
Companies love proprietary browsers. They will never contribute to a GPL web engine. That's why we don't have any good GPL web engines. This supports the article.
Companies love proprietary browsers. Microsoft was one of the first movers on the web. They had the chance to create a competitive proprietary web engine from scratch. It was popular for a few decades. But eventually Microsoft gave up and adopted Chromium instead. Presumably, to reduce maintenance costs. It doesn't seem like their proprietary engine gave them any competitive advantages that would be worth the cost. This supports the article.
So, the article is correct regarding GPL and proprietary, even (indirectly) predicting the continued absence of GPL web engines and the death of proprietary web engines. In 2015, when the article was written, IE was still bigger than Firefox and Safari on the desktop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
But the article completely misses the huge success of MPL and LGPL. You are 100% correct.
That's true. But at the same time, the risk is kinda overblown. You can still use the last open version of Redis. There's even an open, community-maintained fork that you don't have to maintain yourself.
Even GPL can't force a company to maintain and keep developing an open version when the company doesn't want to. Even if Redis was GPL (no CLA), they could still abandon it and write a compatible clone from scratch. AI makes it even easier to do
