Eghbal: The term 'open source' has become meaningless
Nadia Eghbal · a16z Podcast | The Changing Culture of Open Source · Jan 2, 2019 · at 31:08
Nadia Eghbal (open source researcher) explains why she previously stated she hated the term 'open source' during an a16z Podcast discussion on open source community dynamics.
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“Oh, I said I hate the term open source, which is admittedly it was a little bit inflammatory to say that. I felt very, I felt this tension coming in as an outsider and talking to some people who strongly believe this one thing is definitely a core value of open source. Then you turn and talk to other people and they're like, no, this exact opposite thing is also a core term of open source. And it started to feel like the term open source is just sort of meaningless.”
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More from Nadia Eghbal
Eghbal: Corporate open-source 'gifting' is often just code dumping
“Like, sometimes people go, we're really excited to announce that this is now open source, meaning we don't want to take care of it anymore, so go live over there. We'll give it to the community, except they haven't actually identified anyone in the community w…”
Eghbal: OpenSSL had only one paid maintainer when Heartbleed hit
“There was, like, a very critical bug that was found in OpenSSL, and the question Was, well, why did nobody find this before? And the answer was, because there are, like, two, there's one paid person, and there's, like, 10 volunteers that are working on this.”
Eghbal: Tech giants have replaced academia in funding major software breakthroughs
“You still need people to think about, like, why are we building it this way, or what does the actual system look like? And that role is actually kind of being filled lately by companies like Google or Facebook that have the resources to make big strides the wa…”
Eghbal: Completely decentralized systems cannot function without baseline governance
“You can't have a completely decentralized system. You have just enough management somewhere in there.”
Eghbal: Open-source popularity and project health are separate metrics
“So you can have projects like OpenSSL might be a project that was really, really popular. Lots of people use it, but not actually healthy. Until we separate those things out, then you have the problem of people saying, well, if it's, you know, if no one's main…”
Eghbal: Source code alone does not create an open source project
“Code by itself does not make an open source project. You have to have all these other types of skill sets, and that's, like, one of the biggest issues that I've seen where people don't really understand the value of a healthy community.”