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The slow evaporation of the free/open source surplus

Free/open source has been on my mind lately – more than usual. (FOSS or OSS for short, the distinction matters, a lot, but for the purposes of this post the two are similar enough to lump together.

The software industry has extremely high margins (products that are both non-rivalrous and non-excludable will do that) and historically easy access to investment because of both low interest rates and the pervasive belief among the financial class that successful tech companies grow exponentially for extended periods. A non-trivial number of coders in California also have moderate wealth from being secondary or tertiary beneficiaries of industry liquidity events which lets them work on FOSS as much as they want. The JS npm ecosystem, for example, is almost certainly unsustainable in its current form and has coasted on years of overinvestment in useless startups and Microsoft’s blatant attempts to own the entirety of software development.

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