The capital dynamics are all wrong.
01 October 2017
Ben Werdmuller, in Why open source software isn’t as ethical as you think it is:
When you release open source software, you have this egalitarian idea that you’re making it available to people who can really use it, who can then built on it to make amazing things....While this is a fine position to take, consider who has the most resources to build on top of a project that requires development. With most licenses, you’re issuing a free pass to corporations and other wealthy organizations, while providing no resources to those needy users. OpenSSL, which every major internet company depends on, was until recently receiving just $2,000 a year in donations, with the principal author in financial difficulty.
This is a good example of one of the really interesting problems of working in an immature industry. We have a similar problem in web advertising. We're over-rewarding the ability to collect numbers that show the effectiveness of a marketing project, while under-rewarding the ability to build brand reputation. Web ads also have an opportunity to fix incentives. We don't have our incentives hooked up right yet.
Why does open source have some bugs that stay open longer than careers do?
Why do people have the
I've been coding to create lots of value for big companies for years and I'm still broke
problem?How does
millions of dollars of shared vigilance
even make the news, when the value extracted is in the billions?Why is the
meritocracy
of open source even more biased than other technical and collaborative fields? (Are we at the bottom of the standings?) Why are we walking away from that many potential contributors?
Quinn Norton: Software is a Long Con:
It is to the benefit of software companies and programmers to claim that software as we know it is the state of nature. They can do stupid things, things we know will result in software vulnerabilities, and they suffer no consequences because people don’t know that software could be well-written. Often this ignorance includes developers themselves. We’ve also been conditioned to believe that software rots as fast as fruit. That if we waited for something, and paid more, it would still stop working in six months and we’d have to buy something new. The cruel irony of this is that despite being pushed to run out and buy the latest piece of software and the latest hardware to run it, our infrastructure is often running on horribly configured systems with crap code that can’t or won’t ever be updated or made secure.
We have two possible futures.
People finally get tired of software's
boyish anticslethal irresponsibility, and impose a regulatory regime. Rent-seekers rejoice. Software innovation as we know it ceases, and we get something like the pre-breakup Bell System—you have to be an insider to build and deploy anything that reaches real people.The software scene outgrows the "disclaimer of implied warranty" level of quality, on its own.
How do we get to the second one? One approach is to use market mechanisms to help quantify software risk, then enable users with a preference for high quality and developers with a preference for high quality to interact directly, not through the filter of software companies that win by releasing early at a low quality level.
There is an opportunity here for the kinds of companies that are now doing open source license analysis. Right now they're analyzing relatively few files in a project—the licenses and copyrights. A tool will go through your software stack, and hooray, you don't have anything that depends on something with a consistent license, or on a license that would look bad to the people you want to see your company to.
What if that same tool would give you a better quality number for your stack, based on walking your dependency tree and looking for weak points based on market activity?
Why blockchain?
One important reason is that black or gray hat security researchers are likely to have extreme confidentiality requirements, especially when trading on knowledge from a co-conspirator who may not be aware of the trade. (A possible positive externality win from bug futures markets is the potential to reduce the trustworthiness of underground vulnerability markets, driving marginal vuln transactions to the legit market.)
