Open Source Goes Nowhere Behind Closed Doors

With the development of open source in the past two years, the open source culture has started to sprout and grow. The open source evangelists make a great effort behind it. Although more and more people are beginning to accept open source, it is just sown seed in the fertile soil, and more evangelists are needed to stand up and tell everyone how to participate in open source, how to correctly understand open source, how to pay for open source and a series of other issues. Only in this way can open source thrive and blossom someday in the future.

Source: Freepik

Case Analysis

A hot event broke out in the open source field a while ago. Marak, the author of the well-known open source project Faker.js, deleted the library because he did not get a return that matched his contribution. First of all, whether it is open source or closed source, as a qualified citizen of modern legal society, no one should do such extreme things. But at the same time, we need to reflect on ourselves. From a distributional point of view, the project Faker.js has contributed a lot to society on many occasions, but Marak is not paid accordingly under the existing distribution mechanism. There must be some problems. We should advocate for open source users to pay for this project. From the perspective of economics, the supply increased with the increase of payment. We all know that if we want to ensure that these systems that provide services to customers are reliable and controllable, we should provide basic living guarantees for these open source authors so that they can work on open source without worries.

Is there a threshold for using open source?

This is a question we need to refine the scenario. It can't be generalized from a single example. First of all, open source allows users to modify data, but the modification does have a threshold and requires you to have some technical skills. However, there is no artificial threshold but a technical threshold in open source. It takes about four to five years to master basic computer principles, knowledge and programming languages to develop a unique understanding of certain systems in the software industry. Any technology or industry has a threshold of knowledge and skills. It is not appropriate to attribute the threshold to open source alone. Open source is open to anyone, but requires some knowledge and skills. In general, there are no thresholds for open source, only skills and knowledge reserves are required.

Source: Freepik

How are the open source engineers now?

One of the characteristics of being an open source engineer is that they have a super strong self-drive, and they are willing to search for problems that need to be solved proactively. Few open source engineers complain about the 35-year-old crisis, and they often keep their minds open to adapt to this era of rapidly evolving and rapidly changing technology. When we look back at the history of technological change, we can find that the technologies such as programming languages, operating systems, architectures and databases change every five or ten years, and what you have learned before is useless. But if you're in the world of open source and dealing with new problems every day, you'll be able to keep learning and continue to enhance core competitiveness. In a word, life is going well for the Open Source World guys so far.

How to determine whether an open source project is promising?

There may not be a definitive answer to this question, like many choices in our lives that we don't know the outcome of. We only know whether we are happy when we choose it. Open source is a project that no one knew whether it would be successful at the beginning. Of course, we can collect as much information as possible to analyze the project, or to predict the future from a macro social environment. For example, Ceph is a distributed storage system that tries to dominate block storage and file storage. This project was suddenly known by many people when cloud computing and distribution became popular in 2013. But in the seven to eight years before that, it was the author himself who had been obscurely insisting on maintaining, later acquired by Red Hat and donated to the Linux Foundation and operated as a foundation. There are many other similar projects that are popular today but not at the beginning. Therefore, there is no way to foresee the future of an open source project. But we have to consider the following when we engage in a project: Does this matter meet your current requirement? Can you enjoy this process? Do you have a sense of belonging in this community? Do you agree with its culture? These factors are critical.

Source: Freepik

Conclusion

The actual challenge of the open source is the whole global trend of anti-globalization thinking. "Open source behind closed doors" is quite dangerous especially when a country's software industry is not very well developed. If the communication channel with the whole world is blocked, the global development of open source will leave us behind, which is a terrible thing. In the world of open source, if we want to stand up and build influence as leaders, we have to take some responsibility such as making a contribution and formulating KT standards.

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