I’d like to break this out from a thread above and talk about remixing, business models, and open standards: https://futureofcoding.slack.com/archives/C5T9GPWFL/p1593684929127500?thread_ts=1593659834.110700&channel=C5T9GPWFL&message_ts=1593684929.127500 In today’s business-driven technology environment it seems success is tied to ownership of a platform or “walled garden”. The idea of sharing and making things work with each other is severely limited. It hasn’t always been that way. All these walled gardens run on core technologies that are open standards (Internet protocols, web standards, etc.) and wouldn’t exist without them. How did we end up here? And more importantly, how can we swing back to a more remix-friendly environment? What creates incentives for that?

none of the core technologies has a sustainable development model other than "I work at Big Corp and they allow me to work on it" or "begging 2.0" (aka patreon, github sponsors)

Very good critiques and observations Mariano, what are some favourite path out of these dilemmas so far?

the way I did it is to "grow out of consulting" by building tools to work faster and bill the consulting part until the tools were good enough to be sold by themselves, then partner for the "consulting on the ground" part (installation, setup, migrations, upgrade) and keep focusing on product development.

Crafting a business model around something that's not just open source but actively remix friendly is one of the big open questions that (I assume) is why it's currently rare to see such tools come to light.

I think it could be pulled off in an elegant way with the right team culture and values, where you really do value and consider the self-hosted case, rather just throwing it up as effectively PR for how "open" you "are".

Yeah, the crucial challenge here for me is that most customers don't truly internalize the value of openness beyond superficial aspects. As a result, an organization trying to truly do the right/sustainable thing is often at a disadvantage relative to one that's just performing 'open!'. For this reason I think the society we live in isn't mature enough for sustainable open commercial businesses in most industry segments. To get there we need a more appreciative, thoughtful audience/consumer base. Which isn't the sort of thing one can just magic into existence. @Chris Maughan just reminded me of an older post of mine that might be relevant: https://futureofcoding.slack.com/archives/C5U3SEW6A/p1587746535114000

Hi everyone, really happy to hear you all discussing this. This is actually an existential question right now for me. I’m working on Athens, which is effectively “open-source Roam” at the moment (but hopefully can become something much more in the future). I’m currently thinking about what open-source licenses make sense for Athens, what biz models are possible if the software is free, and how we could compete against Roam long-term when they’ve already raised from VCs. Would love your help here haha…

Does “open standards” automatically mean “open source implementations” of those standards? Does something have to be open source to qualify as remixable?

Nope, in the same way that “local-first” software doesn’t have to be open-source

@jeff tang (Just to be clear: I was responding generally to all previous replies, not specifically to you. Love the work you do with Athens. I’m following that, #roamcult, and the Digital Garden “scene” very closely.)

@Stefan There's a fundamental tension between remixability and interop. Proprietary implementations of open standards have a huge incentive to parley user bases of their implementations into incompatible forks for locking in their customers. So I consider standards to be a waste of time. Either everyone's on the same implementation and the standard is irrelevant (CPython), or it's slowly becoming irrelevant (Common Lisp). See also https://xkcd.com/927.

@Kartik Agaram Yes! That’s the kind of opinionated responses I was hoping for (which btw doesn’t mean I agree). Keep it coming!

one place where open source has worked out ok for the maintainers is ruby on rails. very weird situation

Is it possible we're just done with standards because it's too easy to switch? We needed a standard for phones because everyone needed to be able to call everyone else. Now I can talk to people for free on 1000 different apps, emphasis on free. Someone tells me contact me on "Kik" (never heard of it) and I install "Kik" and start talking to them. As a geek I hate installing stuff and signing up for new services to be tracked but I'm going to guess most people don't think twice about it. Standards can also stifle innovation because instead of just adding the feature you want you have to argue about it for years in standards committees. Sure maybe you can come up with some extension mechanism but then you're kind of back to the same thing, only people with your app can use your special extension. OTOH I'm happy HTML exists and is a standard. It enables all kinds of things because it's in a standard format used in a standard environment. All the browser extensions like Rikaikun (japanese to english helper) and even Ublock Origin (the element zapper) and I'm guessing the password managers only work because everything is running in a standard environment with a standard data representation. If everything was native apps that ability disappears.

@Garth Goldwater RoR was "extracted" from the work 37 signals (now basecamp) did while developing basecamp, so it's similar to the model I mentioned about developing open source while doing your day job at a company. Or do you refer to something else?

“Big” standards like TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML, etc. seem to be the infrastructure that was built in the past that everything today still mostly depends on. We wouldn’t have been able to get to today without them. But there seems to be a pattern where the heavy lifting is done by visionaries motivated by ideals (and backed by governments and/or large corporations’ R&D budget) and then capitalism swooping in, taking over, and making their foundational work look like it’s no longer necessary (and perhaps it is no longer necessary?).

Maybe a good strategy would be to listen to people like Mariana Mazzucato https://marianamazzucato.com/ and people researching how to manage "the commons" more 🙂

@Mariano Guerra the weird part about it is that 1. a ton of their money comes from the original product (basecamp) rather than rails itself 2. both the product and the open source stuff did really well and 3. they built the product and the open source platform at pretty much the same time

Just found out about Sponsorware. It’s sort of like MassDrop or Kickstarter but perhaps works better with software. Probably wouldn’t work for every project, but seems like a good balance between openness and value capture

Well I am not sure we have walled gardens. Npm, container repos and others let anyone make their own version of a repo library if they wish don’t they? Or am I misunderstanding the thesis? Like Facebook did with npm and yarn

I interpreted the walled garden as FB Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat, iMessage, Line, Kik, etc do not work with each other. I can't be in WhatsApp and message someone using WeChat. Same with Zoom, Facetime, Meet, Skype, etc... I can't video conference with someone from Zoom if they're running Facetime. They have to download Zoom. I don't know if re-mixing and open standards are important here or not. Except for iMessage (haha) all the others work everywhere and are free so if someone says "contact me on X" I just install X. I think it's likely to get worse. If you believe in the acceleration of change then before you can standardize something it will become irrelevant? Like there was a SMS standard. Who still uses it (I'm sure India or some place like that still uses it). My point is a 140 character standard has mostly been supplanted. Next we need images in our messages. Then we need video clips, then live voice, then live video, tomorrow we'll require shared AR or shared VR or something. On the other hand, the Web is pretty good at remixing. Iframes and other APIs let me mix stuff from all over. https://driveandlisten.herokuapp.com/ Yet another reason I'm glad for web tech and often anti-native apps 😛