Why aren’t more things open-source? And to remember: open source doesn’t mean free and it doesn’t even need to mean open contributions.

Switzerland mandates open source for the public sector

I saw some news about the mandate issued by Switzerland.

As with anything on the internet, mixed reactions.

For most people outside Switzerland and even there, this doesn’t matter much (sorry Switzerland).

Between that and the launch of Llama 3.1 with the weights and a comprehensive paper on how it was made… it resurfaced a thought that at one point most of us might have had:

Why aren’t more things open-source?

It might be just source-available, closed to contributions and paid. But why not open source? Is your way of doing CRUDs so innovative or special? How about the way you center divs? Is it that good?

Because I’m pretty sure most companies and us “out there” are all using the same libraries for that… which are probably open-source.

Open source already does the “heavy lifting”

The most marvelous pieces of engineering are already made in an open-source manner, some of which make money out of it and some are “unicorns” (companies evaluated at 1B without even being publicly traded on the stock market).

The case for closed-source:

The bad ones

No need to hide credentials from the code if it’s internal.

No need to mind using real people's data in tests and the like.

Easier to obscure shady practices.

The good ones

Not show the “next big thing” and make a surprise. (In this one I would argue that after that, why not open the source?)

Some companies might have something that is their “secret sauce” (intellectual property) that they don’t want others to use or know about. (There are software patents that might cover also this.)

The valid ones

Security concerns about vulnerabilities in the open without enough resources to dedicate to a security team.

Security is hard and closed means a smaller vector of attack, on one hand, you could have people contributing to finding those vectors, but before that, you would probably have someone exploiting then.

The case for open-source

My biggest point is that if we learned to learn from each other, maybe a lot of things could be easier to achieve.

We already joke about “stealing” (copy-pasting) from other sources available, this would just streamline the job. Have a problem? Just show the code, no NDA or its “private code” concerns… it would be all in the open.

The “shoulders of giants” is where all the foundation is built and why we got so far. If more things were closed source back then, then the internet might have been a different place (or maybe it just wouldn’t be, maybe just a niche thing if that).

I know it’s a naive view. And that there are more valid reasons not to open source that I just can’t think of.

A lot of companies probably think they would “lose revenue” because people would just host the solution… coming from a world where people don’t even have “personal pages” anymore and just use whatever centralized solution is more popular.

Or that some company will just steal their code. Not to mention that companies will already steal if they want and just pay a settlement if needed (or just buy it).

Code is just a tool

Think of most social media nowadays: they do the same thing, and they work in the same way.

The code is a detail, and if a “new thing” appears they will just copy it. The code doesn’t matter and the idea is usually simple enough. All that changes is all the shady “how to keep you here for the most time possible” (that they probably don’t want out there).

Even in the “real” tangible world, few things can be truly kept a secret, most are reverse-engineered anyway and copies are out there. But between patents, lawsuits, and “branding” the copies don’t matter and people will still go for the original ones.

Meanwhile… many brands today started out just copying something (some still do), and started adding their own spin to things and improving further than the “originals”. Then they are the copied ones and the cycle repeats.