It was just before midnight on New Years Eve, 2011, when Stephen Henson broke the internet. The 43-year old British software developer had accepted a small change to the code for OpenSSL, an open source encryption protocol that secures a substantial portion of the web. The fact that it was open source meant that anyone could see its code online and volunteer to help write code for the project. But just because anyone could contribute didn’t mean many people did. [...] Since its inception, one of the biggest selling points of open source development was what the software developer Eric Raymond called “Linus’s Law,” or the idea that with enough people looking at some code “all bugs become shallow.” Thus, after the Heartbleed bug was patched, the biggest questions on everyone’s mind was how such a critical vulnerability could go unnoticed for so long and whether similar bugs lurked in the code for other open source projects. [...] Henson was the only OpenSSL developer working on the project full time—and for a fraction of what he could have made taking his considerable technical skills elsewhere. “These guys don’t work on OpenSSL for money,” Marquess wrote. “They don’t do it for fame. They do it out of pride in craftsmanship and the responsibility for something they believe in...knowing that [they] will be ignored and unappreciated until something goes wrong.” Clearly, something was broken with a system where the security of the global internet was almost entirely supported by the selfless efforts of one overworked and underpaid programmer. As for who was to blame, Marquess pointed to the “commercial companies and governments who use OpenSSL extensively and take it for granted.” [... Mandatory citation of Stallman at MIT...] In the midst of the orgiastic dotcom bubble, when tech companies that barely existed were able to command obscene valuations, Stallman’s ethically-driven free software movement offered a starkly alternative vision of the future. Unlike the digital castles-in-the-air being churned out in the offices of Silicon Valley venture capitalists, free software worked. Stallman and his acolytes had demonstrated that it was possible to make great software that could be modified to meet the individual needs of users by combining ethical conviction and technical chops. For a brief moment in the mid-90s, it seemed like the future of software was free—as in freedom. Then in 1997, a programmer named Eric Raymond published The Cathedral and the Bazaar, an essay that analyzed the process of developing free software. At the core of Raymond’s seminal text is an idea that he has termed “Linus’s Law,” the idea that if enough people are working on a software program, any bugs hidden in the code will be caught and patched quickly. [...] The success [of open source] after Netscape would depend on replacing the negative Free Software Foundation stereotypes with positive stereotypes of our own [...] There was just one problem: The free software movement was burdened with a major ethical component, and ethics are bad for business. [... e dopo aver speso un terzo dell'articolo a spiegare che Etica e Free Software fanno male ...] Although open source software was rapidly embraced by many of the biggest tech companies in Silicon Valley, economists struggled to explain how these projects, which bucked all the conventions of the marketplace, could be so successful. By that point, the standard explanation peddled by the free software crowd—that free software development could be sustained on the basis of the ethical imperatives of freedom and altruism—no longer seemed adequate to account for the rapid emergence and adoption of a project like Linux. To that point, no other industry in history had ever produced such a technically demanding project on that scale by relying solely on the goodwill of its contributors. Continua con analoghe buffe acrobazie logiche su https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/43zak3/the-internet-was-built-on-... Non sfiora lontanamente il pensiero degli autori che l'Open Source sia insostenibile proprio perché strumento di marketing (e quindi secondario agli interessi di chi lo produce) e che il Free Software funzioni COME funziona perché completamente indifferente agli aspetti commerciali e alla market share. Non li sfiora, perché la soluzione altrimenti sarebbe semplice: TASSE. Tasse sull'uso, sulla modifica e sulla distribuzione del software "bene comune". Tasse con cui finanziare il software libero. Giacomo