OSCON is waxing nostalgic on its 20th. Tim O'Reilly expressed his pleasure in being back in Portland, though maybe bringing some Texas weather. For sure.
From humble beginnings in UNIX culture, free and open source culture took off and now (semi-secretly) powers the economy. Heavy hitters come to OSCON seeking to recruit new devs.
At OMSI last night, some of the OS community expressed their sense of OSCON closing in around core devs and seeming less accessible in terms of providing a more Maker Faire style front end.
That's not a new development, as OS migrated to the cloud, where it gets configured into proprietary back ends, inherently closed, but with components contributed back to the community. The cloud world is dominated by big name monopolies, sometimes abbreviated FANG (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google).
Tim O'Reilly wondered from the stage whether the cloud companies were becoming too greedy around empowering themselves at the expense of others, versus catalyzing new synergies and surfing on network effects.
The question need not be posed in terms of morals, unless one sees ethics in engineering as a restatement of scientific principles. "We're doing science" said Tim, which means experimenting to find what works.
Generosity (definition goes here) is a component of long term business strategy, and more than airy fairy investment in "good will" per the old school economics textbooks.
