Open source is great because it makes software cheaper.

In a 2024 Harvard Business School paper, researchers estimated that firms would spend 3.5 times more to build software were in not for open source software (OSS) 0. This is good news to more than just MBA-types. This is also good news to us, regular consumers, because the relationship between software costs and software output is superlinear: cheaper software leads to more software 1. As an optimistic software engineer, this means being able to solve more problems with fewer bugs given the same time and budget. As a result, I think OSS makes our world more fruitful.

Disappointingly, OSS is often overlooked because it is viewed of as “free.” This is a significant downside to the open-source model. While projects and companies become dependent on open-source packages, they rarely contribute back engineer hours or provide monetary support. As a result, critical, yet under-resourced packages become vulnerable to malicious attacks. For example, a recent widely-known example is the hijacking of xzutils by “Jia Tan” 2. However, recent trends such as bounties and sponsorships are steps in the right direction.

Just like big corporations, I too rely on a great deal of OSS, my recent favorites being Ghostty and Neovim (which I used to write this) and Rust and React. I’m also part of the problem– I rarely contribute back. My hope with taking this class is to change that.