Is there anything here that isn’t purely speculative?
What are the signs that OSS is actually in decline?
BTW, I’m not sure there’s anything wrong if OSS is in decline. Overwhelmingly, people do it not to get paid or help industry but because they love building things and solving problems. If people are generally finding better ways to do that, then good for them. Or if people have less time for OSS due to general economic circumstances, then that is a sad thing, but that’s not specific to OSS, so it’s a bit weird to frame it that way. That is, if people have fewer opportunities to find personal satisfaction in their lives, that’s bad across the board, not just for OSS.
The whole article is evidence-free nonsense. Free software has been around for at least 50 years, and will still be around as long as programmers want to scratch an itch or just enjoy (as you put it well) finding personal satisfaction from it.
I think the extent to which one could say open source software is in decline is driven by the fact that FOSS was recently considered by many big VC firms to be an “investable category” and now that view is less popular.
True FOSS has always been uninvestable, healthy, and small. But we’ve had a lot of “eventually fake” (non-MIT/GPL) FOSS in the last decade. Elasticsearch, mongodb, cockroach, and so on.
True FOSS (maintainers not beholden to rent-seeking investors), as always, trudges along. Because it’s growth is not correlated to market returns.
What are the signs that OSS is actually in decline?
BTW, I’m not sure there’s anything wrong if OSS is in decline. Overwhelmingly, people do it not to get paid or help industry but because they love building things and solving problems. If people are generally finding better ways to do that, then good for them. Or if people have less time for OSS due to general economic circumstances, then that is a sad thing, but that’s not specific to OSS, so it’s a bit weird to frame it that way. That is, if people have fewer opportunities to find personal satisfaction in their lives, that’s bad across the board, not just for OSS.