The Death of Consequences

The Golden Era of Open Source, in whose late stages we currently exist, has been defined by early decisions to release code with no expectations around who uses our code, and what happens when people abuse the gift they’ve been gifted. Little thought was given to what consequences an extractive or abusive party would face.

Today, we’ve allowed maintainer burnout to take hold in community and volunteer-led projects (with disastrous consequences, see for example xz), and we’re seeing mass rejection of attempts by corporations to impose consequences on those who seek to continue extractive behaviour (see for example Hashicorp’s rapid demise as an independent entity).

This contrasts to some of the earlier eras in Free and Open Source Software, which were defined by social contracts with consequences for those who chose not to follow them, most notably (but not entirely) those informed by the concept of Copyleft.

By choosing not to define consequences for disobeying the social contract of Open Source, the broader ecosystem has chosen consequences for us. In this talk, I’ll look at some points of inflection through the history of Open Source where our movement collectively decided imposing consequences, the (in retrospect) highly predictable results of those decisions, and what we could have decided instead. I’ll also talk a bit about how we might want to think about consequences in the future.