Writing in Communications of the ACM Kamp wrote that economists and others focused on money — like my bank — have had a lot of trouble understanding the free and open-source software (FOSS) phenomenon. Eventually, they conclude that it makes no sense, so they go with the flow.

“However, recently, some serious people in the FOSS movement have started writing long and thoughtful opinion pieces about how it has all come apart and will end in tears and regret,” he wrote.

He said that companies were currently trying to make a make a business out of FOSS or its derivatives.

“The "F" in FOSS was never silent. In retrospect, it seems clear that open source was not so much the goal itself as a means to an end, which is freedom: freedom to fix broken things, freedom from people who thought they could clutch the source code tightly and wield our ignorance of it as a weapon to force us all to pay for and run Windows Vista,” Kamp wrote.

However, the FOSS movement won what it wanted, and no matter how much oldsters dreamed about their glorious days as young revolutionaries, it did not come back; the frustrations and anger of IT in 2024 were entirely different from those of 1991.

He said that one big difference was that more people have realised that source code is a liability rather than an asset.

“For some, that realisation came creeping along the path from young teenage FOSS activists in the late 1990s to CIOs of BigCorp today. For most of us, I expect, it was the increasingly crushing workload of maintaining legacy code bases,” he said.