Open source software (OSS) has revolutionized the technology industry. The ability to freely use, modify, and distribute source code has enabled rapid innovation and collaboration. However, there is a dark side to open source that is rarely discussed.
In this article, I want to highlight some of the less obvious pitfalls and challenges that come with relying on OSS. My goal is not to discourage the use of open source, but rather call attention to problems that we collectively need to fix.
Overdependence on Volunteer Maintainers
A lot of widely used OSS projects are maintained mainly by unpaid volunteers contributing in their spare time. This can be problematic when critical infrastructure depends on these projects.
For example, the popular JavaScript utility library Faker.js is used by many companies and developers. In 2020, the lead developer announced he was no longer going to maintain Faker.js for free and asked for a six figure salary to continue supporting it. This caused panic among many who relied on the library.
Similarly, the Java logging library Log4j is used by a huge portion of the internet's infrastructure. Yet the developer who fixed the critical Log4j vulnerability that made headlines recently noted he worked on Log4j in his spare time with only 3 sponsors.
Dependence on volunteer maintainers can be precarious. Maintainers have no obligation to keep working on projects indefinitely. If they lose interest, change jobs, or face personal issues, important OSS can get abandoned.
Lack of Accountability
With open source projects, there is often no "official" vendor or company accountable for the software. If things break, there is no support contract or SLA dictating fixes.
This was evident with the breaking changes introduced in Elasticsearch 7.0. Many companies using Elasticsearch 6.x in production had critical outages and downtime. There was no recourse or way to demand fixes from Elastic.
Commercial software vendors are accountable to their paying customers. Open source projects operate on a "use at your own risk" basis. As adoption grows, this lack of accountability can become a glaring issue.
Poor Quality Control
The open source philosophy of "release early, release often" and decentralized governance can lead to quality and security issues. Having many contributors merge code without much oversight is a recipe for introducing bugs and vulnerabilities.
Heartbleed was a glaring example of this. A trivial coding mistake in the OpenSSL library exposed private data from a huge portion of the internet's secured web servers. More eyeballs on the code could have prevented this costly mistake.
While open source allows anyone to inspect code, the reality is most users just trust whatever code is published without auditing it. And with dependencies going dozens of layers deep, fully auditing everything is impossible.
What Can Be Done?
I don't want to just point out problems without considering solutions. Here are some ideas that could improve the open source ecosystem:
Companies relying heavily on OSS should donate money, developer time, security auditing, and other resources to those projects. This reduces overdependence on volunteers.
For projects reaching critical mass, have maintainers form entities like the Apache Foundation to share responsibility and accountability.
Increase funding for security focused organizations like the Linux Foundation's Core Infrastructure Initiative that aim to improve quality.
Use permissive licensing sparingly on core infrastructure. Copyleft licenses legally compel contributions back and discourage freeloaders.
Open source software has transformed technology in many positive ways. But the coloring book fantasy that it's all passion-driven volunteer work powering the internet simply isn't accurate. Serious problems exist, and failing to address them will only lead to more incidents like Log4j in the future.
What do you think? Are there other dark sides to open source I missed? What solutions could help improve the ecosystem? I'd love to hear your perspectives in the comments.