Interesting article, I guess it may come off as a reflection of being of a different mindset than an older style of open source software and culture?

I thought the idea was, software is created with an open source and open license to it - so people know what the software is, and are able to make copies of it freely, and so that becomes hard to monetize.

If you are trying to sell software and make it proprietary with closed source, it's not software you can trust (could contain literally any insecure code) so you avoid it and it would lack people using it (not saying this happens in practice, but I thought was the open source argument).

Hence you're saying, just create / pay for insecure proprietary closed source software that can't be shared and isn't intended to be shared.

The subscription model lends itself towards abuses: namely, you can use something temporarily, then lose access. The open source vision was about creating software that can be freely re-used indefinitely without a required subscription and shared without as much of restrictions.

So I think basically people object to this increased limitation of "indefinite reuses" which you can get with open source software that you "own", and maybe the proprietary closed source tendencies of these locked down subscriptions.

Now granted, some of the newer "spaces" we operate in may look a little differently, with lots of things needing or desiring constant updates and we recognize we only have so much time so a question comes up if we even want or need "indefinite reuse" or to even have open source software or to understand how the software works.

But, there might not even be disagreement here... if you just "donate" to an open source nonprofit project, that could still be framed as a "subscription". I think it's maybe not conventionally how we're referring to subscriptions, but I think I could see your case for reframing the subscription towards being something "good" or "ok".

There are open source monetization strategies, but if code tends towards being less able to be monetized, how can software projects be funded? I think in this "post-intellectual property" open source scenario I'm suggesting at, the funding might shift in other directions (maybe like from selling hardware or tangible physical goods).

But anyway, I guess we would just probably distinguish between "unwanted" and "desired" subscription practices: limited locked down subs versus unlimited maybe subscription-less or limited open source subs.

At least these were some thoughts this essay was generating in me.