Skip Navigation
132 comments

  • On the other side, Free and Open Source Software leveled the playing field for software development by quite a lot. Before FOSS you had proprietary databases, proprietary OSes, proprietary web servers, etc, at every level of the chain. Without FOSS Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office would rule the roost. Without FOSS smart phones might've taken years longer, and have far less choices. Without FOSS the web would be drastically different. Without FOSS development would be harder to break into, and anything you tried to produce would involve 15 different licensing fees.

    • Everyone can equally profit off it. And hopefully, everyone (that can) will contribute.

    • Without FOSS Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office would rule the roost. Without FOSS smart phones might’ve taken years longer, and have far less choices.

      Uhhh, Google Workspace isn't FOSS and the only FOSS Office project that has market share is Libre Office with a whopping...1%.

      Chromium may be "open source" but Google is definitely trying to make a walled garden, especially in respect to ads, and Chrome rules the roost. Chrome itself has plenty of proprietary software in it.

      How is this any argument for something else? Your examples are weak, MS Office does rule the roost, and Chrome only rules the roost due to it being a Google product, not because of its open source bona fides.

      Without FOSS smart phones might’ve taken years longer, and have far less choices.

      Android is literally the reason bloatware from phone developers made a resurgence. It made modern phones worse than the shitty proprietary OSes driven by shitty phone manufacturers from the 90's to 2007. Google allows manufacturers to install applications you can't uninstall without rooting the device and risking your security.

      How did that benefit consumers? To get a decent Android phone, you're paying a shitload of money, just like you would be for an iPhone (a completely closed source product) and iPhone at least doesn't have software bloat from your phone carrier/phone manufacturer.

      Further, Google is literally attempting to use their web dominance to make it nearly impossible to implement ad blocking with Manifest v3. Their ad profits are more important to them than FOSS. How is denying the ability to block ads a "benefit" to consumers?

  • Here's an article all about how 'open source' coopted and recuperated 'free software' movement to the benefit of corps.

    https://web.archive.org/web/20230703044529/https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-meme-hustler

    The enduring emptiness of our technology debates has one main cause, and his name is Tim O’Reilly. The founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, a seemingly omnipotent publisher of technology books and a tireless organizer of trendy conferences, O’Reilly is one of the most influential thinkers in Silicon Valley. Entire fields of thought—from computing to management theory to public administration—have already surrendered to his buzzwordophilia, but O’Reilly keeps pressing on. Over the past fifteen years, he has given us such gems of analytical precision as “open source,” “Web 2.0,” “government as a platform,” and “architecture of participation.” O’Reilly doesn’t coin all of his favorite expressions, but he promotes them with religious zeal and enviable perseverance. While Washington prides itself on Frank Luntz, the Republican strategist who rebranded “global warming” as “climate change” and turned “estate tax” into “death tax,” Silicon Valley has found its own Frank Luntz in Tim O’Reilly.

  • They are also who mostly finances the development of very many Foss products. So still better than closed source, as small companies and the general public can also use those products.

  • Isn't that why FOSS survives as a model and is encouraged so much, though, so there is something to enclose and charge bullshit fees for once you fork it?

    • Not all licenses allow charging for forks. You can charge for your services always. And you can charge for code that is all your own. But, only certain licenses allow you to actually fork and charge for it without sharing those contributions. And many might not even really consider those licenses to really be FOSS.

    • It's particularly popular for startups to use to bootstrap their tech company and build cred shortly before they reach the "we have to actually turn a profit" phase, at which point the bean counters try to squeeze every bit for a nickel. Once they have marketshare, they say, "we are helping the competition by releasing this!" and abandon the things they actively maintain.

      There is also a direct benefit for open sourcing: you can get other people to debug and improve your software for free. They go the enclosure direction once they want to squeeze their customers for more money, e.g. closing the source code and charging $x per use of the software to their service clients.

      Once they're a monopoly, companies can swing back to the open source direction because they have no competitors to worry about and can just get free dev work and good will out of it.

  • Those of us who work in tech need to have a serious reckoning about our contributions to this sort of dynamic and the sort of social environment it incentivizes us to gravitate towards, maintain, and create.

    There also needs to be some discussion of class in tech and how the bull pen tech support grunts are going to have very different incentives from the senior technician making 7 figures on top of mad stock options.

    • Nobody listened to Negativland enough when it mattered. They helped develop Creative Commons licenses and were pretty much the spearhead for the "no attribution but you can't use it for commercial purposes" license. I'm not sure if that one even exists anymore, but it seems like Creative Commons is also pretty dead-in-the-water these days. They understood the need to define ownership and be able to say "No, corporations can't just use it freely."

  • There are so many contradictions here I don't even know where to start. Is this one of those debate bait memes?

132 comments