Comment by Vampiero
1 year ago
It's not that FOSS fails, it's that unethical corporations worth billions of dollars go unpunished for abusing it (because the law exists to protect them).
FOSS is fundamentally anarchy (the good kind that shows that human beings are not all pieces of shit). Anarchy can't exist in a capitalist society because it shows people that they don't HAVE to live like slaves. They can live as members of tribes, as evolution intended for us.
So as always the organism is originally healthy and successful until the parasite that is capitalism spreads and suffocates it for its own reproduction.
> They can live as members of tribes, as evolution intended for us.
Please, quit the cheap sophistry.
Evolution doesn't intend or plan anything for us, and you will have a very hard time convincing people that we would be better off living in a tribal/clan society than whatever we have today.
Evolution intends in the sense that it follows an abstract fitness function. I didn't think I'd have to explain that here. I know how to implement evolution algorithmically.
And no matter what you think about tribal societies, we still live in tribes every day. You and your close friends are a tribe. Your family is a tribe. Forums and now social media communities are tribes. HackerNews is a tribe. Open source projects are tribes, indeed they fork over ideological differences all the time. Political parties are tribes, indeed they split and antagonize each other all the time. Nationalities are tribes. Companies are tribes. Social classes are tribes. Subcultures and "identities" are tribes.
We are not built to handle global contexts, so we collapse them into tribal ones. We do that for everything. There's always an in-group and an out-group and a hierarchy if we're talking about a cluster of people.
A tribe assumes a strict hierarchy and mobility only though power and violence.
I can agree with you about the issue of societies failing to organize themselves past a certain scale, but this is not a problem with "Capitalism".
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What is unethical about the actions of the corporations who use the software? They did so in accordance with the license.
The fact that Open Source is about sharing, and they don't share. They only take. It doesn't have to be written in legalese somewhere, it's the spirit of what makes Open Source what it is.
And I'd argue that doing something for profit is also against the spirit of open source, but that's a different argument. The thing is that open source is for the most part an effort from hackers, hobbyists and professionals who want to foster a positive ecosystem for people like themselves. To make their passion better and simpler and more fun and more accessible and more interesting and safer and more efficient and more general... So that more people might fall in love with it.
It's not to push a product or to convince people that they need it. And that sentiment comes from the fact that open source is the reason many people got into programming in the first place! Thanks to all the free resources out there. So they want to give back to the community. That's how I feel about it at least.
But then again, when huge corpos contribute to open source it's great because they have a lot of inertia. So I think that's a good thing, it's a positive feedback loop. My previous point is not black and white, even though I am obviously bitter about a lot of things.
A regular user who just downloads a build and runs it on their system (i.e. the most common use case, because it's the one that takes the least effort) also doesn't share anything. Why is it worse if a company does the exact same thing?
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Licenses are about legal agreements, not about ethics. Legality doesn’t imply ethicality (nor vice versa). If this was about legality, people would say so.
Then why is there not a file outlining the ethical expectations, alongside the legal agreement? The companies using the products have no way of reading the developers' minds regarding expectations of reciprocity.
The idea really isn't so far fetched, lots of projects today have non-legal outlines of expectations of community members. For a single example, codes of conduct are very common.
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Which megacorporation abused Gitea here? And how?
I'm sympathetic to some of what you're saying, and I believe the original hacker ethos spurred some of the original FS impulses, but...
FOSS licenses don't, and can't, embody anarchism (or any socialism) because they make no distinction between humans and capital-holding entities, lumping them all under the term "users".