Comment by impossiblefork

I'm not saying that you can replace the entire software industry by Linux, but you can replace Windows with Linux, you can build simple locally run software to replace many of the well-known services, you can put some efforts into creating local clones with greater adaptability to match the biggest SaaS services, etc.

Basically, to go after the easy 90%. Then we go from a world with data in the cloud, massive advertisement statistics gathering etc., to a world where people mostly use computers to solve concrete physical problems in their environment and where networks are distributed, e-mail like or like a facebook where every participant stores a substantial amount of information locally in plaintext and has it interpreted by a desktop app, where he has no feed with the content decided by others, but chooses what he has the computer show him, etc.

Just look at telecom. How much complexity in the protocols isn't there just because people have to have their resource usage monitored so they can be billed for it, and for this to be settled between telecom companies?

The software to kill SaaS and Facebook might be so simple that a couple of people could write it by themselves. It's like that local government 'if you have regional govt they decide it all in Nottingham probably in a couple of meetings. Complete amateurs.' That's where I think we could go, but with software instead of the UK civil service.

It also fits really with with the coming of LLMs etc. You can just store of a lot stuff in plain text and have this super-fast reader process it all. Instead of lots of software, just huge amounts of plaintext that the machine can understand.