Comment by bigyabai
1 day ago
> Don't be too kind to the trillion dollar company.
They got to be worth a trillion dollars somehow. I hate Apple with the passion of a million suns; guess what? They sell something people want. They make money, they survived. Their copyright is preserved equally as well as the AS-IS terms of the BSD license. And despite being whipped like a dog, there are still multiple BSD OSes with modern software packaged for them.
> We let these giant companies use open source to make the internet and technology more centralized and less free.
Do "we"? I'm running Firefox right now, maybe you're on an iPad or some other platform that locked you down. But that's your problem, if it concerned you then you should have returned it to the Apple store.
People still have a free choice to run whatever software they want. Wordpress is not being made "less free" because hosting companies won't get out of bed to pay Matt's bills. If the project has to die to prove it, it will die as a free program. It will still be forkable and maintainable by the community because that was the intention and spirit of the project.
> Google is very good at this game.
No, the fed is just particularly bad at it.
Google's big problem is that they monopolize online advertising and the DOJ refuses to neuter them. If your free access to the internet gets tragically cut off by Apple's indignant software policies... not my problem, is it?
I almost totally agree with you, with the exception that I think market distortion does impact non-users.
You can be a Firefox user, and your Firefox usage is impacted by the overwhelming market share capture of Chrome and Chromium browsers.
You can use Librem and be impacted by your government requiring software that will only run on iOS or Android. Or Chrome.
> DOJ refuses to neuter them
Yes, but don't give them the free pass. Even if a company's objective is to take as much of the pie as possible, Google and Apple actively employ lawyers to skirt the regulators.
I expect my experience will degrade. The whole web's felt stale since Flash died, I doubt the next few years will feel any different. We're post-that, sadly. Apple and Google already got the pass, they won't be litigated in this admin unless they fail to kiss the ring.
We have to live with these damages, the same way we've limped alongside a broken internet for the past decade. Its possible these abuses will be encoded in American identity for decades to come. The next step is surviving top-down control, and freely-licensed software will be the only alternative to the digital monoculture.