← Back to context

Comment by fluoridation

16 hours ago

>he infrastructure it powers is mostly cloud hosted SaaS which is far and away the most closed model of software.

Free software was conceptualized at the dawn of the personal computing era. As it is defined, it could never prevent isolating users from the software by isolating them from the hardware, because it was assumed that the software would run on the hardware that the user interacted with directly. You could build an SaaS product on entirely copyleft software without breaching any licenses. It's only specific kinds of free software that require giving users the source code. And even then, they don't require the service provider to implement any changes. If Google Docs was free software, Google isn't going to integrate your patch if it doesn't want to.

>Very few people use much open source software directly. With a few notable exceptions it’s only used by developers and IT pros.

>I suppose the Darwin kernel in Apple OSes and Linux in Android kind of count but people really don’t interact with those directly in a tangible way. They are way deep down under the hood from a user POV.

I mean, what does it even mean to "interact directly" with something, at that point? If I'm using Firefox on Android to watch a YouTube video, is that direct enough or not? Firefox, like the kernel, is just a facilitator for a task I'm interested in. Hell, arguably, so is YouTube. Then it follows that almost no one actually "interacts directly" with software; people interact directly with their task, and software is ultimate just a tool that's more or less practical to accomplish it.