Comment by ferguess_k
3 months ago
Yes, it's all about control. Control the platform. Control the access to the platform, and the world is your oyster. And the political and legislation system are their friends. It is the establishment.
The only way to fight is to indoctrinate the next generation, at home, and in school, to use FOSS. People tend to stick to whatever they used in childhood. We the software engineers should volunteer in giving speeches to students about this. It is much easier to sell ideologies to younger people when they are rebellious to the institutions.
I agree with you. But you do realize that it's been like that since about 20 years now. It started because of Microsoft (proprietary software), then Google (propriteary platform), now ChatGPT (proprietary knowledge).
And I tried to tell my kids. And it failed mostly.
But in the long run (a decade), what is exceptional and proprietary will become common FOSS. And everybody will benefit.
I envision this as an ideology. We don't need every kid to follow it, and I don't expect the majority to follow. A 1-2% is good enough. That's why giving speeches to teenages might be the best bang for the buck. There are always kids who need to escape into some cool ideas and it could be the idea of FOSS.
Really its probably the dumbass judge that told Google "The apple app store isn't anti-competitive because they don't allow any competitors on their platform" when google asked why the play store was ruled a monopoly and the app store wasn't.
I cannot think of a more detached and idiotic ruling than that.
The US anti trust legislation punishes the abuse of monopoly power, not being monopoly in itself. Google was found guilty in leveraging their dominating position on the platform to do just that.
On the other hand in the US Apple's App Store was not found to be a monopoly in the first place. Different cases about abusing dominating position also didn't go far.
Hmm, having read that, I am starting to sympathize with Google if they are going to be punished for being open.
No one seems to care that Apple has never allowed freedom on their devices. Even the comments here don't seem to mention it. Google was at least open for a while.
Or maybe no one mentions it just because the closed iPhone is a fait accompli at this point.
Perhaps because Apple never “promised” to be open, Google instead built itself by playing the good guy and started to switch when money called so those who chose them for that reason feel betrayed.
I guess they are going to say whatever to prove the case. The legislation system is highly...closed and shun of laymen.
It's the JUDGE that came up with that reasoning.
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But the ruling is correct. You can't have it both ways, if you invite competition you're not allowed to be anti-competitive. You can be Nintendo, offer a single store, only allow first party hardware, and exercise total control over your product. Then your anticompetitive behavior can only be evaluated externally. But if you open yourself up to internal competition with other phone vendors, other stores, and then you flex your other business units (gapps) to force those other vendors to favor you then you're in big trouble.
> But the ruling is correct. You can't have it both ways, if you invite competition you're not allowed to be anti-competitive
That's just stupid, because being anti-competitive is an emergent outcome, rather than anything specific.
Apple is definitely anti-competitive, but they exploited such a ruling so that they can skirt it. Owning a platform that no other entrants are allowed is anti-competitive - whether you're small or large. It's only when you're large that you should become a target to purge via anti-competitive laws. This allows small players to grow, but always face the threat of purging - this makes them wary of trying to take advantage too much, which results in better consumer outcomes.
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> You can be Nintendo, offer a single store, only allow first party hardware, and exercise total control over your product.
How is this not even more anti-competitive?
It's fine to be mad at Google for being duplicitous, but treachery is in the nature of false advertising or breach of contract. Antitrust is something else.
"You can monopolize the market as long as you commit to it from the start" seems like the text of the law a supervillain would be trying pass in order to destroy the world.
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So basically you're saying we're fucked. People don't care about FOSS in general, let alone when their phone says it's dangerous.
If peopele cared about privacy as much as politics pretends they do, we'd have solved so many problems in society.
Fortunately, those fighting, albeit a minority, have done great work in protecting this. No reason to stop now.
Yeah we are fucked, but as long as a small percentage of us, like 1% of the population knows, understands and agrees with the idea I think we are fine.
We'll have to initiate solid self defense protocol though. I think the first thing we should do is get a new logical fallacy term officially coined.
Stallman/StallManned Abusing the principles of the Slippery Slope to discredit perfectly rational predictions
Really difficult because you need to have two devices.
One mandated be the establishment and one mandated by visions and freedom.
But it would be a great start.
On my work laptop I am mandated to use Windows 11 but I run (and when I have time) I develop FOSS.
Imagine needing to agree with a TOS that can lock you out of your phone when they change/add some random new policy