Comment by deckard1
2 days ago
it's a real shame no one warned us this would happen when a bunch of corporatists and opportunists wrested the term "open source" from the advocates of true freedom in the late '90s.
But there was money to be made and the friends you thought were friends were just mercenaries with a shiv in their hand.
Also the FSF squandered its opportunity being RMS’ hobby / support organization and skipped a lot of important discussions, even before the skeevy behavior they’d been ignoring came to light. I used to donate in the 90s but … really feels like that was just flushing cash.
If my timelines are correct, the FSF ousted RMS before ChatGPT came out.
They actually re-appointed him to the board in 2021, also before ChatGPT came out: https://www.fsf.org/news/statement-of-fsf-board-on-election-...
ChatGPT came into the picture long after the open source issues we’re talking about were apparent. AI companies are making it even worse but solid advocacy in the 2010s or 2000s would’ve been helpful.
The FSF also ignored the SaaS revolution. They put out the AGPL but did not really market it or convert FSF projects to it.
Open source ended up disrupting the software profession; just not in the way people thought it would.
If we didn't have open source arguably developers would be more secure, way more secure, in the face of AI.
I'm just not sure how to connect this rhetoric to the facts of the source link, where a hobbyist attempted to extend some source-available code to support a new technology, and the CEO of the for-profit company who owns the license said he's not allowed to for business reasons.
You can be and I am sympathetic towards the CEO! I wouldn't accept a PR for cannibalize_my_revenue.txt either. But if we insist on analyzing the issue according to the categories you're describing, it seems undeniable that the CEO is a corporatist, and that he put an unfree license on his repository to stop people from freely modifying or redistributing it.
There were more-or-less two original spheres of OSS. There were the academics who were too "pure" and holier than thou for everyone else, and then there were commercial FOSS that OS'ed because something already reached its reasonable lifetime potential and it was cool to give away the plans to a cult classic to let it live on in some other mostly permanent, mostly released form. When OSS becomes a mindless pattern, an absolute prerequisite to investment, and/or ceases to be released without regret, resentment, and/or strings attached, then it's not cool anymore and becomes toxic.