Comment by utopiah
3 days ago
"We should be able to trust that our tools will remain the tools we actually signed up to use."
Yep... well that's what free software and open-source is for. You can't trust corporations so you MUST have the actual code. Harsh lesson but at least if something is learned and the mistake not repeated, that's OK.
Free and open source is necessary but not sufficient to protect you from the bait and switch (or general lock-in).
You need at least:
1. A Copyleft license
2. Rights staying with the authors, no CLA, no Copyright assignment
3. A diverse enough set of truly independent contributors to reliably prevent collusion.
Bonus points if everything is held together by an organization that operates for the good of the public (and not only its members, 501(c)(3) > 501(c)(6)).
Good examples are Linux, Git, Inkscspe and QEMU. Notably all software from the 90s or early 2000s.
OSS isn't sufficient. It must also be forkable by a small team. If the software grows complex enough, like Chromium, it doesn't really matter much if the code is open or not.
I'm not sure, maybe the architecture itself is what matters. I'm thinking about the Linux kernel. Nobody, not even large companies, might be able to handle it, but each focuses on their own driver, some on specific parts, maybe it's manageable. So Chromium itself is too large but I'm not sure if the size of the team is the main criterium. There are other browsers (in fact I even have https://browser.engineering on my desk and I wrote my own toy browser) so I'm wondering what indeed makes a project manageable. Maybe its the expectations that make it impossible to handle and that it is used strategically, both in Android or Chromium, to make sure nobody else indeed can keep pace.
> well that's what free software is for
FTFY. Free software is the user-freedom fork of that concept, while open source is the developer-corporation-freedom fork.
You have the source to everything you use in life right? You can make your own car, patrol, shampoo, grow your own food, build your own house, wire your own electricity (and generate it), can switch to having your own reserve of drinking water anytime and plumb it, etc.
Nothing against you personally but that kind of logic is getting old. I get it that you don't trust corporations but asserting it like open source projects don't do rug pulls, and like having the source because you can spin up the version you even if they screw you over means it's safe is missing the point of how we all function as a society.
The problem isn't open source or corporations to begin with or someone made the mistake of trusting someone who seemed trustworthy to begin with, and people who take the opportunity to push their own beliefs and narratives by capitalizing on emotional situations like this instead of finding constructive ways to make things better are the worst.
If I woke up one day to find some corporation had snuck in overnight and subbed out my shampoo for their newest scent without asking, then yeah I'd be looking for more reliable options for that too
The car is a better example. I'd be infuriated if my car received an OTA that made it play ads or something. I have to trust that the company won't do that (or buy a car that doesn't have OTA capability).
As others pointed out it's not the same dynamic when it's not about software.
The big picture is that agency was lost and that's not OK.
> You can make your own car, patrol, shampoo, grow your own food, build your own house, wire your own electricity (and generate it), can switch to having your own reserve of drinking water anytime and plumb it, etc.
*can* is a lot better then *do*. I would prefer that all of these processes be documented such that new sources of these products and services can be created if need be. That's really what having the source for a given piece of software is; the documentation required to reproduce it.
Imagine if the process of generating electricity was a big secret and controlled by a single company. That company would be unreasonably powerful, no?
I trust corporations enough that i do pay them to provide me with goods and services. I do not trust them enough to set them up as the only viable source for goods and services.