Comment by cryo32
11 hours ago
No we won’t. We’ll make grand statements about it, leave it for commercial entities to corrupt it, then complain loudly about the state of it when we really did nothing about it.
I expect we’ve got a future of “undo forks” as I’ve called them which is rolling back to pre-insanity times and rethinking again. That’s only something people unencumbered by commercial requirements can do.
In a certain way, moving from "Free Software" to "Open Source" started this transition and it's not slowing down.
Imagine if the AGPL had become the default license for open source projects, as it was intended to when the service provider loophole in the GPL became apparent. The software industry would be unrecognizable.
Instead, millions of developers now gift corporations their work by releasing everything under MIT or Apache, and those corporations take from that treasure trove what they want and give back what they want, which is very often nothing.
Some projects , like Godot are MIT so contributors can use it for their own commercial projects.
Occasionally, EA for example, a big corp will donate some money to. Apple has created PRS to add support for Vision Pro.
If Godot was GPL it would be useless for most commercial game devs.
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I believe Open Source software sold developers the dream of "to be hired for what they have developed" and cash-in the effort they have spent as a future, stable employment.
Many die on the hill of "developing something required for free with permissive licenses for recognition which will help with their future endeavors", which is the same with other creative lines of work. As a result they are milked of their knowledge and forced to bear the burden of leading the project and handling the community while companies just use what's developed while quietly but strongly nudging the project's direction for their benefit.
If the developer gets rogue, the thing is forked and sometimes closed down with no downside to the company, but the community and the developer(s) are hung to dry, conveniently signaling other developers about what they might face if they disobey their overlords with iron fists in velvet gloves as a secondary effect.
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lying about the license to linus probably wasn't a smart move for AGPLv3 adoption. In my experience the virality clause is the main reason those projects don't get used therefor sponsored.
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Its worse. Open source will be hijacked by hype warfare companies to extract free labour and build the things they want instead of the things we want.
But that's already what open source is...
Oh that ship sailed over a decade ago. Industry appeasement is a big part of what killed Drupal.
What killed Drupal, and what replaced it? WordPress?
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Commercial entities are 95% of useful open-source (Linux, Postgres and similar — excluding leftstr-type of utilities).
Commercial entities latch onto useful open-source because it is a successful product they simply cannot compete with.
why would they compete with it when its open?
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Debian, KDE…
Note that the LF of today is basically just like any other global corporation with its own political agenda. You can just follow the money, and see that it is controlled by corporations. They neutered Torvalds, are very woke, and generally a nightmare to work with.
I always advice aspiring open source enthusiasts to stay far, far away from the Linux Foundation. It has become a barrier to software freedom these days, rather than an enabler.
Spot on!!!
Idk I swapped to a Linux-only PC last April and have been steadily shifting over to open source software for basically everything in my life. I haven’t done everything, I doubt I ever will hit 100%, but well over half the stuff I use on a daily basis I have real control over now and can audit.
Keep in mind I am not a coder/engineer, I’m just kind of a tourist in that world, so if I can do it it’s clearly very achievable for many people.
No reason to throw up your hands in defeat. We don’t need everyone to shift over everything. We just need to make sure there’s always space and demand for open source software to keep it alive.
One of the reasons why a source-based system like Gentoo is particularly nice is that you can compile your binaries with debug flags, so if you hit bad behavior you can inspect, write a patch, compile into your running system, and then push the same patch upstream.
I barely have to do it, but imho, this is how software should work and what running a computer should feel like.
It's worth noting that even more staid distributions like Debian provide you with the means to do this. It's arguably bit more complicated, but saves you a lot of time and hassle on the happy path.
I use OpenBSD and it’s actually the same thing with the additional niceties of binary packages. A bug or an issue with any program (including the kernel and drivers)? Patch and rebuild.
I'm doing exactly the same but you really don't have as much control as you may wish. I mean look at Freedesktop which is basically Redhat staff. The biggest Kernel contributor in SLOC a while back was MSFT.
Gnome and Systemd is a fine example of how fucked up this can get.
I’m on bazzite which isn’t perfect but it’s lightyears ahead of windows.
You can always find bad examples. The good news is there’s still lots of good ones out there right now. No point in being defeatist about it, just do what you can
> I have real control over now and can audit.
> Keep in mind I am not a coder/engineer
How do you control and audit something you don’t understand? What specific steps are you taking?
I depend on the community tbh. Poor phrasing, it implies I personally audit it. But ultimately if I want to I can and I know plenty of folks scour repos/compile code themselves, so if something is wrong it’ll likely come out. It’s open source, they can’t hide it from people who are looking. Also I’m not entirely ignorant - I can sometimes see when something is up, I am comfortable using a CLI, I know my way around a computer better than most.
Wouldn’t you say that’s way better than the status quo with windows/macOS?
Defeatism is easy
Which is a large part of why what cryo32 said will come to pass.
Acknowledging the result of defeatism should push us toward a different mindset, not more defeatism. Over the long run, humanity has a pretty good record, carried by the people who refuse to give up.
Only if people succumb to defeatism. There have been documented instances of that not happening.
Commenting on an Internet forum is what's easy.
> Defeatism is easy
I prefer easy.
If you prefer difficult, more power to you.
It's the same easy as falling out of a plane without a parachute. Gravity will do all the work but you'll not like what happens at the bottom.
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> I prefer easy.
Clearly you don’t feel that strongly about it. You know what would’ve been easier than making an account just to post that comment? Not doing that.
Have you also stopped working, paying your bills, showering, eating, interacting with other people? Not doing any of that is easier than doing it.
Do you have any concrete plan to make things better that doesn’t involve magical thinking or pseudo-appeals like “everyone just needs to…”?
So is taking without giving back.