No idea who this person is but I poked around their website a bit and found them to be kind of charming, in an odd sort of way.
i believe that the free software movement is over, and that it has been over for years.
Strong disagreement. The free software movement is so, so much larger than RMS and TFSF.
the accidental benefits of the free software movement: a global community working asynchronously, sharing code without pay. these important, critical benefits, which were responsible for the absolute dominance of things like gcc, the gnu coreutils, and linux - have been hopelessly devoured. all they had to do was strip away the pesky moral movement that all of these efficiency gains carried with it - and voila. money.
Except for the part where a lot of FOSS development is done by corporate employees, for pay, because the corporation uses the software too, needs it improved, and isn’t above sharing those improvements with the rest of the world.
Need I remind you that every single web browser engine in common use is open source now? Every last one. Even the one Microsoft uses.
Why? Because it turns out that cooperating with the community, rather than fighting it, is far more efficient for all involved, behemoths included. We have made free software profitable, without sacrificing freedom.
And yeah, Predator drones run Linux. Everything runs Linux. Phones run Linux. Servers run Linux. Billboards run Linux. Routers run Linux. Video game consoles run Linux. Even Windows runs Linux. Linus Torvalds set out to achieve “world domination, fast”, and he has succeeded beyond my wildest dreams, without compromising his principles.
That’s a win for FOSS. A really, really big win. One whose magnitude and importance I think Jes severely underestimates.
I can understand the tone of the post. I’d also love devices where I can modify all of the source, change everything to how I see fit and have the freedom to not have telemetry beamed up to corporations. At the same time, I want to interact with friends and some of those friends chose closed source. I want to have my cake and eat it too and we can’t.
The world has changed since the free software movement started. It’s not enough to host your own mail server and keep a landline telephone to keep in touch. It’s not even enough to use IRC or services which, relative to today, hardly maintained their walled gardens like MSN or AIM. Some are willing to make that sacrifice, I’m not, but I don’t really like either choice. Sometimes I feel like I don’t really own my devices but at least I still have friends.
At the same time, you’re completely right. Free software didn’t lose just because grandma isn’t using a Coreboot tablet in a FOSS utopia. Anything written under the GPL requires that any (distributed) modifications have source code shared and that’s huge for anything important. Yeah, some people never pay a cent and never have, that’s kind of why they even used it in the first place. I switched to Ubuntu when Vista came to a crawling halt because it’s free and people said it’s good. I set up Linux servers at work because they host apps we need and it’s easy to sell free. Some might never pay, some might have a really weird issue which needs fixing now and they’ll throw some developers at it to ensure they get it. Free beer is the bait while free speech is the hook and, where it isn’t free beer, billions are being spent.
what a sad, cynical take as we sit here, enjoying an explosion of popularity in a new FOSS platform and a suite of applications-- as I, myself, participate in a team of devs creating a new FOSS app for Lemmy, to think the FOSS movement is over just because corporations happen to take advantage of it.
Don’t like your FOSS project being used for profit? Change your licensing scheme. but bemoaning that the philosophy, the religion of FOSS is somehow sullied by a departure from some purist vision once held is a conceit. It never belonged to you, nor, really, to anyone. That’s the point. That’s what we all signed up for. And it’s naive to think it might not ever be used in a way to which we might object. When we let our code out into the wild for anyone to use and re-use, that’s the risk we all take.
You might think that’s easy for me to say, what, with my Lemmy app that can’t be used to kill people in far-off places, and while that’s true, just as easily, someone could come along, fork our project, and make a far superior version and shut my project down overnight.
My point is that this isn’t a flaw with FOSS or even the FOSS community, it’s a societal flaw called capitalism. and, rather than distressing over who abides by some abstract philosophy of how FOSS should be used, we should focus our energies on combating the cause of the problem, not its symptoms-- and certainly not each other.
