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It’s crazy how many people I’ve seen since joining Lemmy who don’t realize this - it happened so many times before, and I would assume will eventually happen with ActivityPub as well… like anything else online, enjoy it while it lasts.
Linux is still kicking as an independent project 30 years in, despite the success of monetizing it. The EEE strategy has been tried by many.
Granted, that’s in no small part because Linus Torvalds keeps driving it. It will be interesting to see how he manages succession in the next few years.
They’re trying again with Red Hat. Probably the second biggest implosion in the last few weeks.
Although, I would argue that what RH is doing is more “monetizing their investment” rather than a EEE strategy. Red Hat has done some wonderful things for the Linux ecosystem, and it absolutely sucks that they are trying to move their work under support contracts when it used to be freely available. But RedHat is not really essential for the Linux enterprise. You can buy robust support for several flavors of Debian, and of course SUSE is still out there kicking it old school.
Linux is a very unique project in many ways, so I don’t think it’s the best example.
There’s Wikipedia as another example.
We shouldn’t let them make us act like we’ve already lost.
The big difference is that the Linux Foundation and Wikipedia are non profit organizations. Companies exist to make money plain and simple. You cannot use a company to improve society, since profit is ultimately the only motive. Even the most altruistic of company owners will die eventually, and profit will become the driver again at some point. Non profits are the only way to maintain humanity advancing projects, since money isn’t the motive.