I’ve seen a lot of posts about the Red Hat situation, and it made me want to talk about something I’ve been thinking about for some time.
Personally, I think Linux is inevitable. It’s only getting better, and eventually there will be no real reason to use something like Windows. As a result, there are going to be distros that are going to be heavily dictated or influenced by large corporations, but that’s fine. It’s very similar to federation. If Microsoft does something shitty with Windows, you don’t really have a choice but to deal with it, or to move to a similarly closed competitor. With Linux, that changes. You might have WindowsLinux or something like that, and Microsoft could put in all the insane telemetry, but only people who specifically need what Microsoft would offer will use it. Everyone else can just use the upstreamed code, and/or remove the telemetry - remember, it’s open source. The big thing here is how much control any single company can have. For all the FUD that was/is pushed about systemd, what we’ve actually seen within the Linux ecosystem is that it’s robust. Other distros still function perfectly well using systemd alternatives, with minimal if any feature loss. Even if a major part of the Linux system starts going haywire, it’s always possible for the community to create an alternative or a fork, without losing the surrounding work.
None of this is the case with a closed source system. That’s the beauty of open source. I think people get very scared at the ideas of corporations being involved, but corporations being involved is essentially why Linux is currently as viable as it is for end users. Hell, personally, I stopped using GNOME because of its seemingly user-hostile attitudes. I jumped to KDE which is only getting better, and seeing increasing user numbers for the same reasons I left GNOME. That’s a good thing. FOSS gives people the ability to move away from toxic platforms and shitty choices, so I think everyone needs to just take a deep breath and calm down.
We’re good.
I think all the flexibility and distributed nature of open source is simultaneously it’s greatest strength and greatest weakness. It allows us to do so much, to tailor it to our specific needs, to remix and share, and to grow communities around common goals. But at the same time, those communities so rarely come together to agree on standards, we reinvent the wheel over and over, and so we can flounder vs big corporations with more clearly defined leadership. Flexibility and options seems to lead to an inability to compromise.
But also I think open source and standards have become a battleground for Big Tech, with different mega-corps looking to capitalise on their ideas and hinder those of their competitors. Microsoft trying to push TypeScript into the ECMCA Script standard, Google trying to force AMP down our throats, Apple saying fuck-off to web standards/applications, the whole Snaps/Flatpak/Appimage thing, WebAssembley not having access to the DOM, etc.
I think one of the great things that open source does is that it effectively puts the code in people’s hands and it’s up to them to get value out of that however they can. But so often now it’s these mega-corps that can garner the most value out of them - they can best market their offers, collect the most data to drive the software, bring to bare the most compute power, buy up and kill any threats to their business, and ultimately tip the balance very firmly in their favour.
Open source software needs contributors, without them it’s nothing - sure you can fork the codebase, but can you fork the team?
Most people do the work because they love it - it’s not even because they particularly want to use the software they create, it’s the act of creating it that is fun and engaging for them. But I wonder if perhaps we’re starting to cross a threshold where more restrictive licenses could start to gain more popularity - to bring back some semblance of balance between the relationship of community contributors and mega-corps.
