A lot of open source software is written by people working for corporations. Red Hat may have started out as a plucky co-op but it’s now part of IBM. MySQL is written primarily by Oracle. The fact that the source is open doesn’t mean it’s all volunteer work.
That doesn’t mean it wasn’t a massive transfer of wealth, just that for a lot of it people were paid a fraction of the wealth they created rather than none at all.
Sidenote: Here’s a good article about how software developers can wage class warfare. Some tips are: Don’t help other people learn things, never write documentation, and make your code as opaque as possible so your boss doesn’t get anything from you for free.
Valve probably stands at the company who has “given back” the most in recent history (making Desktop Linux viable for the first time ever, mostly through gaming), but even Valve has corporate America skeletons in their closet. (Like the only reason they have a decent refund option now is because Australia basically forced them, and they had to change their flash sales for European laws.)
Valve’s bigger, and unforgivable crime, is their failure to release Half Life 3.
Valve still is a corporation, decently good at open source, but still a corporation that develops and distributes a lot of closed source software. Like the github ceo once wrote: open source the engine not the car, that’s what drives open source development for them. When many use their software and contribute patches and more importantly report bugs, everyone wins.
I don’t hate Valve, but let’s be real, they’re not adding to Linux out of the goodness of their hearts: They’re doing it to protect their profits because they see that Windows is quickly becoming more closed and has its own Xbox gaming storefront. It isn’t about belief in Linux as a product, it isn’t about improving it for everyone, it’s about improving it enough for gamers so that Steam won’t be eventually locked out of the digital games sales market by Microsoft. They’re basically just buying their way out of the vendor-lock-in of putting their store on someone else’s proprietary operating system.
I don’t think Linux desktop usage jumping from 1% to nearly 3% equals “everybody wins.” Sounds like to me a lot of fuckin people are still losing. Like 97% of them at least.
I wouldn’t say it’s a complete disservice. They made the Steam Deck. And while it’s just a fancy GUI (Steam in Game Mode or whatever it’s called), that’s exactly what people need for it to become mainstream. Besides, if it wasn’t for Valve’s Proton and Wine, I wouldn’t be using Linux as a daily driver today And they (as far as I know, take this with a grain of salt) pioneered the Handheld gaming space (and before you say Nintendo or PSP. They were different than the Steam Deck or the ROG Ally)
The utter irony of this being a monetized medium.com article
An interesting read. The advocated actions have many similarities with the guild system.
I think we’d have fewer security problems if we had a tech guild. It would keep unqualified people from becoming sysadmins, for one.
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. -Adam Smith
If you think Guilds would solve security problems instead of just propping up security theater, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.
“Bricks are used in most corporate structures… Brick-layers are boot-licking capitalist class-betrayers!”
What a stupid take…
you can use that logic with just about anything
wheat feeds the workers, which do work, transferring wealth to the top, wheat is a hyper capitalist class-betraying crop!
this was never not a Pascal’s mugging thats not exactly what I ment
On the other side, Free and Open Source Software leveled the playing field for software development by quite a lot. Before FOSS you had proprietary databases, proprietary OSes, proprietary web servers, etc, at every level of the chain. Without FOSS Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office would rule the roost. Without FOSS smart phones might’ve taken years longer, and have far less choices. Without FOSS the web would be drastically different. Without FOSS development would be harder to break into, and anything you tried to produce would involve 15 different licensing fees.
Without FOSS Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office would rule the roost. Without FOSS smart phones might’ve taken years longer, and have far less choices.
Uhhh, Google Workspace isn’t FOSS and the only FOSS Office project that has market share is Libre Office with a whopping…1%.
Chromium may be “open source” but Google is definitely trying to make a walled garden, especially in respect to ads, and Chrome rules the roost. Chrome itself has plenty of proprietary software in it.
How is this any argument for something else? Your examples are weak, MS Office does rule the roost, and Chrome only rules the roost due to it being a Google product, not because of its open source bona fides.
Without FOSS smart phones might’ve taken years longer, and have far less choices.
Android is literally the reason bloatware from phone developers made a resurgence. It made modern phones worse than the shitty proprietary OSes driven by shitty phone manufacturers from the 90’s to 2007. Google allows manufacturers to install applications you can’t uninstall without rooting the device and risking your security.
How did that benefit consumers? To get a decent Android phone, you’re paying a shitload of money, just like you would be for an iPhone (a completely closed source product) and iPhone at least doesn’t have software bloat from your phone carrier/phone manufacturer.
Further, Google is literally attempting to use their web dominance to make it nearly impossible to implement ad blocking with Manifest v3. Their ad profits are more important to them than FOSS. How is denying the ability to block ads a “benefit” to consumers?
I agree with your points. But you can just download Android studio, hook your phone up in dev mode, and remove the bloatware packages as well as DT to prevent them from coming back. I did and I’ve not seen any carrier crap since.
That requires some technical knowledge that most people simply don’t have.
you can’t uninstall without rooting the device and risking your security.
I see you bought into the fear mongering. Rooting your device doesn’t compromise your security. Malware that uses an exploit to gain root access does compromise your security, but that’s independent of a user rooting.
Here is a list of the volunteers of Linux 6.1: https://lwn.net/Articles/915435/
Huawai is the biggest contributor, followed by intel, google, amd… Most volunteers are all on a payroll. Companies working together on an industry standard is still noble, though.
Everytime I go to post a minor correction comment, somebody else like you made a much better version of the same comment. This place is way better than Reddit.
Thanks, this place is full of dreamers and sometimes it feels violent to bring realism and nuance into their wonderous worldview. I’m happy my comment got upvotes, the first readers can downvote you to drown at the bottom of a comment thread. Good to have multiple voices like ours here.
So, don’t mistake this as me telling you you’re totally wrong, because you definitely do have a point and it gets under my skin too (that’s why I believe licenses like AGPL and, dare I say, SSPL should be used), but many of these companies actively contribute back to the open source software they’re using.
and are hardly the only companies using FOSS; everyone from non profits to miliary systems use it. this meme doesn’t really work when you take the whole picture into account.
Regardless of how you slice it, foss devs don’t get fairly compensated for their work.
I have two diverging responses to this - one, if they’re credited for their commits, in the purview of FOSS projects, they’re compensated as much as they expect; two - that said, I would love to see FOSS projects get more love and financial support from the community - which is why watching the GODOT project has been exciting. I’m not much of a dev, and not in a position to contribute to what they’re doing in code, but sending them some coffee money has been worthwhile.
SSPL
TIL what that is.
… and [whistles], that’s a doozy!
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Side_Public_License:
[the SSPL] primarily replaces [the AGPL v3’s] section 13 “Remote Network Interaction; Use with the GNU General Public License.” with a new section that requires that anyone who offers the functionality of SSPL-licensed software to third-parties as a service must release the entirety of their source code, including all software, APIs, and other software that would be required for a user to run an instance of the service themselves, under the SSPL. In contrast, the AGPL v3’s section 13 covers only the program itself (the copyrightable work licensed under AGPL v3).
I get what they’re going for and I sympathize with the goal, but I’m not sure there’s any software in the world that could comply with that license because it would have to release an entire container or disc image with nothing but SSPL software from the kernel on up. Does a SSPL-licensed kernel or httpd even exist?
So, without getting too into the specifics about SSPL because you and many of the critics of it I agree with in that it seems poorly thought out or too aggressive, I do think AGPL fails in some ways. Mongo and (I think) Elastic were both licensed under AGPL but made/changed to SSPL because of a perceived abuse by cloud services like Amazon. As for what exactly the cloud providers were doing that they perceived as wrong and what the best solution is I’m not too sure. It could be that Elastic’s own managed version of its product wasn’t getting any use because Amazon’s was benefiting from economy of scale and vendor lock in (“hey, we already have everything on AWS, let’s use AWS’s Elastic offering”) and if that’s the case then it’s not really a failing of software licenses and just a shitty and unfortunate situation.
One of the things libre software is trying to accomplish is letting anyone use it for anything and allowing competitors to monetize it is a valid use. It seems like Elastic and Mongo may have been trying to have a primary revenue stream be money from offering their own managed service and cloud providers were out competing with them. It’s hard to not see this as them being a parasite that will take over the host and eventually kill them both because the devs of the product will stop getting compensation.
Some products (I think QT is another example) offer a GPL/AGPL version but for a fee will give you a more traditional license (non copy left) and this allows users to have a way to keep their own code closed source while providing revenue for the creators. Win win. AGPL was made to fix a loophole of putting a GPLed product behind a web interface and then saying “hey I’m not technically distributing anything so I don’t have to release my source code.” You’d think that most enterprise folks would pay but it seems like the cloud providers didn’t need to because they found ways around AGPL or just didn’t modify anything.
Like I said in another comment, no matter how you look at the situation, open source devs are getting taken advantage of. Enterprise customers should set the example and monetarily support the devs of open source software they use. While they do sometimes it’s not the norm. Even within the same company you see mixed behaviors. Microsoft has been contributing code back to git and adding new features but also “stole” AppGet. They even interviewed the dev and asked specific questions about it. It’s just scummy. It’s a reminder that something being legal isn’t automatically ethical or moral.
They gotta want to do it I guess, lots of companies use like GPL code but don’t tell anyone.
Even if they want to do it, can they? The Wikipedia article claims that every piece of software necessary to run the service would have to be licensed as SSPL. Not just to have its source code released in compliance with whatever other copyleft or permissive license it was under, but relicensed as SSPL. That means (assuming the Wikipedia article is accurate, anyway) you can’t even run it on top of Linux and be in compliance with the license! You’d have to write your SSPL service for the bare metal hardware, or write an entire new SSPL-licensed OS for it.
