That’s not an opinion, that’s a fact.
Here’s an article all about how ‘open source’ coopted and recuperated ‘free software’ movement to the benefit of corps.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230703044529/https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-meme-hustler
The enduring emptiness of our technology debates has one main cause, and his name is Tim O’Reilly. The founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, a seemingly omnipotent publisher of technology books and a tireless organizer of trendy conferences, O’Reilly is one of the most influential thinkers in Silicon Valley. Entire fields of thought—from computing to management theory to public administration—have already surrendered to his buzzwordophilia, but O’Reilly keeps pressing on. Over the past fifteen years, he has given us such gems of analytical precision as “open source,” “Web 2.0,” “government as a platform,” and “architecture of participation.” O’Reilly doesn’t coin all of his favorite expressions, but he promotes them with religious zeal and enviable perseverance. While Washington prides itself on Frank Luntz, the Republican strategist who rebranded “global warming” as “climate change” and turned “estate tax” into “death tax,” Silicon Valley has found its own Frank Luntz in Tim O’Reilly.
That may be true, but there is (usually) also an upside. Any fixes and modifications must be shared back. Thank you copyleft licenses. Thank you GPL.
Man, I’m so glad that the Border Patrol is using my tech to violently abuse refugees! It’s extra awesome that they sent back some modifications! I love it when I get help from *checks notes… fucking Nazis.
This is a joke, right? Cool beans that the people who decided to use the code for nefarious purposes helped make it cleaner. /s
Seriously, that’s really pathetic for an “upside.”
While we might not agree with immigration policy and power abuse, it’s hard to put moral limitations on who gets to use our software. While the example you gave is far from trivial.
The second we say someone can’t use our software for whatever reason, that’s the second the software is no longer truly free. It’s same with Open data.
If you set in writing that your software can be used by anyone, then you also take away the power of those in high places to interpret the licence in a discriminatory way.
Negativland helped create a Creative Commons license whose purpose was literally that. You didn’t have to give attribution to the original artist, but you were disallowed from using the work for profit/in advertisements/et cetera. The issue is backwards copyright law that says the only way copyright should be distributed is through ownership and capital. We need a copyright law that respects the original creators intent, if they don’t want it used commercially/in government. Not all of us are Tom Waits (who famously refused to license his work for commercial purposes) and happen to have the money to fight misuse of our creations in court.
Those of us who work in tech need to have a serious reckoning about our contributions to this sort of dynamic and the sort of social environment it incentivizes us to gravitate towards, maintain, and create.
There also needs to be some discussion of class in tech and how the bull pen tech support grunts are going to have very different incentives from the senior technician making 7 figures on top of mad stock options.
Nobody listened to Negativland enough when it mattered. They helped develop Creative Commons licenses and were pretty much the spearhead for the “no attribution but you can’t use it for commercial purposes” license. I’m not sure if that one even exists anymore, but it seems like Creative Commons is also pretty dead-in-the-water these days. They understood the need to define ownership and be able to say “No, corporations can’t just use it freely.”
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 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.
Valve’s bigger, and unforgivable crime, is their failure to release Half Life 3.
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)
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.
The utter irony of this being a monetized medium.com article
