Egregoros

Signal feed

Timeline

Post

Remote status

Context

5
@sun I've been saying for like five years at this point that Linux has been subverted by corporate interests where lots of different people and organizations that the end user has no practical way of vetting or opting out of or in general having any say in has captured the OS. up until now it's seemed benign to most people but this tactic of maliciously contributing to the technical development of software is a thing that SV companies have already successfully used to subvert the web (esp Google) and it's been obvious to me that they were going to start doing the same thing to Linux more openly than just contributing shit like systemd that only nerds care about
@Ree @sun the problem is that FOSS has never had any serious political commitments that could have prepared it to resist shit like this. computer touchers only think in terms of the technical merits of something without thinking in terms of the bigger picture of what the political implications are of letting corporate interests have more of an influence over projects by allowing them to contribute code, and the only thing that FOSS added to this was using licenses that these corporations will ignore anyways if they care to since they have far more resources than the FSF to win in court cases.
@nyx @sun @Ree i’ve been saying this too

many foss people are highly intelligent but they have zero street smarts and will give their free labor to corporations that will use it against them

just look at the AGPLv3 open core playbook that works literally every time: promise “free software forever”, wait for fossbros to build your entire product, wait until you have enough captive users, then gradually move features to paid SaaS until the “free” part is nothing but a useless skeleton. exact same thing also worked for android

what matters isn’t the license, what matters is whether it is free software by and for the community, or a commercial product in disguise.

never ever contribute to the latter. do not even report bugs.
@mia @sun @Ree I think of this as being an instance of a much broader societal problem of people not being proactive about organizing themselves, or taking it very seriously in general, and viewing such questions as being inconvenient politics that no one wants to deal with. there is a prevailing individualistic mentality that formed the foundations of the early F/OSS movement(s) where everyone is simply making software for themselves and releasing it out into the world if anyone else finds it useful, which in such a context where everyone knows how to program and is engaged with the software on that basis is all well and good, but that's no longer the world we live in.

I don't think it's any better to foist the responsibility of organizing onto a bunch of unpaid developers either though, and this is another broader problem of free software people seemingly not caring about or listening to their users very much but chasing after a hypothetical market share that can only be acquired by copying whatever corporate software looks like. there's been this ever widening gap between the users of the software and the people who write it, and increasingly many users have very little technical competence despite computers being far more ubiquitous than they were when Linux was first released.

idk this is something I could only really elaborate on meaningfully in a whole blog post (evergreen nyx statement =w=)

Replies

3
@nyx @sun @Ree yep that last part in particular is just making me angry.

nobody really wants “pisscord but for nerds” or “twitter but blurple” or “windows but the desktop is a spinning cube”. those aren’t alternatives, they’re poor imitations of a thing that already sucks ass. “surely more people will consider free software if only they won’t have to get used to anything different” is such an unbelievably and obviously stupid take it might as well be a CIA psyop

it’s like all foss is capable of is either unimaginative corpo mimicry or technological regression, with very few exceptions