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.
Or, you know, how they pioneered loot boxes and gambling to children in their games
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.
This is why I don’t agree with the GPL. It’s perfect in every way, except for the allowance to utilize the licensed work or derivatives thereof for monetary gain. Fuck that shit. You got it for free, you give it away for free.
So wait, you’re saying that anything created or developed using opens source software should be given away for free?
I am, and I’m tired of pretending it shouldn’t.
Isn’t that why FOSS survives as a model and is encouraged so much, though, so there is something to enclose and charge bullshit fees for once you fork it?
It’s particularly popular for startups to use to bootstrap their tech company and build cred shortly before they reach the “we have to actually turn a profit” phase, at which point the bean counters try to squeeze every bit for a nickel. Once they have marketshare, they say, “we are helping the competition by releasing this!” and abandon the things they actively maintain.
There is also a direct benefit for open sourcing: you can get other people to debug and improve your software for free. They go the enclosure direction once they want to squeeze their customers for more money, e.g. closing the source code and charging $x per use of the software to their service clients.
Once they’re a monopoly, companies can swing back to the open source direction because they have no competitors to worry about and can just get free dev work and good will out of it.
Microsoft loves this. They bought GitHub for a reason
My best guess about their purchase is that they wanted to do a bunch of copyright infringement of code hosted on GitHub to train their language models. Are you thinking there’s also a motivation to get free dev work another way, too?
Closed licenses are arguably better for certain left projects, particularly self-contained ones. You can use bourgeois legal nonsense to stop corpos from using your work.
I’ve seen anti-war people write open source code that ended up getting used to help fly war drones.
Closed licenses are arguably better for certain left projects
What about licenses that restrict the software from being used in a certain way? I think I’ve heard of at least one open-source license that disallows the software from being used in the military industry.
I like the idea a lot but my understanding is that they’re unenforceable. I’d go with one of those if I thought they worked, though.
