This appears to be a battle of philosophies.

May "the best business" win.

Our Dearest Zucky vs Freedom Fighter Stallman.

The enteral struggle continues.

> This appears to be a battle of philosophies. May "the best business" win.

Why do you think it's a battle? Why does anyone have to be fighting? Both groups can build the web they want to build. Both can live side by side. What's the problem?

Complaining that someone else is not building the thing you think they should be building is not a reasonable complaint.

If my local bicycle shop or running club decides they don't need a website because they've got a facebook page, some would see that as a loss to the open web.

I hate this too, but to continue the example, my actual real life bike shop struggled for years with bad websites sold to them by a succession of "developers".

The Facebook page appears to draw as much if not more business, and chap can run entire thing himself with no overheads. It's hardly a surprise some choose just to use Facebook really - as far as they are concerned its often "better" for them than the open web was, even if that is hard to swallow sometimes.

That's only a 'loss to the open web' if the open web somehow had an inherent claim to have that page in the first place.

yeah, "open" implies the freedom to choose to be hosted by a platform like Facebook if you want.

It would be a loss to the open web if, somehow, there were no alternatives but Facebook, but that isn't the case.

It took me a second on Google to find bike shops local to me that have web presences outside of Facebook. They probably have pages on Facebook as well (it would just be good business) but the web isn't a zero-sum game, one doesn't somehow cancel out the other.

One side built their ideals, and released them to the world for free, with the expectation that people would use it the way THEY imagined it would be used. Zuck (as the current victim in this discussion) took those technologies, and used them to personally enrich himself while duplicitously selling out other people's self-interests. In a world in which the original inventors of things like TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP, SSL, Postgres, and PHP never make any real money at it, the implied expectation would be to at least honor their intent. That's the deal that's been abrogated. This argument is so obvious that I am forced to assume that you're just playing devil's advocate here, for the sake of discussion, so I'll play along. And you can say that it's their fault for not monetizing those technologies, or not creating a license to prevent what's been done, and maybe that's true, but that's beside the point.

I'm not playing devil's advocate.

And I think you can see the weakness in your own argument as well! 'implied expectation' doesn't really hold any water, does it?

Part of creating freedom is you have to be prepared to be disappointed that other people use their freedom to choose to do something different to you and to disagree with you. You should embrace that as a success not complain about it, I think, because you really know you created freedom when people can safely disagree with you.

There absolutely was an implied social contract with open source in the old days: that you would NOT just take, but also give back. It’s the entire underlying ethos of the GPL. Saying that the concept doesn’t hold water is to ignore at least 20 years of hacker history.

I didn’t say the implied social contract wasn’t a thing in the mind of the open side of the web.

I’m saying it’s not reasonable to complain about people breaking an implied social contract that they never agreed to.

If I tell you that when I wrote this comment I had in mind an implied social contract that you wouldn’t disagree with me you’d just reply ‘lol no thanks I don’t want to’. I can have as many implied social contracts in my head as I want. What are they worth if you don’t feel the same way? Nothing.

Well we're just dancing around the point now. You agree that there was an implied expectation, I agree that there was no obligation to follow it. That people didn't just makes them -- maybe not bad, per se -- but certainly less-good. But, hey, a lot of businesses are run by literal sociopaths, so what did anyone expect of a person like Zuck. I mean, the "dumb fucks" comment has been out there for at least a decade, and that's really all you need to know about him.