To geezers like us, the elephant in the room is this article being hosted by m$. And honestly, I still can't fully trust that this isn't the Embrace phase of a long game. For the ultimate cognitive dissonance, I'd even work there because I like how they treat their employees.
On the other hand... whose screen should we be throwing sledgehammers through? The internet enabled an absolute explosion of tech, but these days it's nearing impossible to live without a smartphone. Governments tacitly support Apple and Google's monopsony to distribute apps to access government services.
Back when it was just nerds on the net, we controlled our digital lives. But today, the rug has been swept away and... the impact of our sledgehammer only isolates us from the non-nerd friends and family.
And I'll say it... if I brought a modern phone to a LUG in '96 with Candy Crush on it, y'all wouldn't get anything done for a month. It's not just resignation. Contentedness is a problem too. So I support the OSS devs I can.
Me too - it's as if the entire scene has "sold out". I'm younger than you are, but I entered the Free Software(TM) scene as a zealot and a true believer - you probably had to back in the day because the overall software quality of the entire ecosystem wasn't close to parity to proprietary solutions (some parts of it were clearly superior, e.g. Apache vs. IIS). I think this high bar resulted in a self-selected group being involved in LUGs and similar groups. These days, the bar is much lower, thanks to Github and the large number of high-quality FOSS projects that are market leaders - far better than proprietary equivalents.
My theory is that with this self-selecting filter gone, a lot of developers are now part of the community for self-serving reasons, so their attitude is ...mercenary. Its now all about "How does this project help me and make my life convenient as a developer" rather than "How does this project help software users like me": it's a subtle difference, but with far-reaching consequences.
I don't think we were naive - we thought we had won when corporations defected, but our victory was subverted and it feels more and more like most corporations are a fifth column. "Open Source Software" is slowly suffocating "Free Software".
I don't think this is a new thing, or something that is necessarily correlated. I've seen plenty of old open source projects that are totally obtuse and obscure to everyone but the developer -- having that attitude is not mutually exclusive with being a FOSS enthusiast. Probably more people are developing this stuff for money now, but that's a different thing from the "selling out" you were talking about.
Github didn't change much here if you ask me, in the old days it was Sourceforge, and you can still find a lot of those obscure projects still hosted there.
Agreed - it's not new, but its certainly related as it is at the root of the philosophical differences between BSD-style licenses and GPL, and the respective licenses popularity over time support my thesis.
Not only are more people developing stuff for money, there are fewer who are developing it to scratch an itch and giving it to the world for free. For a large number of people (too large, if you ask me), the process is now:
1. Author popular open source project
2. ???
3. Profit
Free software used to be a way to avoid exploitation, now developers (and corporations!) are tripping over themselves to exploit the popularity of their FOSS projects - that's what feels like "selling out", because money/control is the goal now.
> Github didn't change much here if you ask me, in the old days it was Sourceforge, and you can still find a lot of those obscure projects still hosted there.
Git, Github and turn-key CI lowered the bar by a lot! Forking an existing project or getting a new one off the ground is much easier now, which is a blessing and a curse - but mostly a blessing. Building and packaging software by hand (ok, using Makefiles) would filter out all, but the very committed - and that was what you had to do in the Sourceforge era. I didn't say it was impossible in the past, only that the technical (and commitment) bars were much higher
I miss those times, and places like HN are far from it. Join mastodon if you want to breathe a similar atmosphere again.
> Were we hopelessly naive?
No, Linux won hands down. Also, a lot of people warned about the coopting of FOSS from software freedom into unpaid labor. We saw it coming and couldn't stop it.
Also, what were people naive about?
I think what was naive was building OSS around service, support and consulting. Instead it could have been built around mutual benefit as a governing principle.
Free software was built around the principles of mutual benefit. OSS was coined as a "corporate friendly" label, and it is from that culture that the whole service and consulting thing comes. Service, support and consulting is how you make money from it. It wasn't naive at all - it was a cynical co-opting.
(And if you don't see the problem with the maintainers of a piece of software to also charge for support, may I direct your attention to The Shirky Principle [0] - "Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution". Software developed under this model will, over time, become byzantine, baroque, and frustrating - because that brings in the consulting cash.)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clay_Shirky#Shirky_principle
Stallman (and others e.g. Lessig) had clear visions of where they wanted to be but were thoroughly stuck in an end-of-history mindset - "we'll do the work to get this small part of society from A to B, and then we'll be at B." Well, no, then someone is going to drag parts back to A, and another is going to drag a few over to C, and after a few steps of this your rhetoric around digital freedom is going to be half fueling the propaganda of the largest, most powerful corporations in American history, and half the weak intellectual justification for a right-wing populist riot.
https://thebaffler.com/latest/capitalisms-new-clothes-morozo...
https://www.e-flux.com/journal/70/60567/the-vectoralist-clas...
I feel like all of this is trying to escape economic realities that someone has to do the work to make those binary blobs and that person deserves some sort of compensation. There's a line somewhere between supporting Bill Gates and supporting rank and file developers, and I don't purport to know where that line is, but I don't understand how "all software should be freely written by volunteers" is sustainable. Perhaps that's not the position advocated?
I think I would describe that as spite. Is it not? By long term strategy I mean strategy for building things in general. Like, I get it, I don't particularly enjoy using certain Microsoft products either. But once you get that off your company's machines, then what? There has to be somewhere to go from there.
So really, you think “building things in general” required . . . what? Calm acceptance of restrictive licensing and software patents? Or maybe we should have been nicer about it? Again, it’s like “building things” must be properly done the way we currently do it. With lots of lawyers and lots of EULAs.
This strikes me as a profoundly conservative position. How rude those Jacobins were! If only they were more polite. If only they had recognized that we live in the best of all possible worlds . . .
Back then, there was this enormous revolutionary fervor around free software, and it was intensely idealogical. You used the GPL because you wanted to fuck Microsoft and the entire concept of proprietary code. Linux was punk, not a good “solution.” And every time someone hacked up a free version of something, we all rejoiced, not because it “didn’t cost anything,” but because it was another way to make the point that the entire concept of making money off binary blobs was inherently evil. Install fests! Bring us that old 486, and we’ll make it YOURS! What a party.
Were we hopelessly naive? Maybe. Probably. But I find it depressing to read threads like this. It’s like everybody is just doing some kind of cost benefit analysis, but nobody is asking serious questions about whether the world we built is actually the world we want.
I’ll say it: If many of you had walked into some scrappy LUG in 1996, you’d have been laughed out of there as some kind of tool.
Are you a tool? I don’t know. But the resignation still bums me out. Y’all want to “support OSS devs,” not throw a sledgehammer at the screen.