I’m reminded of a situation that happened in a small town in Sweden.

Lots of boutique stores in the city centre moved into the newly created mall (due to the economics of malls being as they are)- the mall was also centrally located so: nothing lost.

Almost immediately after this happened; another mall was built outside of town (requiring a car to get to), but as you might expect: rents were substantially cheaper.

All those stores (via peer pressure, cost saving and so forth) moved into the new mall.

Those boutiques never returned and the high-street is dead.

— we have this same situation in tech,

We have lost the ability to function without loss leading technologies (all US based, tying those needs to whatever economic and political situation is happening in the US to the entire world), and, at some point that will have to end, but the oxygen has already left the room for anything else to exist - everything else is starved.

And, Microsoft will not save us, they are leaning into these practices and will suffer the same if US tech is regulated (as it should be). There’s no space for competition.

We sort of limp along with corporate cooperation on key technologies. Unfortunately, there are a number of places uncomfortably controlled/owned by single organizations. Think things like the npm repository.

I wonder if something like a NIH style grant system would make sense to keep opensource software funded and supported without needing corporate support. I have xz on the mind. Would that have fallen under the control of a bad actor if the original maintainer (or others) had the financial ability to dedicate their time to it's maintenance? Who knows.

The Dept of Commerce should be funding such an effort.

> We have lost the ability to function without loss leading technologies (all US based, tying those needs to whatever economic and political situation is happening in the US to the entire world)

Many countries have their own tech stack for what Google provides (think Japan, Korea, China, Russia). It's a shame how EU has completely given up its market for Google.

So should Google be regulated as a public utility? I am leaning towards search being a natural monopoly due to the huge resources required to build an index/algorithms/etc

I have been wondering how hard modern search would be to implement. More and more of the world is getting hidden behind walled gardens denied to search.

Reddit, newspapers, Facebook, Twitter, are all locked down or heavily restricted. I am sure there is still a burgeoning small web, but it is increasingly hard to find. Would many consumers notice/care if your search engine only surfaced pages from the top 1000 highest ranked domains? You would actually decrease the amount of SEO garbage you hit from Stackoverflow clones, Amazon listicles, or Grandma's cookie recipe #9381.

We should create non-profit versions of each of the archetype sites that exist. Reddit (forums), Twitter, Search, Email hosting should all have non profit versions ala Wikipedia.

For Reddit and Twitter there's already Lemmy and Mastodon.

> I am leaning towards search being a natural monopoly due to the huge resources required to build an index/algorithms/etc

A bigger issue are the network effects - no website can afford to block Google; not so much for your startup search engine.

>For humanity and the future of software’s sake we need to go back to users of software owning their software, preferably by being free and open source.

I'm in the process of setting up a Community Interest Company to facilitate this very thing. I spent a couple of decades in the world of Drupal, which is the largest open source community in terms of contributors, and have spent the last few years following and supporting the ceptr.org project which is rebuilding the tech stack aligning as to how nature works.

One of CEPTR's subprojects is Holochain.org, a distributed agent-centric open source language, and I'm using https://theweave.social/moss/ which is built on Holochain, to collaborate with my as of current one collaborator who is my support worker, funded by an Access to Work grant as I discovered and was diagnosed last year aged 50 as autistic and ADHD.

Free/Libre Open Source Software can work and be sustainable, it just takes more people getting involved in every aspect of it, and I find the biggest issue there is the majority simply don't know this stuff exists, let alone they can use it and adapt it to their needs.

So times are changing, we have the power, we just give it away every day by not making the most of what we have control over.

>the ceptr.org project which is rebuilding the tech stack aligning as to how nature works.

I like the idea of building communities and software that is inspired by nature. Btw homepage looks nice.

I honestly think SaaS, which I think is more honestly described as "renting software" is a business model that would have never worked if we hadn't curtailed so many threats to it with draconian laws

The most natural analogy for software is infrastructure. Lots of money to be made in building, maintaining, and supporting it, but as with any technology, the proposition of renting the right to use it is one that is obviously a bad deal for everyone but the rentier, and all the moreso for the fact that they can constantly make changes to the deal, including how the software functions, what one must pay for it, and what other benefits your use of it may extract from you on the behalf of its owner

I make money building software and think this feudal status quo is a terrible one that we should welcome the destruction of. Its benefits are ill-distributed and temporary, its drawbacks are dystopian, pervasive, and long-lasting, not only creating these awful deals for a wide swath of the economy, but also creating massive incentives for the rentiers in this equation to hoard competence in using these new technologies, stymying untold amounts of innovation and progress by making criminals out of tinkerers and discouraging even non-technical users from adapting them to their own needs

Isn't most infrastructure rented? I fail to see how SaaS is special in this respect. You rent internet access from your ISP, you rent roads when you pay tolls, you rent sewage access, etc.

Saying that software is infrastructure only supports the renting model.

From the perspective of thinking that this model of infrastructure is working well, I suppose. ISPs are a great example of where it kind of isn't, and the degree to which the municipality imposes regulations on infrastructure-providing companies basically predicts the degree to which the service functions well

Even the city kind of rents the maintenance to maintenance companies. Everything is a subscription, for example the maintenance of traffic lights.

SaaS is not a bad deal when users pay for the service directly.

And Google have provided tremendous value with their free tools. People forget what it was like before Gmail and Docs.

I sincerely hope we can move away from their business model, but looks to me consumers rather pay with anything but their money.

So many people have never known any different. Gmail launched in 2004. Google Docs in 2006.

So anyone who’s 18 today has never known a world without it.

People don’t know what the save icon is in reality.

Paying for things is interesting as media streaming is frequently valued by paying for it, collaboration and things like Google Maps not so much.

I remember using a Palm Pilot with Tom Tom, and an old maps pack that didn’t have half the new main roads included in the UK! I’d honestly pay for Google Maps for the value I get from it.

OTOH something you pay for is much safer and more reliable in multiple ways. I've been in "interesting" situations before with Google Maps, here's one scenario:

You begin a trip with driving directions, but 2/3 of the way in your phone shuts off because you forgot to plug it in. When you get it going again you have no service. You open Google Maps and... nothing. Your directions are gone, and you can't load them again because you don't have network connectivity. I believe due to the restart this is even the case if Maps happens to give you the "download offline directions" option and you accept (which they don't always do). AFAICT there is no way to "reload" downloaded offline directions, only a search bar which does nothing without network connectivity.

Google only really makes things that serve Google's interests, that's why they'll never fix this. If you, the user, put yourself in a situation where you depend on them, you're the sucker. Google has no incentive to actually make the product good for users, they just have to make it good enough that a sufficiently large number of users look at the advertisements in it. I'd much rather buy software and services from a company that has better aligned incentives. That's why I keep a paperback road atlas in my car.

Very off-topic by now, but I have Organic Maps as a backup on Android. Downloaded the entire Eastern US and that works surprisingly well in a pinch.

It's hard to beat Google Maps for POI discovery though

For maps specifically, OpenStreetMap is free and better in a lot of ways (not least being able to easily download everything offline)

Google used to be Writely and Google has improved it very little after the acquisition and integration.

We had Google docs before Google released it and it would have prevailed as an independent company if the authorities had had any interest in preventing trust and oligarchy

> Google used to be Writely and Google has improved it very little after the acquisition and integration.

I don't think you're correctly remembering Writely or early Google docs. Expectations were very different back when ajax was still a cutting edge buzz word.

I can only speak as one consumer, but I definitely prefer paying for things once instead of multiple times and also I don't actually own them.

> All of our core service and software is locked up in a handful of companies.

> For humanity and the future of software’s sake we need to go back to users of software owning their software, preferably by being free and open source.

This sounds like a decent plan. Why not start executing the first step of it today?

What is the first step? Surely you can't mean the author using open source software (which they might already), or writing new open-source software like they envision? In the face of the societal changes they are talking about, one person will accomplish nothing. So the first step must be writing about it, trying to convince other people, or maybe developing their ideas so that instead of just a goal, they have a reasonable mechanism to get there.

Or is that the actual first step to make a societal-level change? Maybe it's better to make millions of dollars under the existing regime, and then found or fund a think-tank to get certain politicians elected.

Run for office, propose a bill. Do anything other than just sit here and complain about it on a forum.

> For humanity and the future of software’s sake we need to go back to users of software owning their software, preferably by being free and open source.

That ship has sailed in my opinion. I am under the impression most enterprise and public facing open source projects are fauxpen-source and use FOSS as bait for commercial support and freemium plugins. I am at the point where between two solutions, one fully commercial where I don't even host but can export data out and has strong GDPR compliance and an open source one with a locked-in scheme then I'd rather go with the commercial one because at least I am not under the delusion that I am financing feature-parity open source alternatives to commercial products. I draw the line at formats and protocols, maybe ? /rant

It's not so horrid once you realize physical resources we all need for daily existence are locked up by a handful of countries, run by buffoons who have no interest in or understanding of philosophy, science or engineering.

Your existence is contingent upon people the best of whom (ones who at least read) think 48 laws of power is a how-to manual. You live among people who know less than nothing.

Software is a land of idealistic, capable angels by comparison.

I feel like this discussion is like squabbling over weather the private highway conglomerate should be broken up and what the consequences would be for users who have been benefiting from toll-free road usage subsidized by billboards and other shady tactics. In both cases the real answer is that what is effectively public infrastructure should neither be run as one private corporation nor split into many private corporations but deprivatized entirely.