”We should respect freedoms and not restrict them arbitrarily… except when I do not like the people using those freedoms.“
It is always a weird take to me. Pick a license that matches your preferences, like the GPL. Do not pick MIT/whatever and then complain when corps make use of the freedoms you afforded them.
But you can also take a noncommercial GPL software, slightly modify and put your logo and name on it, do some marketing and get cash out of it without contributing anything significant. You just can't make it proprietary. But it's still an unfair situation.
If you don't want your software used commercially, don't Open Source (or Free Software) it. Maybe a CC-NC license if you want to give it away for noncommercial use.
The rest of us will continue to use and make OSS and enjoy it without worrying about what others are doing with it.
But the GPL goes even further than that, and this appears to be the source of your confusion. The GPL stops people redistributing the software under terms that would restrict or prohibit use, including commercial use. The GPL guarantees that anyone receiving the software now or in the future has the same rights you have.
Companies like Microsoft with huge marketing departments hate the GPL because they don't like their users to be free. It's part of their business strategy to keep people locked in. That alone should tell you it's probably not for for you. Sadly you seem to have been taken by their bs, though.
Someone can absolutely fork your software and use it commercially. That's what FOSS is about: You shall not limit what other people can do with the software.
You may however restrict others from putting restrictions on derivative works of your software. That's what the GPL is all about. You enforce reciprocity and ensure that all works based on your software allow the user the essential freedoms of free software.
(Alternately, Google for people trying to get the full sourcecode to their Android phones from Samsung and see how difficult it can be).
Many human problems could be solved if humans were less willing to compromise with greedy people, but unfortunately authors are too nice in general to do that.
What does stick in the craw with many of us, however, is that Meta, Mapbox, and various other bigcos have nonetheless decided to disregard the attribution requirements of what is a fairly permissive licence, simply because they're sufficiently big that they can say to the OSM Foundation (annual turnover about £3.27) "suck it, we dare you to sue us".
It’s the same thing with freedoms
> younger generations raised on corporate platforms and their phone apps are less aware of non-corporate alternatives
All the new guys I work with are trapped in the app store/play store bubble. If it's not available directly through the device's software distribution system it's not getting used.
> might even be suspicious of libre and altruistic movements
All my boomer bosses think that anything that is outside the Windows/O365 ecosystem, or doesn't come with a $150 yearly license, is clearly pirate hacker software that will give your e-mail a virus and steal your bitcoin.
It is increasingly frustrating when we have a problem that could be fixed with GNU corutils and a bash script, or a raspberrypi/arduino translating between 2 serial devices, but we end up getting some $1500 black box from the 'official' vendor. It teaches the newer guys that step one is not to think about the problem, it's to grab your wallet and call a salesman.
</tangent>
It's the whole reason management consultancies exist. If Deloite tell you to do X, or Gartner say buy Y, and you do, you aren't going to have the blame. Even when you end up losing half a billion as our last CxO did, you'll just get a golden handshake and a move to another company.
Turn it all off, bury it in concrete, toss the concrete in a river and hurl the river into space, and maybe then IT will be happy with the security.
What would be a sensible fee to do support on 1000 lines of code you didn't write?
Of course, all the software in the distro repo is there because somebody went against this tendency.
I get why people might not be motivated to join us in the tragedy of the commons.
Then the project loses visibility to end users. I don't know if that is worth the occasional commercial contributions from them to satisfy their own requirements.
This post box is no longer there. "I'll drive round and check", "no need I'm stood there, it has gone". "I'll drive round tomorrow"...I got the impression i was on someone else's patch and gave up
But with regard to bodies of water, there are systems that monitor OSM and warn if someone has tried to "move them to the right place". These details were often added to OSM from professionally surveyed maps, so they are in the right place. However, ordinary people's consumer GPS is typically a few meters off, and they end up moving things to the inaccurate coordinates on their screens.
Meanwhile, the Dutch community also imports all official addresses, but there the tool simply allows for these to be used with other OpenStreetMap tags. It makes you wonder about the Danish approach.
Anecdotally, I’ve had a lot of experiences like this with newer generations of people on topics like open source software or community projects: They’ve been trained, usually by a social media niche, to believe that the only good fight is to actively harm corporations. Their idea of the world is a very clear black and white contrast with people on one side and corporations on the other.
Such a clean separation of the world only exists in ideas they get from social media and movies. Encountering a project like OSM or an open source project where the largest users (and for OSS, maybe the largest contributors) are people involved with corporations doesn’t fit into their worldview, so they file it in the “corporate” side of the divide and dislike it.
However on the other hand, it has been drilled into your head repeatedly that wanting compensation for work is "bad" and antithetical to social movements. You work for the whole, not for yourself. Besides, you (along with everyone else) gets to enjoy the fruits of others free work.
But then after dwelling on it, you realize that 90% of the people holding you to this ideology aren't contributing much if anything at all, and just gorging themselves on the work of a few.
So now you either consolidate power into your hands (nazi mods), lose motivation (project decays), or become an "evil" capitalist(start charging money for access).
You can be compensated by "gorging" on other open-source that you haven't contributed to, working outside OSS, or asking for funding to keep working or work more. But if you work privately, you're competing against someone who will work publicly, while limiting someone else who would like to use your private work but can't afford it (like you can't afford others).
You never hear about them but there are also invitation only communities where contributing is required. The benefits are not shared outside.
Any ideology built on this premise is doomed to failure. Successful movements are ones that align the particular interests of individuals with the broader goals of the community.
Dogmas that set individual interest and public interest at odds with each other will always debilitate the effectiveness of the entire movement, and subject it to never-ending internal conflict.
The free software/open source ecosystem has successfully demonstrated how public-interest idealism and for-profit commercial pursuits can not just coexist, but actually complement and reinforce each other. Anyone who's arguing for one side of the ecosystem in opposition to the other is asking for the entire thing to collapse.
This is something I've noticed as well.
- Movies made after WWII that needed villians often made them Nazis.
- During the cold war, evil villians were communists or Soviet spies.
- Movies made after the fall of the Soviet Union often make their villians evil faceless corporations.
A generation or two has been raised by Hollywood and Disney on business always being evil, while simultaneoulsy choosing to consume and make themselves dependent on giant corporate content.
It’s fascinatingly devilish, isn’t it? They control the outrage and profit from it. I’m reminded of Bill Hicks’ bit on marketing.
We’ve been very lucky that the incentive structure has them doing a lot of useful things for us, but that doesn’t mean we have to be happy about having so much of our lives being ruled by these amoral aliens.
Oh hollywood and disney, not the behaviour of Standard Oil, DeBeers, Nestle, Coca Cola, banks in the sub-prime mortgage crisis, Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, OPEC, DuPont, Chemie Grünenthal, an "epidemic" of wage theft in America estimated in the tens of billions per year, the trends towards enshittification, nickel-and-diming, rent-extraction and grifting of most products and services over time, health insurance companies, the lived experience of millions of workers being devalued, insulted, and treated like cattle?
Or maybe they just feel that corporations are actively trying to harm them and this is the logical response?
I don't think that's unfair at this point.
So I don't know that it's fair? Nearly all the material goods around me and a ton of services were provided by corporations, which are largely composed of regular people glued together at scale by bureacracy.
Correction:
Stop buy stuff.
My issue would be with the corporations, which I see as the new estates. Except that they are far larger and far more powerful than what we had two centuries ago. Their perks include: regulatory capture, political access, access to finance. Ie powerful corporations run the infrastructure for capital movement and consumption - in their interests.
Free market competition makes sense. Lowest prices.
What we see right now in the USA, though, is a mafia. That has nothing to do with capitalism as such. It is a racket, a ponzi scheme. There are many variants of capitalism. Even the chinese adapted their variant to sinomarxistic ideals (to certain extent; I don't think today's main China is purely capitalistic nor purely sinomarxistic as it once used to be).
> Capitalists hate capitalism. They don’t want to be exposed to the risks entailed by competition, and feel the goad of that insecurity. They want monopolies, or platforms, or monopoly platforms. They want assets, not businesses.
https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-capitalists-hate-...
Government intervention is the principal mechanism by which powerful participants restrain other partipants' market activity, and insulate themselves from competition.
So there is no theory/practice distinction here, because there is no applicable theory -- it's all just a description of manifest reality. Markets just are ecosystems of people engaging in value-for-value exchange with each other, and competition just is an inherent characteristic of them that's observable in reality.
> What happens in practice is that one or a small set of participants become big enough to shut others out through all sorts of tactics including locking suppliers and customers into exclusive contracts, buying out competitors, paying for ads and headlines about customers, etc., etc.
Negotiating exclusive contracts is a way of securing long-term business from a customer, motivated by a desire to prevent the customer from defecting to a competitor -- naturally, customers don't sign such agreements unless there's something in it for them.
Buying out competitors is only possible if there are competitors to buy out, which means there aren't barriers to entry, and other firms can target your weaknesses, which you're seeking to compensate for by gaining the market position of a firm that's been successful at doing so. If you can't maintain that position, someone else will fill it -- if they couldn't then the competitor you're acquiring couldn't have done it in the first place.
Paying for ads is a method of trying to win customers' business in a competitive environment. If you didn't have competition, you wouldn't need to advertise.
Everything you're listing here are methods by which firms engage in competition with each other. Every single item on your list is a tactic used by firms because they are in a competitive environment.
It's not "a competitive environment" just because it's legal to found a company if anticompetitive tactics are allowed.
You can start a railroad, but if the big existing railroads that already have lines running to the cities and factories refuse to let you connect to their service, your company has no hope of surviving.
You can start a factory making paperclips, but if the incumbent has billions of dollars in reserves and can afford to sell at a loss or barely above cost you will never be able to grow and thrive.
You can make a lot more money talking to your competitors and agreeing to fix prices or to each operate in regions that happen to not overlap, eliminating competition.
You can tell customers that if they want to buy product X that they want, they have to buy a bundle that includes Y, meaning that any competitors to Y are bound to fail since customers are already buying that version anyway.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. "History of antitrust" will give you any number of real world examples.
Unchecked Capitalism always leads to Mono/Duopolies aka Mafia. The best of both World is maybe called Social-direct-democratic-capitalism.
>What we see right now in the USA, though, is a mafia. That has nothing to do with capitalism as such.
Has everything to do with unchecked Capitalism, go too far and both extremes end in a ~Monopoly, in Socialism/Communism it's mostly the State (China, USSR, Cuba etc.) in Capitalism a massive conglomerate of Enterprises (S.Korea, again "new" China, Russia, USA, India)
But he also wasn't interested in major political change.
So we've got something that I'm surprised Europeans don't recognize; state-backed champions and heavy government intervention in various markets, and almost total free markets in sectors that the government doesn't really care about. But at no point can any one company or industry even attempt to undermine the central authority, because Deng wanted to get China out of the economic gutter, not lose power.
But the issue is not about corporations - or companies - per se.
The issue is how they relate to the general population. You can have good corporations and bad corporations. When billionaires buy legislation then something is wrong. When a corrupt elite invades countries and kills people - that's bad.
The problem of "billionaires buying legislation" is that billionaires get money from market activity to buy it with, not that it's up for sale by politicians or that the limits on the scope of legislation are insufficient?
When a military force marches into another country, that's the work of a vague "corrupt elite" and not the political officials in charge of the military?
Shock horror, people tend to care most about things that they feel personally affect them.
Samesame after a while if unchecked, just play cyberpunk 2077 ;)
So even when these people have turned into a broken clock about being anti-corporate to the point that they’re anti-open-projects, someone will always come along to explain why we everything is the fault of corporations. A normal working class person can not be faulted for their beliefs in this model, because every fault will be transformed into something that can be blamed on a corporation.
Personally I find the erasure of individual thought in this model to be demeaning. You can’t blame everything every individual does on corporations having either made them do it or forced them to believe it through their actions. At some point we have to admit that people’s thoughts and actions are their own.
If someone becomes so bitter that they’re becoming anti-OSM or anti-Wikipedia or anti-OSS, I’m fully okay with holding them to account for their chosen beliefs.
> Personally I find the erasure of individual thought in this model to be demeaning.
The fact that you are describing a behavior that you believe to be shared among a sizable group of people seems to contradict your claim that their beliefs are due to individual failings rather than some broader social forces that caused them to believe these things, no?
The historical left/marxist view is essentially: look at someone's social context and where their money comes from, and you'll know how they probably think. The American ideology is: everyone is an individual and a tramp can be a philosopher.
The second is much more appealing to us as individuals, and to our sense of self-determination and independence. And people do have agency---some people succumb to despair, others don't; some work hard, some don't; some rebound from setbacks, some don't.
But if you look at large groups of people, the first one starts to have strong explanatory power. Look at US coverage of foreign elections, and that second view is almost all you see.
US coverage of foreign elections can't indulge in personality based coverage or leverage the audience's in-built understanding of culture and politics, so you get broad statements about how urban professionals voted for party X but the rural poor voted for party Y.
I think GP pretty clearly states it's due to broader social forces:
> They’ve been trained, usually by a social media niche
I don't think that was a complicated point, but maybe you think you were asking something else, while trying to still blame whatever "social forces" TikTok has told you to blame.
I’m responding primarily to this sentiment:
> At some point we have to admit that people’s thoughts and actions are their own.
I generally find that placing blame on individuals for views that one believes are wrong is not constructive. Clearly there are reasons that they believe the things that they do, and this is especially true when you disagree not with an individual but with an entire group.
Of course anyone is free to get angry at anyone else for their individual beliefs, and I believe that individually people’s minds can be changed. But blaming individuals _who you have never met_ for behaviors that you are stereotyping from an entire group seems wholly unproductive. This is not going to change the group’s minds, and is only going to make you bitter.
When discussing group behavior, it only makes sense to discuss things that influence the whole group.
The problem isn't "corporations", it's capitalism. The economic system forces corporations to behave in anti-social ways.
Similar goes with the trope you peddle, individuals were to blame. They're not. The system they live in, and never had any say in shaping, forces them to engage in behaviors short term that ultimately run counter to their own interests long term.
Contributing to open source software or commons like Wikipedia definitely is questionable. Those contributions get monopolized and their benefits privatized. That's not a "belief".
Which bits do you object to? The idea that people should be able to form going concerns that outlive any individuals (e.g. investing in the construction of a fishing boat)? That several individuals should be able to share in the risk and profit of such a venture (e.g. a group investing in the construction, and receiving shares of the profit of each catch)? Or that they should be able to hire others on a free market for a wage or share of profits (e.g. hiring a crew for the boat)? Or that if they should have a dispute, there should be a formal, legal, process to resolve it?
The trouble is that there is no human system in which the agents who distribute the resources are perfectly aligned with the agents to whom resources are distributed. This is nowhere more obvious than in the planning, execution, and communication, failures of the Soviet Union. This is a general case of the alignment problem, which is fundamentally unsolved. I would argue that it's un-solvable as long as your agents are living organisms competing in an ecosystem.
Niches exist to be exploited. As long as the niches exist, they will be exploited. Resenting that is akin to resenting the biggest fish in the pond for being so damn aggressive - it's pointless. We live in a pond, and we should focus on maintaining the nonviolent and often ecosystem-benefitting nature of our exploitation (since it is hard-won and precarious), rather than resent the inescapable reality of its existence.
As far as I can tell none of these things existed before modern times. Mostly people were under authoritarian rule.
When you refer to "private ownership", you unreflectedly endorse things like individuals "owning" land.
The consequence of that negligence are things like environmental destruction, capturing of arable land by rent-seeking individuals and on and on. A substantial part of what currently goes wrong on the macro-scale.
"Free exchange" is a misnomer in the same vein. The "freedom" leaves people to willfully avoid asking whether they really should in the first place. More importantly, it favors people with money to impose their will upon those without.
"Due process" isn't tied to capitalism to begin with and all these things don't "span back to the dawn of agriculture".
You put up the straw man of the Soviet Union, prepping it up to the height of serving as the epitome of what humans could conceive of as alternatives (or modifications) of the existing system. That's a declaration of intellectual bankruptcy, not higher insight.
> environmental destruction, capturing of arable land by rent-seeking individuals and on and on
> asking whether they really should in the first place?
> it favors people with money to impose their will upon those without
All of these criticisms reflect a total naivety to ecosystem dynamics at play, and the motivational landscape that they create. As long as these behaviours continue to create a competitive advantage for the organisms that display them, they will continue to emerge and perpetuate. There is no method of social organization that can overcome the competitive reality of the ecosystem we live in.
You'll also note that environmental destruction, resource hoarding, and interference competition are all widespread behaviours in the natural world. We are part of that world, and are subject to the constraints that it produces.
It's like trying to overcome a bug in the CPU instruction set by writing JavaScript. The "problems" are part of the fundamental substrate and aren't addressable at the proposed layer of abstraction.
When you abstract, you leave things out. You claim to abstract from cave people. How is that the best we can do?
You pretend, humans were cells competing mindlessly. Then you conclude, any other approach than mindless behavior was naive.
You again observe animals and justify your behavior (on a vastly greater scale) by it.
How do you manage not to see the absurdity in that? You're not an animal, you have a conscious mind, capable of rational thought and according foresight.
Because that is, in a very fundamental and immutable way, who we are.
I'm saying that we live in an ecosystem, and that creates emergent properties and behaviours. Resource hoarding and interference competition are among those. No amount of consciousness, rational thought, or foresight, can change that.
As long as (e.g.) hoarding resources today makes it more likely for your offspring to succeed tomorrow, the traits that influence people to hoard resources will continue to perpetuate. It's also why, for example, we have the dark tetrad - it works.
Too high of trust creates opportunities for liars. Too many liars lowers trust to the point that it's not profitable to lie. There exists between these two points a stable equilibrium between zero liars and everyone lying all the time, and it's at neither extreme. The same is true for all other behaviours you moralize.
I'm not justifying anything, I'm simply observing the constraints of the system we live in, and inferring that any mode of social organization that ignores or opposes these constraints is doomed.
Apart from debatable (but real) genetic differences you don't know about, the crucial point is culture. We're not cave people as we don't share their culture and don't have to.
Your idea of our environment predisposing us for capitalism is simply false. Notably, the premise rests solely on your posturing here.
Your ideas about people being automata beholden to their genetic programming beyond their control is even more absurd. And lacks any basis in evidence.
You apparently have never heard about ethics. There is a difference between morals and ethics. Lying isn't wrong because "arbitrary morals" say so, it is because realistic, objective consequences tell you so.
Your idea of an "equilibrium of all behaviors" presupposes mindless automata, again.
Human societies are meta-organisms - they modify themselves over time, and compete with each other for finite resources. Any culture which sacrifices competitive advantage for any reason is simply out-competed and absorbed by other societies which make no such sacrifice. There is no escaping this reality. This is referred to as cultural group selection.
> Your idea of our environment predisposing us for capitalism is simply false. Notably, the premise rests solely on your posturing here.
I'm not saying it predisposes us to capitalism though, I'm saying it predisposes us to maximize resources and engage in competitive behaviour. This is supported by the fact that very nearly every organism in nature also engages in resource maximization and competitive behaviour (r-Selection). There is no altruism (going against genetic self interest) in nature, it's simply not sustainable.
> Your ideas about people being automata beholden to their genetic programming beyond their control is even more absurd. And lacks any basis in evidence.
I'm making no such claim. I'm simply claiming there are constraints in the system, and ignoring them doesn't make them go away.
> Lying isn't wrong because "arbitrary morals" say so, it is because realistic, objective consequences tell you so.
Any yet, no matter how hard we try, we've not managed to eliminate lying (or even agree what specifically it means). Are you really suggesting that some yet-undiscovered set of rules will create a society in which no one will ever lie? Doesn't that sound a bit.. unrealistic?
well, other systems were tried and were worse (feudalism, communism etc)
in practice capitalism with some regulations is better than known alternatives
> Contributing to open source software or commons like Wikipedia definitely is questionable
what is not questionable then?
Worse, you mistake the bounds of your personal knowledge as the borders of the world.
Even if there was no currently "known" alternative, the proper course of action is to research that and find one?
please test it properly before putting it in production, communism went poorly
> Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.
note that I am not arguing that better system is impossible - that would be silly
but "destroy capitalism" attempts went remarkably badly so far
The idea, you would have to produce a turn-key solution, beta-tested on "somebody else" is obvious nonsense and pure deflection.
In the given dire situation, you have to do the best you can, not wait for some imaginary perfect escape hatch to appear.
Not taking a side in this particular discussion, but this specific sentence looks like a self-fulfilling statement: if people disagree with you, you take it as proof that they are unable to evaluate your claim fairly.
"Or maybe they just feel that organizational methodologies used by people to coordinate complex multi-participant activities are actively trying to harm them and this is the logical response?"
No, it's quite illogical.
A million lines of C supporting 2k lines of declarative unit files is less complex from the user's perspective than 50k lines of custom bash scripts. Of course it would be better if it did the same thing in, say, 100k lines or in Rust, but perfect is the enemy of good. systemd exists today and it works fine.
Everything is regular, predictable, documented and easy to read. A file made for one distro only needs trivial changes to run on another. That's what simple really means. I would never go back to init scripts.
OpenRC, s6, rc.d (the BSD), are more simpler than the systemd ecosystem which is feature ladden and not easy to use on the common line. They are also way easier to hack upon, especially when you want to run a lean system (small vm, containers). systemd feels like running windows server for a small php application. The happy path is easy, anything outside of that is torture.
If indeed, their contributions serve mainly to enrich corporations that then contribute to the subversion of the political system through corruption, anti-democratic measures and so on, that's an entirely reasonable response.
Craft is Wikipedia / OSM for software. We're building an open source AI software factory to agentically remake everything.
We're going to open source all the apps, turn platforms into protocols, build open infra, and help assist open weights.
Everything will be rewritten as high quality open source software. And once we've covered the space of everything people use, we'll turn the components into highly reusable open source libraries that can be reshaped into new workflows in real time.
We're going to make a seamless bridge between local and cloud AI, we're going to make a rich set of primitives for fine tuning and sharing.
Not just applications. Data, infra, hardware, the whole of technology.
I've been around long enough to know that sustained collective enthusiasm can sometimes blindside you.
I took a brief look at the posted projects and quickly surveyed the community behind it and I'm not ready to dismiss them yet. I'm not exactly sold either, but I am going to put them on my radar and check in every few months.
Can you explain how you will resolve the tension between "high quality" without moderation who turn into Reddit "nazi moderators" or StackOverflow meanies, and without turfing out all moderators and turning into 4chan of old, trolling, and low quality overrun with ads and noise?
What social structure, organization, review, moderation, do you think will solve that tension?
Then please publish it. Others can ask Claude too but it's stupid, and one central repository will have everyone's bugfixes and feature recommendations.
Did you ask for help in the community group for your country?
> That could be fixed easily if there was a convenient app that recorded my driving and uploaded it to a central source, processed it, and converted that into edits for me to confirm.
Mapping requires more than that. GPS traces can be useful in areas where no recent aerial imagery is available, but automated importing of that would cause a lot of errors.
I really wish the world recognized and provided tax income to these projects because they have been the backbone of our ever-complex technological society for probably about thirty years. Rather than what we have now where large corporations will take a foothold in an open-source project and hollow it out for parts then sell it as a "turnkey" product like we have seen time and time again.
It is, however had, true, that the interaction pattern changed. So many walled ghettos about nowadays - look at Facebook and Google (via youtube).
There is quite a lot of open cooperation between national mapping agencies and OpenStreetMap, at least in Europe.
As for updating the name of the latest pop-up shop, the owner will just have to sort it out himself.
Most of my peers in the bicycle-travel community are uninterested in mapping, or even totally unaware of where maps come from. Apps like Komoot became standard tools for cyclists, but only a minority ever learned that its data derives from OSM and anyone can edit it.