[HN Gopher] Can we deter tech monopolies through reformed open s...
___________________________________________________________________
Can we deter tech monopolies through reformed open source software
development?
Author : andsoitis
Score : 72 points
Date : 2023-11-22 14:16 UTC (8 hours ago)
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| xkekjrktllss wrote:
| No.
| reportgunner wrote:
| Betteridge's law strikes again.
| tycho-newman wrote:
| No.
|
| Why do we spend all this time avoiding the truth? We have
| antitrust _laws_ to dismantle monopolies. This is because
| monopolies can be dismantled by two things:
|
| 1. The coercive power of the state.
|
| 2. A sudden realization among those who run and benefit from the
| monopoly that selfless love for their fellow human beings is
| enough reason to stop predatory rent-seeking.
|
| In other words, only love or power. We spend a lot of time not
| talking about the two main forces that guide human life. Not
| reason. Not reformed open source software development. Love and
| power.
|
| I often suspect this reluctance to involve the coercive power of
| the state comes from a libertarian streak in the tech world. But
| I am a weird anarchist kind of guy so maybe I am mistaken on
| this.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| As the article touches on, we spend the time because people
| want to address companies like Facebook, which are not
| obviously monopolies in the normal legal sense. They don't
| overcharge users, they have strong competitors, etc. But
| they're still a huge tech company with outsized influence on
| both society and software development industry.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| I'd argue they are a monopoly in the traditonal sense too.
| They control the whole stack like standard oil. They probably
| do overcharge their actual users/customers (the advertisers,
| not you, the product they sell access to). The more you read
| about places like standard oil the more they reflect these
| modern companies.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > This is because monopolies can be dismantled by two things:
|
| > 1. The coercive power of the state.
|
| > 2. A sudden realization among those who run and benefit from
| the monopoly that selfless love for their fellow human beings
| is enough reason to stop predatory rent-seeking.
|
| You're missing the third option: Someone else finds a way to
| break their lock on the market.
|
| In many cases this happens indirectly. If you had a monopoly on
| local media before the internet, you don't have one after the
| internet.
|
| But that doesn't mean you can't do it with a purpose.
|
| In many cases this requires an act of altruism. To break the
| monopoly, somebody has to spend non-trivial resources to
| reproduce the ability to do something that currently only the
| monopolist can, without hope of turning a profit from it.
| People can do this if they choose to.
|
| And the work required to do it can be distributed throughout a
| community.
| lumb63 wrote:
| It's humorous to me that we discuss "monopolies" over what
| are ultimately very discretionary sectors. Compare to the
| trusts of the 20th century, which were monopolizing oil or
| steel for example. These are (or were) the commodities
| required to power commerce via shipping and transportation. A
| single entity having pricing power over such essential
| commodities threatens the robustness of the world economy.
|
| Today we complain about the monopolistic power of, e.g.
| Google, who does not actually have a monopoly on search
| (there are many other providers), and the ability to search
| the entire internet isn't really that necessary, or Apple's
| mobile marketplace, where they again do not have a monopoly
| (people choose to develop for Apple devices, and part of
| choosing to sell something somewhere is agreeing to the
| market's terms - as has been the case for all of time), and
| this is mostly to power manipulative microtransactions for
| kids on games. These are entirely different ballparks.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| The thing you're missing is the "you're not the customer,
| you're the product."
|
| The customer is the app developer or the advertiser -- the
| startup Apple is extracting 30% from, or the small business
| which just wants to get its name out but Google
| systematically excludes small websites from organic search
| results and requires you to pay a huge chunk of your
| revenue to be seen.
|
| If your prospective customers have iPhones, you need
| Apple's permission or you're out of business. If your
| prospective customers use Google search, you pay them for
| advertising or you're invisible. You don't get to choose
| which phone or search engine they use, and they rarely if
| ever use more than one -- unlike retail stores where it's
| common for the same customer to shop at dozens of different
| stores.
|
| If Walmart won't carry your products in their stores, you
| can sell them through Target and Amazon and a zillion other
| retailers. The same customers can get it from another
| store. If Apple won't carry your app, those customers have
| no other viable means to get it from you.
|
| This isn't just "manipulative microtransactions for kids on
| games" -- it's the reason you can't use cryptocurrency _or
| any competing payment network_ for in-app purchases. Are
| payments not an important industry for which we care about
| competition?
|
| Apple basically murdered Tumblr by giving them an
| impossible choice between banning adult content (causing
| them to lose too much of their user base) or being banned
| from iPhones (causing them to lose too much of their user
| base). Regardless of how you feel about adult content, they
| have the power to do this over _anything_. Should they be
| able to destroy your social network or force you to censor
| if they don 't like your _politics_? How does this not
| matter?
| thisisabhii wrote:
| but why?
| onemoresoop wrote:
| No. Maybe there's a path to do this through unions though?
| Apocryphon wrote:
| (Dutch)
| Philpax wrote:
| What's the relevance of this?
| BanTheBastards wrote:
| No. Proper "reform" entails reorganizing our economy. We will all
| die before this happens.
| loup-vaillant wrote:
| Some would rather die _trying_ to make it happen.
| leashless wrote:
| I recently discussed whether Stallman's "Four Freedoms" apply to
| corporations.
|
| If not, that would change things.
| bdw5204 wrote:
| They do apply to corporations. Allowing commercial use is part
| of the definition of both "open source" and "free software" so
| a non-commercial license is incompatible with the GPL
|
| Without Stallman releasing an official Non-Commercial GPL
| (NCGPL) and allowing GPL'd software to be upgraded to it like
| it can be upgraded to AGPL, there's no way to merge non-
| commercial licensed code into GPL code without relicensing even
| if the non-commercial code is otherwise using a standard FOSS
| license.
| kube-system wrote:
| This article sounds like the author started with a conclusion and
| worked their way back to a premise. Monopolistic powers are a
| business and economics problem, it has nothing to do with the
| building blocks used to build their products.
|
| >For example, if Uber's driver rating could be exported to other
| similar ride-hailing services, it would have the effect of
| reducing the lock-in effect of Uber platform.
|
| People are not using Uber because they don't have a rating on
| newcomer apps. They're using it because Uber has a large number
| riders and drivers in many locations, and people are aware of it.
|
| > Mandate the use of open standards and open source competitor:
| All solutions must have open source alternatives before being
| implemented. For example, the Bavarian government switched the
| government operating system to Linux in 2018 to avoid being
| subject to Microsoft's monopoly on software. While the project
| was not entirely successful
|
| They discovered that there's a difference between "software" and
| "a software implementation". A myopic view of software as just
| code that you can throw over a fence is missing the entire reason
| that Windows was and is dominant on desktop. Deploying,
| integrating, maintaining, and operating software across an
| organization is labor intensive. Microsoft doesn't "compete with
| Linux", they compete with Red Hat or Canonical.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > People are not using Uber because they don't have a rating on
| newcomer apps. They're using it because Uber has a large number
| riders and drivers in many locations, and people are aware of
| it.
|
| I think the general point is that you want to move the network
| effect outside the control of a single entity. So for example,
| like email rather than like Facebook. You relegate the service
| into something narrower, like payment processing, which then
| becomes fungible. You find the driver you want in a
| decentralized system and then pay them using Uber or Paypal or
| CashApp or Mastercard or physical cash or whatever you like.
|
| > Deploying, integrating, maintaining, and operating software
| across an organization is labor intensive. Microsoft doesn't
| "compete with Linux", they compete with Red Hat or Canonical.
|
| That depends on your scale, but there are different ways to go
| about it.
|
| If you're small, just compiling something from github is a
| reasonable thing to do. You're not deploying it to a thousand
| workstations or trying to centrally manage anything. What do
| you need with Active Directory?
|
| If you're large, you have a well-staffed IT department and
| possibly even your own software developers who can handle
| deployment issues in-house. Google has its own in-house Linux
| distribution _in addition_ to ChromeOS.
|
| The target market for Windows and Red Hat and Canonical is
| medium-sized entities with enough money to pay someone else to
| solve their problems but not enough to bring that expertise in
| house.
|
| But many corporations and governments are large enough that
| they'd be better off doing what Google does, and open source
| communities can operate at the same scale. Medium sized
| companies that actually have a dedicated IT department could
| very well be better off to make a minor contribution to a
| community effort, and use it themselves, than lock themselves
| into one of these enterprise vendors. That would require more
| organization than is currently present, but not necessarily
| more than is humanly possible.
| kube-system wrote:
| > You relegate the service into something narrower, like
| payment processing, which then becomes fungible. You find the
| driver you want in a decentralized system
|
| But how? Who is going to build, maintain, and provide
| equitable and effective governance, support, and regulatory
| compliance for that system? And why are others going to use
| it?
|
| > If you're small, just compiling something from github is a
| reasonable thing to do.
|
| Most small orgs don't have IT expertise. They buy off the
| shelf hardware and software. The computers they buy come with
| an OS on them, and they use that one. What would compel them
| to install a different one?
|
| > If you're large, you have a well-staffed IT department and
| possibly even your own software developers who can handle
| deployment issues in-house. Google has its own in-house Linux
| distribution in addition to ChromeOS.
|
| Google is a software company, of course they develop
| software. Most organizations are not software companies.
| There's really no reason for other large companies like
| PepsiCo to be making their own Linux distros for their office
| staff, any more than it makes sense for Google to start
| bottling their own beverages for their cafeteria. Yes, many
| are large enough that they could -- but they'll never do as
| good as a software company does, because they aren't one.
|
| The question isn't whether they _could_ do it, the question
| is: are there enough benefits to outweigh the costs and
| risks? Are you really better off training and supporting your
| office staff to send out invoices using SumatraPDF on Ubuntu,
| just to save money on Adobe /Windows licensing? For companies
| that have nothing to do with software, this is a recipe to
| lose more money in operational problems than they save in
| licensing.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > But how? Who is going to build, maintain, and provide
| equitable and effective governance, support, and regulatory
| compliance for that system? And why are others going to use
| it?
|
| Who does it for Debian or Blender or DNS or SMTP?
|
| > Most small orgs don't have IT expertise. They buy off the
| shelf hardware and software. The computers they buy come
| with an OS on them, and they use that one. What would
| compel them to install a different one?
|
| The computer they bought came with Windows 7, but Windows 7
| isn't supported anymore. Windows 11 says it doesn't support
| that hardware. Meanwhile it's a quad core with enough RAM
| and an SSD and even if it's a few years old it's still
| fine. All they need it for is to use Google Docs and
| Chrome/Firefox. Why spend hundreds of dollars on a new
| machine when you can just have your niece install Debian?
|
| > There's really no reason for other large companies like
| PepsiCo to be making their own Linux distros for their
| office staff, any more than it makes sense for Google to
| start bottling their own beverages for their cafeteria.
|
| There is though.
|
| Bottling beverages is a low margin commodity market.
| Software isn't. If you can bottle your beverages just as
| well as Pepsi, you might save a fraction of a percent on
| something that costs you a fraction of a percent of your
| revenue. If you can cut Microsoft out of a large
| enterprise, you can eliminate tens of millions of dollars
| in licensing costs. That pays for a non-zero number of
| software developers.
|
| Meanwhile free software exists, so you're not starting from
| scratch with an empty plot of land and have to figure out
| how to mold plastic into beverage containers. You start
| with a Linux distribution that other large enterprises are
| already using and make some minor modifications to tailor
| it to your needs.
|
| > Yes, many are large enough that they could -- but they'll
| never do as good as a software company does, because they
| aren't one.
|
| In many cases they are. If you're a bank, you're "not a
| software company", but how are your customers interacting
| with you in the main? How about a health insurance company?
| A telecommunications company? An online retailer, like
| Amazon (which knows this quite well)?
|
| You don't have to be "a software company" for software to
| be a major part of your business.
|
| > Are you really better off training and supporting your
| office staff to send out invoices using SumatraPDF on
| Ubuntu, just to save money on Adobe/Windows licensing? For
| companies that have nothing to do with software, this is a
| recipe to lose more money in operational problems than they
| save in licensing.
|
| It's not just about licensing. Okay, so you save a couple
| hundred bucks per seat on licensing. That's several million
| dollars, you could justify that, but maybe it's not much
| better than breakeven.
|
| But then you're not trapped in a Skinner box, where every
| day you have to keep clicking "no" to a box that, if you
| ever click yes, you end up violating a privacy law and
| putting your company in regulatory peril. Or locking
| yourself into a vendor who can then raise prices on you by
| more than your original estimate of what they would cost,
| but by then it's too late and the cost of extricating
| yourself is now more than the cost of paying the danegeld.
|
| There is value in opting yourself out of the
| enshittification of major platforms.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > This article sounds like the author started with a conclusion
| and worked their way back to a premise.
|
| That's how all articles or persuasion techniques work! You have
| a message you want to convey in mind, and then you decide how
| to convince the reader and write accordingly!
| kube-system wrote:
| It is how persuasive essays work, but things like exploratory
| essays certainly exist.
| taeric wrote:
| If you rephrase this as fighting consolidation through open
| source software, I think it is rather clear that you cannot.
| Consolidation will always have benefits at the small. That there
| is a straw that breaks that camel's back is not an argument
| against carrying more straw.
|
| I am personally of the mind that we need to somehow shift the
| care not from personal future but to collective future. I don't
| have any thoughts on how to actually do that, though. It is very
| hard to convince people that are legitimately working hard for
| their personal well being that they should also give thoughts to
| those that come next.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > It is very hard to convince people that are legitimately
| working hard for their personal well being that they should
| also give thoughts to those that come next.
|
| What have you tried?
| taeric wrote:
| Fair question, I think? But I am not exactly in a position to
| really try anything. What do you have in mind?
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Sorry - I wasn't clear. I mean what have you tried that
| leads you to know this:
|
| > It is very hard to convince people that are legitimately
| working hard for their personal well being that they should
| also give thoughts to those that come next
| taeric wrote:
| I'm mainly reflecting on friends and family that are
| heavily anti tax. Probably most easily seen by places
| that have a hard time justifying the funding of a school
| district.
| Joker_vD wrote:
| I knew a guy who was not exactly anti-tax, but he
| believed that poor people should be taxed more heavily
| than the rich ones, the moral justification being that
| that would motivate the poor to try harder to be rich;
| plus, of course, there are more poor people, and taxing
| them would likely yield more money than taxing the rich,
| not to mention that much of the taxes go to the social
| programs to support the poor, so it's only fair if they
| paid for those themselves.
| hinkley wrote:
| I can't speak for OP but the fact that business ethics
| classes tend to be viewed not as cautionary tales but as how-
| tos indicates to me that the whole system is rotten at the
| core.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| So much worse is just how unserious they are taken. People
| consider them jokes instead of somber reflections on harms
| done by assholes and negligence.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| > It is very hard to convince people that are legitimately
| working hard for their personal well being that they should
| also give thoughts to those that come next.
|
| I think the way to do this is to put their gains in jeopardy.
| We need to sit down and find an example where some money-making
| endeavor made life worse for most people, and scrub those
| dollars from the record. Perhaps we'll do this yearly.
|
| Make dollars gained doing obvious good more reliable than
| dollars gained doing obvious harm.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| The issue is who decides the obvious good and obvious harm?
| As soon as you've made such a powerful authority it becomes a
| target for regulatory capture since the incentives if you
| pull this off are sky high.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| No need for an authority, it can be a DIY/opt-in sort of
| thing. If somebody came up to you and presented you with
| some money that had metadata re: how it was earned, you'd
| have to decide whether to accept it, so it would be up to
| you to decide if that endeavor was one you wanted to align
| yourself with.
|
| If you make that call in a way that disagrees with your
| wider community, you may end up in a situation where you
| can't find anyone else who will accept that money, so I
| expect some degree of consensus will emerge.
|
| Making that judgement call on every transaction would be
| tedious, so I imagine organizations would form which are
| trusted to make that call, and then you'd sort of
| "subscribe" your wallet to their decisions so that you
| don't have to think about it all the time.
|
| As for regulatory capture, if such an organization stopped
| aligning with your interests, you could just unsubscribe
| from their judgements and either do it yourself or form a
| competing one.
| hgomersall wrote:
| We have the sky high regulatory capture as it is, just that
| what has been captured is opaque. There are loads of things
| that corporations should be getting fined for but are not.
| Joker_vD wrote:
| > We need to sit down and find an example where some money-
| making endeavor made life worse for most people, and scrub
| those dollars from the record. Perhaps we'll do this yearly.
|
| And then what? Just sitting down and finding out that some
| thing some people did made some other people's life worse
| won't put the gains of the first group of people in jeopardy
| -- unless you do something more tangible. What do propose
| that should be?
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Once we know which money is working against our interests,
| we stop accepting that money. If people show up at the
| grocery store with it, they leave empty handed. Eventually,
| people start assessing risks differently, and stop
| investing in endeavors that are likely to leave them in
| that situation.
| hinkley wrote:
| We need a PBS for websites and a PBS for software.
|
| But some of the rules that made PBS PBS have been rolled back
| so I don't know that this will happen any time soon. In its
| place we have various foundations but those aren't enough.
| eYrKEC2 wrote:
| We're all stuck in the quagmire of Oracle databases, licenses,
| and lawsuits, because no open source alternatives exist. What a
| shame that open source hasn't deterred any monopolies and can't
| possibly do so in the future.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| No you can't
|
| American/Worldwide capitalism incentivizes monopolist behavior
|
| There are no currently coherent checks on this because of
| regulatory capture. There exist no socialist governing bodies
| that have power at the same scale as capitalist ones. (Note:
| please no "might make right" rejoinders)
|
| The us government has set precedent over the last ~40 years which
| has intentionally, and structurally enshrined the capital class
| as legally distinct and more protected in practice
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| The biggest disadvantage of open source is the lack of
| organization. Blender solved this. Solve organization and open
| source wins.
| narag wrote:
| Can you ellaborate? What exactly did Blender to solve
| organization challenges?
|
| A relevant link will suffice and be greatly appreciated :-)
| pwdisswordfishc wrote:
| h1 { font-family: 'Maven Pro', cursive; font-
| size: 38px; color: #000; line-height: 1;
| }
|
| I have Google Fonts blocked, so I see the headings on the page
| displayed using the generic cursive font which ends up being...
| Comic Sans. Which certainly gives this article a unique kind of
| gravitas.
|
| A pretty strange choice anyway, given that Maven Pro doesn't even
| seem to be a cursive font at all.
| Skunkleton wrote:
| I feel like you could make a strong argument that open source
| actually aids tech monopolies. Consider some business that needs
| <foo> to work. They can use OSS, buy, or build. If they buy, they
| share their profits with some other company, and they have to do
| that for the duration of their use of <foo>. If they build <foo>
| as proprietary software then they are stuck with keeping
| expertise in that software. If <foo> is instead OSS, then they
| can either directly use that component, or make some initial
| investment in that component, and then use it with minimal
| further overheads.
|
| If you are building, then it better be your core competence. If
| you buy, then as you become larger and more successful, buying
| will be more and more expensive. Its hard to make your suppliers
| exclusive, and competition will be somewhat maintained.
|
| The Linux Kernel is a great example. There used to be a ton of
| kernels to choose from maintained and developed by small
| businesses, but over time Linux was chosen as a good free option.
| Companies would then put relatively minor investments into
| customizing or maintaining Linux, avoiding needing a proprietary
| kernel. After 20 or so years of this, there is almost no money to
| be made as a small operating systems vendor.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| If they are the primary maintainer of <foo> then that's no
| different than building it in house and it becomes "open
| source" in the way that Android is, where they throw the code
| over the wall once a in a while but don't develop it in public.
| This only helps them in the sense that it prevents a competing
| ecosystem, by making the one they control free-as-in-beer. But
| that is something _they_ do, not something _you_ do. Whether or
| not you produce some other free software yourself isn 't going
| to change it.
|
| If they're using some common community-developed free software,
| that's good, because they contribute to it without controlling
| it, and then anyone else can use it too and it's one less
| component of the stack that someone else has to build or buy in
| order to compete with them.
| naasking wrote:
| I'm not sure how that drives monopolies though. All you've
| explained is how it lowers the barriers to market, but it does
| so for all companies, competitors included.
| jlarocco wrote:
| I feel modern "open source" is kind of a parody of the original
| intentions and it completely misses the forest for the trees.
|
| Wikipedia says the goals of the GPL are "the four freedoms to
| run, study, share, and modify the software."
|
| It's a pyrrhic victory in today's world where the building blocks
| are open source, but the full stack is not, and the software is
| running on corporate servers where users have no control over it.
|
| Companies have simply commoditized and devalued the software and
| started hoarding the far more valuable user data instead.
| ponty_rick wrote:
| Yes, large corps have weaponized open source.
| amelius wrote:
| FOSS developers should probably slap a license on it that
| says it's free unless you are a company that has a revenue
| greater than $X million dollars. This is still fair to
| everyone since for the company the price of using the
| software would be peanuts. And now at least these companies
| are paying for the development and maintenance.
| an_ko wrote:
| What stops Amazon from establishing a separate company
| called Totally Not Amazon, which employs 1 person, and
| hosts your software for the rest of Amazon, and has revenue
| much less than 1M$ so they can use it for free?
|
| If they need more capacity than 1M would plausibly buy them
| from themselves, just establish however many more identical
| companies are necessary, none of which exceed 1M$.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Probably language that suggests if amazon would like to
| do that they would need to split the entire company into
| a million pieces to each be under the revenue limit.
|
| In practice though amazon engineers would reverse
| engineer any tool they cant legally use and need.
| amelius wrote:
| This shows more what's wrong with corporate law than with
| the idea behind this license.
| kazinator wrote:
| Probably the same thing that stops Amazon from
| establishing a Totally Not Amazon that has zero revenue,
| so that Amazon can use all sorts of "free for non-
| commercial use" software.
| JAlexoid wrote:
| MongoDB and HashiCorp did that... and guess what? These
| kinds of licenses aren't open source.
| amelius wrote:
| That's only a problem if you want it to be a problem.
| JAlexoid wrote:
| It's not practically enforceable.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| Ironic that people complaining about free riders are
| trying to be free riders on the goodwill of "Open Source"
| by repurposing it to mean something else.
| indymike wrote:
| I've been burnt by "open core" in the past. Never again.
| josephcsible wrote:
| A license like that makes it no longer FOSS. The AGPLv3
| will accomplish the same goal while still being FOSS.
| amelius wrote:
| Agpl has no clause for large companies, so it's
| different.
|
| Also, may I ask what is your fundamental problem with
| such a license besides perhaps the name and purity? This
| license will only affect the insanely rich, and in a way
| that they will most likely not even feel.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| I came here to make exactly this proposal.
|
| Free Software is supposed to create a gift economy. People
| create and release their work in good faith, others copy
| and improve, and contribute back to the community. Gift
| economies work if most continue to gift their work to
| society in good faith.
|
| If some actors decide to largely take and but rarely give
| out of self-interest, or worse use their gifts to cement
| their economic position, then the gift economy turns into
| an exploitation economy. The way to fix such an economy is
| to intentionally exclude those who are exploitative.
|
| Free Software failed to create a gift economy. I am all for
| abandoning it in favor of the Guarded Free Software economy
| as you propose.
| fsflover wrote:
| Linux with its GPL works very well against the
| exploitation. A huge number of commercial companies are
| contributing to it all the time.
| ItsABytecode wrote:
| I've never really understood the difference between a
| gift economy with the expectation of reciprocity and a
| regular non-gift economy
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| In a regular economy, every exchange is a two-way
| transaction. I give you something, you give me something
| (usually of perceived equal value).
|
| In a gift economy. I gift you something. You gift someone
| something. That someone could be me, but if I don't
| need/want anything you need, then you just gift to
| someone else. If there are gifts going around all the
| time, all in good faith, then most people will receive
| what they need.
|
| You see gift economies in families or friends all the
| time. People help others according to their abilities. My
| rich friend takes me out to an expensive dinner, poor me
| gets us lunch from that famous food truck. I nurse my
| uncle when he breaks his leg. He lets my brother's son to
| live with him for free during college. There is no
| accounting of how much anyone gave. Just give what you
| can.
|
| I recommend reading Cory Doctorow's novel Walkaway which
| describes gift economies beautifully.
| kazinator wrote:
| That's not free though. That's something very similar to
| "free for non-commercial use" (with an extension allowing
| free commercial use up to a certain scale).
|
| It doesn't solve the problem of someone being able to
| operate the software on a server, where the users have no
| control of it and their data is held hostage, too.
| gtirloni wrote:
| I think you're confusing open source and free software. Open
| source was never about the full stack. It was exactly what you
| found in Wikipedia.
|
| The issue today is that people want more than open source ever
| promised. The source is available, you can make your own
| changes, you can distribute them or even start a business but
| that's not enough for most people/companies. They want a
| ecosystem, a non-profit organizing the effort, ability to buy
| support, etc. None of that were in the initial goals.
| happymellon wrote:
| This is why all these organisations which are promoting non-
| free licenses as "open source" when they mean source
| available is completely silly.
|
| Either they are BSD/GPL and accept competition or they do
| not, and they are not open source.
|
| The only update that I agree with is the AGPL because of the
| nature that software is being closed back up and not shared
| for studying purposes.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| > or even start a business
|
| Only if you're not in the SaaS space. If you are, then open-
| sourcing your tech is a risky strategy because then if you
| have any success, you start to compete with bigger players
| who take what you've invested & then it's a game of $ which
| is harder to compete with.
| j33zusjuice wrote:
| It can still be open source. The AGPL was designed for
| protections in that scenario. Unless you're suggesting the
| AGPL is insufficient. There's another one that's really
| similar, too.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| I don't know many software developers that are OK using
| AGPL software. The license will infect all products that
| someone may try to go build even if it doesn't compete.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| MongoDB and Elastic famously didn't find it to be
| sufficient, swapping to a new and non-OSI-approved
| license to protect against big cloud providers offering
| managed versions of their software.
| toast0 wrote:
| When has open sourcing your business's core software not
| been a risky strategy?
|
| If you are a software as a product company and you open
| source your software, someone else may put it into a box
| and sell it beside you.
|
| If you are a software as a business process company and you
| open source your software, some else may build into their
| business and compete against you in whatever your
| marketable output is.
|
| If you are a software as a service company, and you open
| source your software, someone may build a service that is
| remarkably similar to yours.
|
| Open source is great for things your company depends on ---
| maybe you get community improvements, and you can build and
| change it how you like; but if the core of your business is
| open source, that's a choice that makes it very easy for
| competition to form. OTOH, if you want to build something
| that other companies depend on, and there's open source
| alternatives, it's going to be hard going; I wouldn't use a
| closed source web server or database server or search
| engine, given there are good open source options; although
| maybe if those options don't work out, I'd consider a
| closed source vendor.
| jlarocco wrote:
| > The source is available, you can make your own changes, you
| can distribute them or even start a business but that's not
| enough for most people/companies.
|
| You really can't in the original sense, though. A person
| using Facebook, Spotify, or YouTube can't make any
| modifications to those products whatsoever despite a lot of
| the code being "open source". It was never about taking
| somebody else's code and making a business.
|
| More disappointing, users often don't even have direct access
| to their own data on those services.
| FwarkTheNark wrote:
| Ok, but Free Software has also failed at the stated goals--we
| still have no control over the software we use even if it's
| copyleft software backing it. This is a useless comment.
| zeruch wrote:
| "I feel modern "open source" is kind of a parody of the
| original intentions and it completely misses the forest for the
| trees."
|
| Correct.
| cenobyte wrote:
| No.
| none_to_remain wrote:
| No thanks.
| zeruch wrote:
| Not really.
|
| At this stage the weaponization/enshittification of FOSS by
| abstracting its original goals, and making it about the
| equivalent of leverage for larger firms to use for cheap
| labor/R&D will only likely change if people only use reciprocal
| licenses with clauses for SaaS firms to straighten up (e.g. AGPL
| v3) AND legally enforce them in the courts.
| jayloofah wrote:
| Unions & regulation
| fyokdrigd wrote:
| A: yes, since gpl v3, but nobody cares.
| ilaksh wrote:
| I think the key is data interoperability and open protocols.
|
| Ideally peer-based but I know federation is much more popular and
| that can work also.
|
| But it's not just the fact that they leverage open software to
| build their closed systems, it's the large networks and
| marketplaces they have. The only way to compete with that is
| through decentralized systems. Which (despite the connotation of
| the name), are the best approaches for creating large scale,
| open, holistic networks.
|
| Moving to decentralized protocols also means it is harder to
| dominate with one piece of software. Ideally the protocols are in
| some kind of protocol registry so they can evolve freely.
|
| But on some level I believe that some entity like a government
| needs to mandate this. Although I know there are many people who
| are philosophically against governments or practically against
| them due to their track record of being generally awful. But at
| some level you may have to force people to cooperate in some
| basic technical way in order to avoid the technopolies.
| kazinator wrote:
| Closed stuff can always be built on open formats and protocols.
|
| E.g. TCP/IP is open; that doesn't make the Internet and Web
| open.
|
| Open formats and protocols can serve as monopoly-enabling
| catalysts.
| drewcoo wrote:
| > Closed stuff can always be built on open formats and
| protocols.
|
| Could copyleft protocols be a thing?
| drivebyadvice wrote:
| I think decentralized networks essentially provide another
| opportunity for businesses. Look at email, or web browsers and
| how centralized they are now.
|
| Make an app for a decentralized protocol, add some polish and
| maybe give something away with it which is cheap at scale
| (storage, bandwidth) as the loss leader and establish
| dominance.
| throwawaaarrgh wrote:
| A protocol cannot stop a monopoly.
| throwawaaarrgh wrote:
| Uh, lol, no. Software development has nothing to do with business
| plans. Don't like monopolies? That's economic policy, not
| software. You can't code your way out of politics. But mandating
| legislation of open source is a great way to kill it if that's
| your goal.
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| Sadly no. Nowadays monopolies are built on open standards (Linux)
| with law-making-machete in left hand and patent-axe in right.
| Everything is open unles wideVine/trusted computing/other vendor
| lock or another smelly thing that makes you unable to use your
| own computer and requires you to marry a big tech corp.
|
| Meanwhile LibreOffice and other opensource software is staying in
| the same place as it was 10 years ago, because too open licenses
| do not require companies to push changes to the public or make
| them choose a proprietary solution instead
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| Giving example of Amazon: their vendor lock-in does not allow
| to reuse most of AWS code and requires companies to take a
| "happily-everafter" marriage with their tech, that's why
| clients, when trying to disable vendor lock-in, spend a lot of
| money to create facades that would allow to use different cloud
| providers, but usually they fail (anecdotal evidence only)
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