The welfare queen megacorps have been too comfortable expecting handouts like open source charity work and public bailouts. Open source software has served the elite executive class while leaving working people to depend on anti-freedom proprietary offerings. I am sick of watching it go down like that. The never-ending data leaks, dark patterns, lock-in strategies, and attacks on encryption and freedom of speech, are all exacerbated by this tendency to yield the commons to the ruling class. If open source doesn’t serve working people, I don’t care a lick for it anymore. Cheers to Stallman and all, but this is where his proposals fell short.
Where the GNU project always fell short in my opinion was that it thought there was a difference between free to use and free as in beer.
There was an abundance of people who predicted where the internet would head once big corporations got into it. There is an entire genre of cyberpunk authors who did after all, and I guess Stallman gets credit for trying to stop it, but it always comes down to money.
It’s very easy to fool yourself into thinking differently, but the harsh truth is that everything you do for money is being weighed and evaluated by someone in the management chain whom, at the very least, considers if you’re worth your cost, every three months.
I just don’t see how OSS is supposed to have changed in that regard. Maybe it was more ideological when it was mainly paid for by academia, but someone still paid for it, and considering how much OSS has improved in the wake of corporate capitalism taking over, academia don’t appear to have paid enough.
That’s easy for me to say of course, I have no solutions, but I still think we’re better off now than ever.
