this discussion.
the situation with free software nowadays is difficult, putting it mildly.
the problems that FOSS was intended to solve to decades ago became inactual nowadays and new challenges arose that FOSS cannot handle in its current state.
the first and foremost problem of OSS nowadays is coprorative (I intentionally spell it so, because it's similar roots with 'copro': copro-economics, copro-software and so on, all that crap they shove up to users to make money on them) invasion that penetrated and poisoned the open source from inside all around. the problem is even worse because it affected the large FOSS projects like Gnome and so on and they went undermined and rotten from inside.
when people say they use GPL license but they live on money paid by coprorations - this is plain prostitution (well, I said it). so what's the meaning in this "freedom" declarations if actually they have their code hooked on coprorations influence, the code is totally infested with purely coprorative solutions and this all serves no "freedom", no effectiveness, no quality, but some fat man's dirty business interests only. no possibility of code reuse, no decomposition, no independence of utilities, no compatibility, no scalability, no K.I.S.S. principles, nothing has left. just sold out people that cover their real intents with FOSS and GPL. hipocrisy at its worst.
so what's the meaning in FOSS nowadays and what to do to get rid of the copro-parasites. the use of GPL does not affect this in any way. we see what happens to Gnome - it turned to coprorative rag-doll and now tries to bind everything around dependent on its very doubtful "services". we see useless-d penetrated many mainstream distributions and it's a typical coprorative hook to enslave and destroy the opensource. and formally this crap is considered "FOSS", but it has nothing in common with freedom and free user or developer's choice. freedom means free choice, first of all. and many little independent projects that are published under LGPL or BSD/MIT licenses are actually more free: they're not dependent on coprorations money and don't contain the rotten code inside. so, the conclusion is simple: GPL does not protect us from this threat. this is just a fact.
what we could do to get back the real open source that we know? well, somehow we should cut out any coprorative influence on open source code. maybe a license that prohibits getting personalized and targeted donations from companies, maybe prohibit to impose coprorative interests in projects by limiting the participation of companies' paid employees in development. I think that a kind of hedge fund that hides the targets of final investments could help: a company can donate money to open source in general, but it will be spread among different projects without their direct influence. when the money is impersonated and porjects stay independent from possible influence. this may cause corruption in donations distribution, I know this. but money always bring in corruption. the ideal solution is when "free" means free from any commercial interests. maybe a totally free projects that do not accept any coprorative donations or help could be a way out. its radical but it's a variant. some kind of "pure free" license that means nobody's dirty interests were included.
and finally we should get rid of that "diversity" cancer. I don't get into people's private life. this is their own business. I don't care, absolutely. in software development only professional skills matter. so there's no need in any COCs and so on. the only demand must be the level of programming skills of developers, instead. there's no "equality" in the world and writing good code takes education, experience and knowledge. it's not dependent on race, skin color or whatever else. I don't damn care what's in someone's pants and who they think they are. "show me your code" is the only question I ask if I look for a developer.
this's what I thought about lately, in short.
maybe later I will try to put it in order and try to extract the main points and principles out of this. it's difficult to invent an effective protection against coprorative invasion, but the problem is acute and we should do something about it.
#thoughts #development #opensource #freedom
@iron_bug fixong a misplaced reply:
is gnome proprietary now or something? you are not talking about open source but your own primitive notion of perfect world. Corporation invest in FOSS not to take over with some evil intent and control the minds of the developers through magical power of money, that makes no sense, they do it to create a level playing field when one of their competitors gets too far ahead. It's a result of a competition in free market, being a naturally superior way to do R&D, it allows them join forces to gain ground on a given monopolist. When most corporations in the world are face with a choice - either microsoft takes over the world or nobody takes over the world, they obviously choose the latter. This is how gcc, linux, bsd and many other large open source projects came to be.
What GPL does is make sure that once they leveled the field it stays level forever for everyone, they can't hide any cards up their sleeves from that point on. It doesn't in any way ensure that you can single handedly build a skyscraper that will be in every aspect exactly what you like it to be. There will always be other people involved, you will have to work with those other people and find a common ground, and if what they want is not what you want you'll have to deal with it, nothing to do with open source vs proprietary software.
@iron_bug yeah sure, your galaxy brain can contain everything, and you should be the sole authority in the new world order you establish. The notions you present are primitive, the leetness of your coding skillz doesn't matter.
