The fact you're looking at this on an ActivityPub-enabled Fediverse app demonstrates that a community of focused individuals can create a global-scale network around an open standard that rivals (or, frankly, beats) pretty much anything capitalism could create, even at its 'best'.
And these communities create without profit motive - just because they share a vision and think it'd be a good thing. All they require is sustainability, not exploitative profit.
I think that's worth celebrating.
@lightweight Exacrly. And now put yourself in the place of wealthy capitalists reading this, knowing it’s true, and hell bent on proving it otherwise with billions in their war chest and the threat we and these spaces face becomes clear. (And yet I still see folks celebrating every billionaire, venture capitalist, and Silicon Valley corporation that joins or otherwise expresses an interest in the fediverse as a win… like sheep celebrating the arrival of the wolves.)
@aral yup, agreed. I guess I have to have faith that people like Eugen and others will mostly recognise the need to keep these tools open. It'll be interesting to see the reaction when someone in the community 'blinks' and sells out.
@lightweight Darn thing is, they can easily write their own tools. Cloudflare’s already doing it. And I’m sure there are a number of embrace, extend, extinguish-based plans floating around (if not being implemented) as we speak.
We must, at the very least, ensure these folks aren’t legitimised. The only time we have any power whatsoever to fight these attempts is at the start, when they don’t yet have scale/network effects. That’s the only time you can kill a Silicon Valley startup.
@aral yes, I agree that it's best to stomp on them early.
@lightweight @aral It's futile. It requires educating the masses about such risks, and nobody has the incentives to do that at scale.
I now think that the FOSS licenses themselves are problematic. Don't "gift" things to the already powerful. FOSS gets us network effect for "usage (without restrictions)". What we need is network effect for "good usage".
Well Free Software movement addressed this with the GPL license, then came the Open Source™ guys that tried to rebrand FS but accidentally opened the door to “give-away” licenses.
@lightweight @post @aral All GPL cares about is user's freedom to run and inspect the software on her own device. It became completely irrelevant in the era of SaaS where the software lives on the server and user simply interacts with the UI. Presently, Developers are creating lots and lots of free software, but users are not using it. Instead, companies are building exploitative SaaS with all this FOSS, and the developer of the FOSS software have no way to stop participating in this.
@lightweight @post @aral More and more, it feels irresponsible to release FOSS that can be used by companies to build exploitative SaaS. Sadly, many devs still don't realize this. Add a slight restriction on top of MIT and hordes of devs start complaining "This is not open-source!" without pausing and working out the consequences of "open-source".
@nilesh @post @aral I'm pretty comfortable that the #AGPL protects users of SaaS services from being locked into #FOSS commercial services. Yes - they might have a lot of data to move if they want to abandon the commercial provider they've chosen, but there's always an escape route if desired. The same is not true for proprietary or SaaS built on weakly (not #Copyleft) licensed components.
@post It was not accidental.
@post @nilesh @aral I agree. #Copyleft is by far our best defence, although it's just *part* of the equation. Weak #FOSS licenses are not a good fit - they are predicated on the idea that all software value is derived from proprietary code, and make it easy to close what was originally open. And that's dumb.