It"s a difficult viewpoint given where money flows. A better method shoupd be more government funded software, with a FOSS requirement since it's tax dollars.
That being said, I'm very fortunate to be working for a company that releases software under MIT and/or SSPLv1, and we use almost exclusively Open Source for our infrastructure and back office (decisions I made, but had the strong, proactive backing of our CEO/Founders).
Heh. It's a very software-centric view. Open source trivializes things that can run as software on readily available hardware, but if there's a linear relationship between cost of hardware/manufacture and results you aren't solving much of the gatekeeping. There's plenty of open source availability for a lot of stuff, from email to LLMs, that nobody self-hosts. The problem isn't the underlying reproduction rights.
I will say this, I don't care about what the author or anybody else "supports". If we should have learned something from the last decade or two is that "support" means jack shit.
I care about regulation. And just like I think education, transportation, medical patents, health care and other key resources should be fundamentally public by law, the same is true of other technologies.
I love the thought, but it the thinking behind it is very utopian. It doesn't match the real world. In my experience, if a company can't make all of the profit from a thing they invest in, they simply won't invest. I wish that wasn't the case, but it's what I've seen. The C-Suite and management would rather make 100% profit from living in the dark ages compared to "just" 99% of the profit from pushing the world forward.
Consider, though, the value you received in non-monetary terms. How much would you have had to pay?
Counterpoint: "I support drone strikes in random developing countries as long as the drones are open source" doesn't really sound that good lol
Paying for closed source software is kind of like voting for your oppressors. Using closed source software is literally like giving away access to your computer in hope that your computer may be used in a way you’d prefer… The software economy is the only reason I don’t create software. The customer is rarely the user.
"I only eat food that's free."
I fully support open source software, but it's not feasible under the current economic system to expect everyone to exclusively contribute to open source projects.
I agree.
Even more broadly, politically - copyleft in general is very unpopular with people, even amongst leftists and self-identified communists who you'd think would be all about that since y'know, good of the commons and the fact that communist states literally didn't give a fuck about copyright and the literature seeing it transparently as another government method of enforcing corporate power, especially apparent today when it comes to pharmaceuticals snd the fact that capitalism needs this intellectual property monopoly as an added incentive for R&D is an issue with capitalism's broken incentive structures, not cost in and of itself or science/technology.
Few people seem to understand the power of intellectual property, and various critics of corporate technology either omit mentioning or openly defend intellectual property, despite corporations having monopolies being the reason enshittification is such a phenomenon in the first place.
It seems like a lot of arguments about the role of technology in society instead boil down to more-stuffism vs. less-stuffism, usually based on emotionally charged preference for modern aesthetics or how much they believe the noble savage/appeal to nature fallacies.
When it comes to AI for instance, anyone reasonable can see that if it's open sourced for everyone to use then it's just a simple common good like a public library, use it (responsibly) and there's no issue.
Closed source private models in use by corporations suck up the environment (which belongs to everyone) and use the capital they steal from wage workers who actually produce the things they sell to give themselves leverage over said consumers/workers and other corporations, and this is not fair to the 99%.
Picture a world where AI is good enough to where it actually provides value to use it in a good chunk of jobs, and the best AI is corporate and closed source, and they just enshittified it and jacked up the prices, but if you want to get a job, you better know how to use it well. It would mean that corpo has an enormous power over your life now and you got little choice but to pony up, and they can raise prices whenever they want and snowball that capital into more and more.
I think the reason in this instance is that a lot of artists are bourgeoisie themselves and they understand that. They may be progressive as a personality trait/gimmick/style and talk about "empathy" but they understand the material reality of things.
They had the opportunities and the room for failure necessary to go into such a high risk field, and their ultimate form of commercial success is essentially using that privilege to create intellectual property they could make money from, hence the "concerns" over "style theft" and moralist fearmongering over vaguely defined concepts like "soulless", which is usually as arbitrary as "white" for racists (not implying equivalence here).
I find generally that a lot of the anti-AI viewpoints are simple self-serving veils of bourgeoisie who's capital is threatened, no different from the culture war fearmongering about vaping, a dying grasp of the tobacco companies of old threatened by shenzen gadget slop factories.
The material reality is that digital goods are effectively infinite, copying an image isn't a crime nevermind copying a style or some such, it is transparently absurd to imply otherwise.
How the world "should" respond to the thing we care about is an actively counter-productive thing to get hung up on.
Its much important how they do respond to it, and how we can reach those who don't connect with it
(And that doesn't just lecturing people and trying to brow beat them into caring about it, which seems like the default approach for a lot of foss folks 🥲 thats the opposite or reaching people, that's alienating them)
Open source can refer to MIT licensed code/projects where it can be taken, modified and redistributed as proprietary software without giving back. You can't contribute without wondering if you're doing work for a mega corp.
I would be temped to argue that doesn't go far enough. If copyleft wasn't circumvented by AI I'd argue for that.
Its my way of thinking. From the ip perspective I can see peoples argument about profits and companies but for individuals you are likely to get your stuff stolen and used by companies. I mean look at ai training. So better to deny any company trying to claim your work is thiers. Added to that is the company technology that goes to the graveyard. Open source allows ones work to be immortal. Then from the user perspective we all know how controlling and privacy invasive proprietary software is.
Fuck Vitalik Buterin.
Open source isn't good enough, I want my software to use a strong copyleft license with no ability to relicense via a CLA (CLAs that don't grant the ability to relicense software are rare, but acceptable). AGPL for servers, GPL for local software, LGPL for libraries when possible, and Apache, MIT, or BSD ONLY when LGPL doesn't make sense.
I agree.
Even more broadly, politically - copyleft in general is very unpopular with people, even amongst leftists and self-identified communists who you'd think would be all about that since y'know, good of the commons and the fact that communist states literally didn't give a fuck about copyright and the literature seeing it transparently as another government method of enforcing corporate power, especially apparent today when it comes to pharmaceuticals snd the fact that capitalism needs this intellectual property monopoly as an added incentive for R&D is an issue with capitalism's broken incentive structures, not cost of it.
Few people seem to understand the power of intellectual property, and various critics of corporate technology either omit mentioning or openly defend intellectual property, despite corporations having monopolies being the reason enshittification is such a phenomenon in the first place.
It seems like a lot of arguments about the role of technology in society instead boil down to more-stuffism vs. less-stuffism, usually based on emotionally charged preference for modern aesthetics or how much they believe the noble savage/appeal to nature fallacies.
When it comes to AI for instance, anyone reasonable can see that if it's open sourced for everyone to use then it's just a simple common good like a public library, use it (responsibly) and there's no issue.
Closed source private models in use by corporations suck up the environment (which belongs to everyone) and use the capital they steal from wage workers who actually produce the things they sell to give themselves leverage over said consumers/workers and other corporations, and this is not fair to the 99%.
Picture a world where AI is good enough to where it actually provides value to use it in a good chunk of jobs, and the best AI is corporate and closed source, and they just enshittified it and jacked up the prices, but if you want to get a job, you better know how to use it well. It would mean that corpo has an enormous power over your life now and you got little choice but to pony up, and they can raise prices whenever they want and snowball that capital into more and more.
I think the reason in this instance is that a lot of artists are bourgeoisie themselves and they understand that. They may be progressive as a personality strait/gimmick/style and talk about "empathy" but they understand the material reality of things.
They had the opportunities and the room for failure necessary to go into such a high risk field, and their ultimate form of commercial success is essentially using that privilege to create intellectual property they could make money from, hence the "concerns" over "style theft" and moralist fearmongering over vaguely defined concepts like "soulless", which is usually as arbitrary as "white" for racists (not implying equivalence here).
I find generally that a lot of the anti-AI viewpoints are simple self-serving veils of bourgeoisie who's capital is threatened, no different from the culture war fearmongering about vaping, a dying grasp of the tobacco companies of old threatened by shenzen gadget slop factories.
The material reality is that digital goods are effectively infinite, copying an image isn't a crime nevermind copying a style or some such, it is transparently absurd to imply otherwise.
Unpopular opinion around here, but I feel that there is a place for IP in the world. Yes, it is a flawed system that is abused by corpos, but it is also a system that can and does protect the work of the little guy. Copyleft has a place, FOSS has a place, and copyright, needs reformed.
DMCA should never have been signed into law the way it was. It limited "free use" way too much and is now being weaponized by police to shirk accountability. Corporations abuse it by buying up technology which would compete with them and burying it. Etc.
My fix:
I have had other reforms, but they are not coming to mind currently. I know it is all a very unpopular opinion around here, but I am personally an independent developer and I want my tools and the code I designed to be used for the purposes I have designed them for, and I don't want someone lifting algorithms I invented and not giving credit or licensing it from me. I am one man who has a family that he struggles to feed, and I recognize that the copyright and patant protections are, ostensibly, there to protect my work as well.
Somewhat tangential hot take: I REALLY think the scope of free as in beer use of open source projects should be limited to personal and small scale business use only (when the business makes below a certain yearly revenue). It's infuriating how the biggest tech companies openly use open source software as the base of their products while giving NOTHING in return to those open source projects, and in fact only bash them when they show the least bit of resistance to whatever evil profit driven change they demand the project make. If you're making billions in revenue using open source software which has saved you R&D money, why shouldn't the open source project itself be entitled to even half a percent of that which will more than cover all their development costs? I'm so sick of companies seeing open source as free outsourced labour they can exploit. There are also existing licenses that only allow free as in beer use of the software if it's for personal use or in a worker co-op, which I think is also an interesting approach worth considering.
Alternatively, I think we should seriously explore even more copyleft licenses than AGPL. I think it was either Elastic Search or MongoDB that tried to implement a license requiring every software that depends on the open source version of their software be open source as well? Everyone, including the OSF bashed that decision when it came out, and as far as I know there were indeed a lot of problems with how that license was written, but people also denounced the very concept of going beyond AGPL which I don't get.
Can we do the same with taxes? I won't fund any projects that aren't license appropriately
Yes, and this should mean financially supporting it. Just using it does not equate to supporting, and usually telling windows friends that you use arch btw and so should they does not equate either.
No. Not just open source. But Free (as in freedom). GPL & AGPL
...or non-profit... But I agree...
> Vitalik Buterin
The biggest growing concern is that many open-source projects are maintained by just 1-2 people, who themselves become targets of capitalists trying to take down such competitors by hacking their accounts. Even GitHub is no longer safe; I now download 2-3 versions away from the latest version of each project and read up on clamor first, just in case.
I don't disagree. I believe if public/government funds are used to develop software, that software should be open source. Same with many of the developments paid for by the government... If we the people are paying for it, it should be open
Especially in public life (government, etc), open source should be a default. The only exception I can think of is where there is no open source project serving a need but a proprietary one does.
But we need to go further than open source and practice ethical technology. If there is overlap between open source and evils like fascism and genocide*, then we are fostering an “open source” practice that serves the privileged.
*Microsoft, Google, etc
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