There's something truly dismal about watching foss go slop.
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There's something truly dismal about watching foss go slop. Like, free software was supposed to be about ideals, a better vision for what computing could be. The rampant misogyny, transphobia, abelism, and racism already showed how limited that vision was, but now it seems like it doesn't exist at all.
Just... volunteer work for giant corporations. The same extractive vision of computing, but now coupled to a Reagan regime oppression of labor rights and environmental deregulation.
@xgranade From my outsider perspective, I feel as though it's still relatively safe to observe that a good fraction of the FOSS culture—hopefully, by no means all—functions chiefly as a shadow of the corporate software industry, and peopled by developers who go back and forth between FOSS work and corporate work and (of course) don't see any problems with permitting corporations to profit from free software.
They track all the awful trends faithfully, they like to brag about how Linux &c. are used by major corporations now as a way of asserting Linux's superiority, and they're all hideously obsessed with collecting easy money through rental schemes and crypto gambling and every other sort of dodge by which people can be cheated out of money via software.
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There's something truly dismal about watching foss go slop. Like, free software was supposed to be about ideals, a better vision for what computing could be. The rampant misogyny, transphobia, abelism, and racism already showed how limited that vision was, but now it seems like it doesn't exist at all.
Just... volunteer work for giant corporations. The same extractive vision of computing, but now coupled to a Reagan regime oppression of labor rights and environmental deregulation.
@xgranade One thing it's done is make it clear who stands where, who we can trust to build a part of our movement and who we can trust to let the things we create depend upon.
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@Canageek Yeah, though there's technical problems with using CC for source code, or for using GPL for things that don't have source code. The licenses are each written to fairly specific scenarios, and don't generalize well. Which is sensible, the law doesn't like generalities, by and large. But it does mean that there's a need for some kind of coherence between the goals and ideals behind code and non-code licenses.
@xgranade I just meant in terms of intentions, The GPL and BSD licenses seem almost designed to make corporations happy
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There's something truly dismal about watching foss go slop. Like, free software was supposed to be about ideals, a better vision for what computing could be. The rampant misogyny, transphobia, abelism, and racism already showed how limited that vision was, but now it seems like it doesn't exist at all.
Just... volunteer work for giant corporations. The same extractive vision of computing, but now coupled to a Reagan regime oppression of labor rights and environmental deregulation.
@xgranade
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@xgranade I just meant in terms of intentions, The GPL and BSD licenses seem almost designed to make corporations happy
@Canageek The BSD and MIT licenses, very much so. The GPL, though, that's a very strange case. The copyleft provisions make a lot of companies run for the hills (hence the popular thing of slopbros license-washing away the GPL), but also its refusal to prohibit any kind of extractionism not explicitly called out in Stallman's original writings is.... weird, to say the least.
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@Canageek The BSD and MIT licenses, very much so. The GPL, though, that's a very strange case. The copyleft provisions make a lot of companies run for the hills (hence the popular thing of slopbros license-washing away the GPL), but also its refusal to prohibit any kind of extractionism not explicitly called out in Stallman's original writings is.... weird, to say the least.
@xgranade Well for consumer facing code, sure.
But if you're just putting it on a server to run some sort of website that attempts to extract money from consumers?
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@xgranade From my outsider perspective, I feel as though it's still relatively safe to observe that a good fraction of the FOSS culture—hopefully, by no means all—functions chiefly as a shadow of the corporate software industry, and peopled by developers who go back and forth between FOSS work and corporate work and (of course) don't see any problems with permitting corporations to profit from free software.
They track all the awful trends faithfully, they like to brag about how Linux &c. are used by major corporations now as a way of asserting Linux's superiority, and they're all hideously obsessed with collecting easy money through rental schemes and crypto gambling and every other sort of dodge by which people can be cheated out of money via software.
@xgranade I think that's wretched for a whole pile of reasons, but I'll cite one especially: because there's so many FOSS programmers who are locked into corporate trend-riding, much free-software work seems almost as stale and stagnant and conservative as corporate software. There's the same defensiveness about sticking with bad old precedents, merely because they're established precedents, that one sees everywhere in the corporate and political spheres.
As someone who started their growing-up before the advent of omnipresent computing, and someone who really did get into that stuff in adolescence and had high hopes for it, I'm still a bit astonished by how hidebound the technology sector really is—totally at odds with their pose as being always ahead of the curve and capable of any act of creation or transformation.
"WE CAN DO ANYTHING WE ARE GODS!" "oh then could we maybe drop the fixation on C/C++ with thousands of other programming languages existing now?" "shut up C is God's programming language"
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@xgranade Well for consumer facing code, sure.
But if you're just putting it on a server to run some sort of website that attempts to extract money from consumers?
@Canageek The AGPL was intended to fight exactly that, but it isn't as widely used as I might like, in part because it raises a lot of technical issues with how it's implemented that undermine its goals.
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@Canageek The AGPL was intended to fight exactly that, but it isn't as widely used as I might like, in part because it raises a lot of technical issues with how it's implemented that undermine its goals.
@Canageek Regardless, I'm kind of splitting hairs here... your broader point that too many code-focused licenses are corporate-friendly stands, and I agree.
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@Canageek The BSD and MIT licenses, very much so. The GPL, though, that's a very strange case. The copyleft provisions make a lot of companies run for the hills (hence the popular thing of slopbros license-washing away the GPL), but also its refusal to prohibit any kind of extractionism not explicitly called out in Stallman's original writings is.... weird, to say the least.
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There's something truly dismal about watching foss go slop. Like, free software was supposed to be about ideals, a better vision for what computing could be. The rampant misogyny, transphobia, abelism, and racism already showed how limited that vision was, but now it seems like it doesn't exist at all.
Just... volunteer work for giant corporations. The same extractive vision of computing, but now coupled to a Reagan regime oppression of labor rights and environmental deregulation.
@xgranade@wandering.shop the only solution i can think of, for myself, is to write software that is only useful to people, and which is not useful (or if possible, actively obstructive) to those who which to continue optimizing paperclips -
@mirabilos @xgranade I don't want tiny shops using my writings either. in I want them to be given out for free, like net.books and other things as they were created when I was young and it was hard to monetize things on the internet.
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@mirabilos @xgranade I don't want tiny shops using my writings either. in I want them to be given out for free, like net.books and other things as they were created when I was young and it was hard to monetize things on the internet.
@Canageek @xgranade I’m totally okay with someone making a bit of money for, say, supporting a dozen $cms_software users. Better yet if they contribute back fixes. (I used a CMS now as handy example, I’m equally fine with the software I write. In fact, your Android thingy comes with some of that, and it made the life easier for many people.)
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@Canageek @xgranade I’m totally okay with someone making a bit of money for, say, supporting a dozen $cms_software users. Better yet if they contribute back fixes. (I used a CMS now as handy example, I’m equally fine with the software I write. In fact, your Android thingy comes with some of that, and it made the life easier for many people.)
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There's something truly dismal about watching foss go slop. Like, free software was supposed to be about ideals, a better vision for what computing could be. The rampant misogyny, transphobia, abelism, and racism already showed how limited that vision was, but now it seems like it doesn't exist at all.
Just... volunteer work for giant corporations. The same extractive vision of computing, but now coupled to a Reagan regime oppression of labor rights and environmental deregulation.
@xgranade Let them eat TANSTAAFL. No quid pro quo? No workie!
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@mirabilos @xgranade see I don't want people making money in certain spaces at all. if possible, I would like it if there was enough open source ttrpgs to completely push companies out of the space, instead of what we're seeing is that it adds easier and easier to publish things for money.
Instead of writing an adventure for a home group, thinking it's pretty good, and putting it up on a forum for free for others to enjoy, everyone puts it up on DTRPG to make a quick buck.
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@mirabilos @xgranade see I don't want people making money in certain spaces at all. if possible, I would like it if there was enough open source ttrpgs to completely push companies out of the space, instead of what we're seeing is that it adds easier and easier to publish things for money.
Instead of writing an adventure for a home group, thinking it's pretty good, and putting it up on a forum for free for others to enjoy, everyone puts it up on DTRPG to make a quick buck.
@mirabilos @xgranade It's even getting to the point that people are expecting to be paid for DMing these days
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@xgranade I think that's wretched for a whole pile of reasons, but I'll cite one especially: because there's so many FOSS programmers who are locked into corporate trend-riding, much free-software work seems almost as stale and stagnant and conservative as corporate software. There's the same defensiveness about sticking with bad old precedents, merely because they're established precedents, that one sees everywhere in the corporate and political spheres.
As someone who started their growing-up before the advent of omnipresent computing, and someone who really did get into that stuff in adolescence and had high hopes for it, I'm still a bit astonished by how hidebound the technology sector really is—totally at odds with their pose as being always ahead of the curve and capable of any act of creation or transformation.
"WE CAN DO ANYTHING WE ARE GODS!" "oh then could we maybe drop the fixation on C/C++ with thousands of other programming languages existing now?" "shut up C is God's programming language"
@mxchara @xgranade To be fair I was knee deep in C23 specs this morning and it is not bad at all. But that's not to say more stuff should perhaps be written in Python? I'm just about willing to give TypeScript a pass given Ableson and Sussman wrote the latest SICP edition with JavaScript examples, not Scheme/LISP. What the tech industry lacks as a whole is humility and creative synthesis. I skimmed a GenAI textbook which name checked Dijkstra 3 times and missed his essential messages entirely.
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@xgranade A lot of the movement side has been co-opted by corporate interests for decades,
it's part of why I still make a point to distinguish 'free/libre' from 'open source'; a lot of 'foss' is open source - about a model of productivity, a workflow, an approach to project management, even the terminology is designed to be more welcoming to the capitalist class.
The ethical side of it has been obuscated, deprecated. Not that the original ethical stance was all that strong to start with;@miss_rodent @xgranade David Reed (he who invented the UDP protocol) is not a big fan of the Linux Foundation, if his LinkedIn posts are to be believed (and not false flags). I cook up tasty nothingburgers to game the engagement algorithm.
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@mirabilos @xgranade It's even getting to the point that people are expecting to be paid for DMing these days
