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Can you elaborate please? This seems like an opinion without supporting evidence, but evidence probably exists? I just don't want to reject your argument out

by labster 10y ago

Can you elaborate please? This seems like an opinion without supporting evidence, but evidence probably exists? I just don't want to reject your argument out of hand because the health of the open source ecosystem is important.

brennen 10y ago
Sure. My thesis is just that: a) open source as a technique and a body of work has become indispensable (or at least, for the moment, quite important) to a lot of industry and to the structure of the existing network that enables it. I don't think anyone very credible on the issue would seriously dispute this. b) open source as a technique and a body of work has been instrumental in giving players like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Twitter (etc. ad infinitum) the leverage to build a service-oriented / centralized / siloed model of networked computing which is antithetical to the aims of user control and freedom expressed by the Free Software movement and a broad set of more-or-less related ideological impulses. By some measures, the health of the open source ecosystem seems quite robust. By others, we're plainly fucked and I'm not sure what to do about it.
matt4077 10y ago
The idea of Open Source was, first and foremost, to allow the users of software to inspect and modify the source code. "free" in this regard has something of a political as well as an economic component. To summarise the political very broadly, I'd say that software (and the data it manages) are power, and giving broad access to both distributes that power among the users of software. The economic aspects are not just cheap access to software, but also the benefits of increased competition result from access to the code, which allows the creation of data-compatible competitors. These missions have failed for anyone but software developers, because so much of today's software runs on servers where the GPL does not enforce sharing of code, and because the community has become dominated by commercial players and permissive licenses like MIT. As a metaphor: the bakers are all happy because the flour and yeast are free. But bread is as expensive as ever, and most people eat in restaurants, anyway.

by labster 10y ago

brennen 10y ago

Sure. My thesis is just that: a) open source as a technique and a body of work has become indispensable (or at least, for the moment, quite important) to a lot of industry and to the structure of the existing network that enables it. I don't think anyone very credible on the issue would seriously dispute this. b) open source as a technique and a body of work has been instrumental in giving players like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Twitter (etc. ad infinitum) the leverage to build a service-oriented / centralized / siloed model of networked computing which is antithetical to the aims of user control and freedom expressed by the Free Software movement and a broad set of more-or-less related ideological impulses. By some measures, the health of the open source ecosystem seems quite robust. By others, we're plainly fucked and I'm not sure what to do about it.

matt4077 10y ago

The idea of Open Source was, first and foremost, to allow the users of software to inspect and modify the source code. "free" in this regard has something of a political as well as an economic component. To summarise the political very broadly, I'd say that software (and the data it manages) are power, and giving broad access to both distributes that power among the users of software. The economic aspects are not just cheap access to software, but also the benefits of increased competition result from access to the code, which allows the creation of data-compatible competitors. These missions have failed for anyone but software developers, because so much of today's software runs on servers where the GPL does not enforce sharing of code, and because the community has become dominated by commercial players and permissive licenses like MIT. As a metaphor: the bakers are all happy because the flour and yeast are free. But bread is as expensive as ever, and most people eat in restaurants, anyway.