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I'm realizing you're right. If we want to change humanity, Linux is quite a good way to start. Not all OSS is created equal, though. It's not by switching any

by tajen 10y ago

I'm realizing you're right. If we want to change humanity, Linux is quite a good way to start. Not all OSS is created equal, though. It's not by switching any end-user commercial product to GPL that we'll make an impact. It's more important for application servers, routers, OS, drivers, DBs, and in general libs that can be reused by someone else. If Snapchat were under APL Affero, would we care? What's in it for me if I switch my app to OSS? I'm giving 1% revenue to OSS. But I have a huge feeling that it's far from enough – Any commercial infra (DB+OS+AppServer) would have cost me 60% of my income. The masterpiece of OSS that really advanced humanity is principally Linux – It seems it's the main one that's worth funding, isn't it?

EGreg 10y ago
Umm how about: WebKit (for browsers) Wikipedia (for knowledge) Wordpress (powers 20% of web) Git, Mercurial Apache, NGinX PHP, Node.js and all the languages All the Web Frameworks lame, ffmpeg, tons of other stuff as well
- csydas 10y ago
  Seeing a list like this and realizing just how much for-pay software is built right on top of all these OSS projects makes it seem a bit farcical, especially in light of the discussion being about copy right; the products being contented under the guise of copy right to protect the business' profit are themselves just facades^ on top of open and free software. It's really hard to accept programs like Cisco's licensing for the hardware when the software that makes it run is just built right on top of open software. Yes, it's been modified to work better and I'm not saying they don't have a right to use it and resell it after modification, but it feels very weird to know that it was built with free and open software. The fact that so much of modern tech seems to be just rebranding already open source programs strikes me as a bit silly. The innovation at play seems to be the marketing rather than the actual technology being sold. ^Take facade in its denotation here, not connotations.

by tajen 10y ago

EGreg 10y ago

Umm how about: WebKit (for browsers) Wikipedia (for knowledge) Wordpress (powers 20% of web) Git, Mercurial Apache, NGinX PHP, Node.js and all the languages All the Web Frameworks lame, ffmpeg, tons of other stuff as well

csydas 10y ago
Seeing a list like this and realizing just how much for-pay software is built right on top of all these OSS projects makes it seem a bit farcical, especially in light of the discussion being about copy right; the products being contented under the guise of copy right to protect the business' profit are themselves just facades^ on top of open and free software. It's really hard to accept programs like Cisco's licensing for the hardware when the software that makes it run is just built right on top of open software. Yes, it's been modified to work better and I'm not saying they don't have a right to use it and resell it after modification, but it feels very weird to know that it was built with free and open software. The fact that so much of modern tech seems to be just rebranding already open source programs strikes me as a bit silly. The innovation at play seems to be the marketing rather than the actual technology being sold. ^Take facade in its denotation here, not connotations.