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One side built their ideals, and released them to the world for free, with the expectation that people would use it the way THEY imagined it would be used. Zuck
by TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
One side built their ideals, and released them to the world for free, with the expectation that people would use it the way THEY imagined it would be used. Zuck (as the current victim in this discussion) took those technologies, and used them to personally enrich himself while duplicitously selling out other people's self-interests. In a world in which the original inventors of things like TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP, SSL, Postgres, and PHP never make any real money at it, the implied expectation would be to at least honor their intent. That's the deal that's been abrogated. This argument is so obvious that I am forced to assume that you're just playing devil's advocate here, for the sake of discussion, so I'll play along. And you can say that it's their fault for not monetizing those technologies, or not creating a license to prevent what's been done, and maybe that's true, but that's beside the point.
- chrisseaton 6y agoI'm not playing devil's advocate. And I think you can see the weakness in your own argument as well! 'implied expectation' doesn't really hold any water, does it? Part of creating freedom is you have to be prepared to be disappointed that other people use their freedom to choose to do something different to you and to disagree with you. You should embrace that as a success not complain about it, I think, because you really know you created freedom when people can safely disagree with you.
- TheRealDunkirk 6y agoThere absolutely was an implied social contract with open source in the old days: that you would NOT just take, but also give back. It’s the entire underlying ethos of the GPL. Saying that the concept doesn’t hold water is to ignore at least 20 years of hacker history.
- chrisseaton 6y agoI didn’t say the implied social contract wasn’t a thing in the mind of the open side of the web. I’m saying it’s not reasonable to complain about people breaking an implied social contract that they never agreed to. If I tell you that when I wrote this comment I had in mind an implied social contract that you wouldn’t disagree with me you’d just reply ‘lol no thanks I don’t want to’. I can have as many implied social contracts in my head as I want. What are they worth if you don’t feel the same way? Nothing.
- TheRealDunkirk 6y agoWell we're just dancing around the point now. You agree that there was an implied expectation, I agree that there was no obligation to follow it. That people didn't just makes them -- maybe not bad, per se -- but certainly less-good. But, hey, a lot of businesses are run by literal sociopaths, so what did anyone expect of a person like Zuck. I mean, the "dumb fucks" comment has been out there for at least a decade, and that's really all you need to know about him.