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The problem with Free Software is capitalism

64 points by nanna 5y ago

JoeyBananas 5y ago
> If we want things to be different, it’s not enough to play semantic games with licensing terms. We need a sea-change in not just software development but in our society as a whole. This "all or nothing" line of reasoning doesn't convince me. No, the legal system is not perfect but that doesn't mean the only way forward is to refuse to participate in it and adopt a radical system that totally reimagines the fundamental idea of property.
- meheleventyone 5y ago
  I dunno it kind of feels hard to fight the inevitability of trillion dollar corporations running everything. It really does feel like there these immovable forces in an increasingly vital sector of society we’ve abdicated control over. I often wonder if something so amazing and vital as the internet and web could actually get made in the current climate. I feel increasingly worried about future iterations on similar ideas like the metaverse/AR which seems to be gearing up to be a fight between Facebook and Apple with Unity, Epic and Roblox on the side. I think we’re going to end up with something pretty closed and dystopian. Visiting the Bay Area, the spiritual home of it all really hammers home that dystopian quality. There is such a stark contrast between the glass palaced elite and the poor. Sometimes I find it very hard to feel positive about “tech” and it’s future.
  - adamcstephens 5y ago
    > I often wonder if something so amazing and vital as the internet and web could actually get made in the current climate. I’d say the answer is no, it couldn’t. The internet was created during the tail end of powerful antitrust in America, which had the government actively fighting against the monopoly size of corporations. Both IBM and AT&T, had they not been kept in check with antitrust regulations, would have likely stifled the internet and the growth of the personal computer. Hell, even the last dying gasp of antitrust in its feeble attempt to check Microsoft, paved the way for Google and the monopolies created since. The answer is to actively support the ideas of anti monopoly and antitrust. To break up companies and punish them for suffocating the good parts of capitalism.
    - prirun 5y ago
      Part of Microsoft's "punishment" for monopoly practices was to give away free copies of Office to schools. With that, every parent has to have a copy of Office to read .doc files from their school. Ingenious! They use their punishment to increase their market share. I don't think breaking up companies should be the emphasis, but rather the merging of companies. AT&T was already broken up once. Now look at them.
      - adamcstephens 5y ago
        Yep, preventing the mergers first is part of the solution too. Unfortunately, we’ve allowed too many, and need to break up companies across industries. edit: and figure out a way to tell future generations not to give up on these laws next time? To your point, they may find themselves in this same place again.
  - ctdonath 5y ago
    I’ve been around long enough to see many mega-corps rise and fall. Seemingly unstoppable juggernauts falter and disappear seemingly overnight. None of this is new; you just haven’t lived thru the cycle yet to see giants fall.
  - JoeyBananas 5y ago
    This possibility of corporations running everything is exactly why we have FOSS licenses. Despite what this article says, many FOSS projects are doing fine and there are a lot of people who do work on making FOSS computing viable. The practical solution is not adopt communism, but to use FOSS software and not accept any gaps in the FOSS ecosystem. > I feel increasingly worried about future iterations on similar ideas like the metaverse/AR which seems to be gearing up to be a fight between Facebook and Apple with Unity, Epic and Roblox on the side. I think we’re going to end up with something pretty closed and dystopian. I fail to see how this lawsuit you speak of is relevant to FOSS. Are you aware of Godot engine, an increasingly viable unity alternative? The important advantage of Godot engine over Unity is that the incentives of the developers are more aligned with the incentives of the users. Unity subjects its users to a terribly complicated EULA that many don't fully understand. It restricts the amount of copies you can install, how much money you can make, what you can use it for and so on. Godot doesn't have any of that, and they're well-funded. Godot engine is an example of a FOSS project that exists simply because the open source development model is more efficient than closed source. Companies realized that a FOSS game engine would be in their best interests and therefore they decided to fund development. This goes to show that FOSS is not totally at odds with capitalism. Sure, the corporation funding Godot could try to take the project in a bad direction. If that happens, the people who care about FOSS rather than "Free software as cheap labor" could fork it.
- meristohm 5y ago
  How far back does your fundamental idea of property go?
- sneak 5y ago
  > adopt a radical system that totally reimagines the fundamental idea of property I'm pretty sure that's what copyrights over digital information are in the first place.
nautilus12 5y ago
What about a type of liscence that behaves like a union. If you pay into this union then you are free to monetize all software with this particular license? Then at least AWS has to pay elastic something if they want to use it
- fsflover 5y ago
  Then poor people will not be able to use the software.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
    I suspect that's up to the software developer. If they want to write software in a manner that allows its use by poor people, then no problem. I write software like that. I use the MIT license for most of my software. I don't like GPL, because I don't like coercion; but I'm a contrary bastard. I like the "ASCAP" suggestion. I would be unlikely to use it, myself, but I think it's a viable option.
    - fsflover 5y ago
      > I don't like GPL, because I don't like coercion Permissive licenses allow coercion of users by corporations.
      - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
        TomaTOE, ToMAHto. We'll just agree to see things differently, then. No probs. Cheers!
        fsflover 5y ago
        You are of course right that GPL is a kind of coercion, too. The question is which coercion is more harmful to the society. It's the same as with any law.
      - toolz 5y ago
sokoloff 5y ago
> does anyone really think that the FSF would be able to stand up in a copyright court against Apple and Google? I do. I strongly suspect I’m not the only one.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ChrisLomont 5y ago
  FSF annual budget is on order of 1.3M [1], a tiny portion of which can be spent on legal fees, the rest being normal operations - people and hardware and offices and such. So, if lucky, FSF can afford $200k / year in a court battle. Google v Oracle racked up around $2M a year for google in legal fees alone (at least early on - I didn't find a final cost for the decade of litigation) [2]. And either could afford vastly more as needed, especially if it could simply bankrupt their opponent and get a default win. I don't think the FSF can even remotely cover such costs. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation [2] https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-wants-4-million-from-oracle-for-legal-costs/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-wants-4-million-from-or...
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    I think it’s a mistake to look at the FSF peacetime budget and conclude they couldn’t sustain a war. If Apple or Google were foolish enough to allow themselves to be pitted head-to-head with the FSF on a clear AGPL violation (the premise of TFA), FSF would easily raise the money required (in dollars and in pro-bono work). I’m not even especially a fan of AGPL and I’d crack my wallet open pretty wide for the FSF side here.
- karatinversion 5y ago
  And the fact that Apple refuses to use any GPLv3 software suggests that Apple's lawyers think so, too.
  - giomasce 5y ago
fsflover 5y ago
It seems that basic income should be the solution here. Anyone will be able to work on their hobby without dying of hunger. With time, the amount of basic income can increase, leading eventually to a society free of exploitation.
- andrew_ 5y ago
  Why should people expect to be paid to work on a hobby?
  - fsflover 5y ago
    Because it benefits humanity?
    - andrew_ 5y ago
      no it doesn't. it benefits the individual. it's a matter of choice; you choose to use what someone else is written rather than write your own. you choose to use what's been provided, rather than fork it. it benefits you, the user.
      - fsflover 5y ago
        A lot of hobbies benefit the whole society. I would say most of them do. Hobby means making something. Hobbyists often make something valuable not only to themselves. It also often involves collaborations. Especially in the field of software development.
        cortexio 5y ago
        true, some hobby-ists improve society. but how many.. maybe 1 in a million? What about jobs that no one wants to do? Who does those? If so many people get paid by the government, wont that collapse the value of money, making 90% of all people live in poverty? Im not convinced it is a good idea.
  - marcodiego 5y ago
andrew_ 5y ago
> Of course, as soon as you bring up the idea that the capitalist system itself is a problem, inevitably people will start objecting, saying that capitalism is what has enabled the creation of all these things in the first place. While many of the creations that they would point to in fact benefited a great deal from government subsidies and/or regulatory capture, it is true that we’ve seen an unprecedented boom under capitalism. However, that doesn’t mean that capitalism is the system we need to stay with. This kind of drivel drives me nuts. Let's just dump on the system that got us here an enabled amazing things to happen, whilst trying to be vague and non-committal about a suggested replacement. The author tries to slip by the fact that they're sympathetic with Marxist ideology - so they show their cards. We've experimented with the kinds of systems that the author subtly favors, time and time again, and they either turn into dystopian authoritarian madness or fail outright. I wish these folks would spend time in one of the failing states, or one in which they have little guarantee of any aspect of life (including liberties), before waxing estatic about utopian tomfoolery.
- bantunes 5y ago
  Sounds like a pig talking to another pig (that wants freedom) about how good they have it in their pens at the farm.
- arp242 5y ago
  Well, the industrial revolution with its child labour, or colonisation with outright slavery "got us to where we are" in many ways, but then we decided that wasn't such a great idea after all. And hey, fossil fuels got us very far too. But maybe we should stop with that too and move beyond them. I don't even agree with the author, or not exactly anyway, but I don't think this type of "it's the system that got us here"-type of reasoning is a good argument at all.
  - andrew_ 5y ago
    Don't be so obtuse. we aren't talking about individual aspects, the author clearly suggests a fundamental change of the entire system. flawed child labor laws, or a lack of thereof, do not define capitalism.
toolz 5y ago
> Someone devotes a large amount of their time and effort to making something that many people both depend on and make piles of money from, but don’t recompense that original developer. I wonder how much free stuff that original developer used to get to the point where they could write working code to begin with? I find the problem with free software isn't capitalism, but greed. Some people are quick to forget how much free software/information they utilize without paying a dime back. > It seems clear that open source isn’t sustainable as things are now. Clear to you maybe, I on the other hand am bewildered to find that anyone can seriously think this is such a clear position they don't feel the need to back up such a claim with any data. Even their linked article doesn't make any real argument other than "what if?".
jqpabc123 5y ago
Open Source is socialism stuck in a capitalist world. A square peg trying to fit a round hole. This should have been obvious from the start. Good luck changing the world to fit.
- throwaway316943 5y ago
  I think it has more anarchist influence than socialist.
  - jqpabc123 5y ago
    Same response as above. You don't need licenses with dozens of pages of legalese to prescribe "anarchy".
    - throwaway316943 5y ago
      Anarchy doesn’t preclude the use of contracts.
      - jqpabc123 5y ago
        A contract is meaningless without some entity (government) to enforce it.
        throwaway316943 5y ago
        Our current method of enforcement is government but any unbiased third party can be used. It could even be automated to avoid human failings. When you buy a house who holds the money while the property exchange is made?
        jqpabc123 5y ago
        ... any unbiased third party can be used. Under who's authority? If government didn't exist, one of the first things people would do is recreate it. And your comments reflect this.
MayeulC 5y ago
> The problem with Free Software is capitalism I've spent a bit of time thinking about this a few days ago. I believe the real problem with Free Software is the copyright landscape. With everything copyrighted-by-default, with no expiration date in sight, it's much easier to handle proprietary software than free software. It actively hinders distribution and cooperation. Of course, the FSF builds on copyright. Imagine as a thought experiment if copyright would last 3 years for software. What would happen next? I'd argue such a short copyright term would be beneficial overall, extensible if a) you submit source code to a governmental archive that publishes it once it falls in the public domain b) extension is paid-for, like patents c) maximum length fall to 10-20 years (no longer than patents). Oh, and that doesn't only apply to software.
- fsflover 5y ago
  See also a step in the right direction: petition to make publicly funded software free, https://publiccode.eu https://publiccode.eu.
donatj 5y ago
I disagree with the problem. The problem is cathedral open source doesn’t scale. The problem is the general idea of an open source project being a full time job, especially if you are unwilling to work for free. If you want money for something, charge for it. It’s really that simple. I’m giving away lemonade at my stand away for free, being mad the donations don’t cover the lemons is just silly. I’d far rather my open source be a shared resource developed by its actual users. More bazaar, less cathedral. Fewer pigheaded decisions of a bdfl or corporation. Want to make a major left turn? Fork it. So many recent open source projects are essentially just a business with a bad revenue model instead of a great project with a business backing it. Horse before the cart.
- jeegsy 5y ago
  > I disagree with the problem. The problem is cathedral open source doesn’t scale. The problem is the general idea of an open source project being a full time job, especially if you are unwilling to work for free. A great summary of the situation.
throwaway316943 5y ago
> In an ideal world, housing and food would be decommodified That sounds more like prison than an ideal world. Considering the complete mess that industrialized agriculture is at the moment I can only imagine how much worse it would be if it was entirely centralized. Also the idea of not having ownership of my own housing is a strong incentive for me to fight against these ideas when I see them. My home is a very much an extension of my being in that it is customized to suit my needs and desires, I am not willing to accept a one size fits all that isn’t completely within my control.
- rini17 5y ago
  Cities in Europe consist of mix of communal housing (rental apartments built with support from government) and private. Some of the cities are top rated in quality of living. Hardly a prison. So I don't know where you got such idea?
  - throwaway316943 5y ago
    What is the legal ownership model of this communal housing? You say they are rentals which means money is exchanged for the right to live there. How does this work without money?
    - rini17 5y ago
      Someone wants to abolish money?
      - throwaway316943 5y ago
        Do you take the argument to be that there is a single owner of housing to which everyone pays rent then? The reasons why that would be worse should be plainly obvious.
        rini17 5y ago
        No. There is no single owner. Whoever wants to own their property, can buy/build one, there are enough of these for sale. I don't know of any case where municipality building houses (or another infrastructure like broadband) would make the situation worse for everyone.
marcodiego 5y ago
The problem with Free Software is: there is no problem with Free Software. People have choice no to use it, people contribute to it, it works, it helps open source, a few a very mature and used in mission critical applications... There is a problem with people trying to link Free Software with a single political line, be it socialism, capitalism or anarchism. Free Software has characteristics of the three lines: the freedom associated with capitalism, the community benifits associated with socialism and the diy aspect of anarchy.
mlang23 5y ago
I feel the incentive for free software / open source has changed. The >2000 explanation of why people code for free is basically "they hope to get hired due to their work". Maybe I was too naiv back in the 90s, but it didnt feel like it back then. And it is still not the truth for me personally. I publish code for free because I want to share with ohers. Yes, I've been invited to a conference or two due to what I wrote, but that was never the goal, and would have been far too little as a compensation for my time. Granted, I am not a major contributor, so I should probably keep my mouth shut. However, I feel like the incentive these days has been poisoned by capitalism.
- JoeAltmaier 5y ago
  Perhaps "the incentive" depends upon the individual. It's like folks saying "in the '60s everybody..." where they're describing what they did or somebody they knew did.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    Yeah, in general, unless you're in the position of having a trust fund/investments that mean you don't need to work for a living, if you're going to be spending 40 hours a week on something, you probably want to get paid for it. Some people do have compulsive hobbies but that's mostly not sustainable. Of course, casual nights and weekend activities can certainly work as unpaid hobbies and they may even be intensive hobbies for a time. But the reality before people got as widely paid for writing open source code is fewer people spent a lot less time doing it.
krapp 5y ago
Capitalism isn't a problem with Free Software. The problem is free software people want to have their cake and eat it too. Billion dollar corporations using your software and never having to paying you a dime is a feature of the FOSS system, not a bug, the rights of the user are paramount and sacrosanct. You, the developer, don't own the software you write any more than anyone else, and because it doesn't belong to you, you have no right to make demands of its users beyond their continuing to respect the rights of the end user. If you can't make a living writing FOSS, that's not relevant to the philosophy. You chose a philosophy that doesn't care whether or not you can earn a living under it. If you want to guarantee people will pay for your software use a proprietary license. Otherwise, stop complaining that the world is playing the game by the rules you set and is beating you at it.
- andrew_ 5y ago
  there's not much I can add to this comment other than to say a wholeheartedly agree
- shalmanese 5y ago
  > Billion dollar corporations using your software and never having to paying you a dime is a feature of the FOSS system, not a bug. FOSS is libre, not gratis. Most FOSS happens to be gratis as well but that's not intrinsic to the FOSS model. Culturally, the FOSS community has been allergic to exploring new business models to see where there can be alignment with their production models. eg: I think models such as feature bounties could be a sustainable path for many FOSS projects but almost no FOSS projects look into such things.
cassepipe 5y ago
As someone who considers himself a commie (in the sense of desiring collective forms of property not in the police state sense although of course right wingers will shout that you can't have one without the other but that's another debate), and while I am sympathetic to the author's concerns I am not convinced by the line of reasoning. See, in a "capitalist" society, that is one where the capitalist mode of production is dominant, you can pretty much state that capitalism is the root of all problems in last resort. While it sometimes makes for complete and thorough analyses, it is often an hand wavy explain-it-all and intellectually lazy answer. Not because it is not true but because it is not relevant. And as every hn reader knows, saying something true is easy but saying something true and relevant is not. "L'heure de la dernière instance ne sonne jamais"
mikece 5y ago
The problem isn't "capitalism" but that most projects don't know how to raise money. We all know the value of project managers, testers, CI/CD specialists for open source projects: perhaps it's time to recruit and promote the role of donor advocate whose job it is to raise money for the project. Just because you build it doesn't mean people or companies will contribute: ask and it shall be given unto you.
AegirLeet 5y ago
If a person creates something that is useful to thousands of other people but capitalism can't even provide for that person's most basic needs, I'd call that a failed system.
- mikece 5y ago
  It's also a problem to call a failed system Capitalism when it's something between fascism, crony capitalism, and oligarchy. In a truly free capitalist landscape we wouldn't have the barriers to entry that exist in the US and most western countries today.
jordanmoconnor 5y ago
Thinking of software as media paints it in a much more obvious light. There are two forms of media - free and paid. Free media is funded with advertising. Paid media gets paid for by the customer. The benefit of free media is distribution. It can go anywhere, cheaply, and impact the largest audience. This is a common model for TV & large YouTube channels. The benefit of paid media is income. Generally, something that is paid for earns more than something that is free with advertising. However, with paid media there's a significant decrease in distribution. If the decrease is large enough, the creator would have earned more by putting it out for free with advertising to increase distribution. Now, here's the other catch, the benefit of mass distribution is power. Power of perception, mostly. You are now a voice for the vision you are trying to put into the world. You're impacting the way people think, and you're causing them to learn what you want to teach them. Open source developers of large projects do a chronically poor job at capturing the upside of distribution. That's the issue. They simply need to have advertising to fund their "media" that has a large distribution, or they need to charge for their "media". Or a hybrid approach works too – ads for freely distributed software and charge for proprietary or managed software.
- karatinversion 5y ago
  "Welcome to FreeBootloader 2.7. The system will boot in 90 seconds, but first, a message from our sponsors - Raid: Shadow Legends!"
- chrismcb 5y ago
  I'm not sure I agree with the assertion that something that is paid for earns more than advertising.
12thwonder 5y ago
I personally don't see that capitalism itself is the culprit of the issues mentioned but I don't like monopoly powered by free software. as long as competition is in place, I am kinda ok with big companies exploiting(?) free software.
avereveard 5y ago
the only logical fallacy is wanting people to pay for software you distribute for free, capitalism has no way to solve that, nor any other system. either you get the headspace that comes with the free software license or you charge for the software and use the money to sustain growth. it's actually quite simple, but every now and then some people think they're entitled money for work they willingly did give away for free and write a thousand word essay trying to externalize the internal logical fallacy of that proposition
kijin 5y ago
Right. And as with most problems that have to do with capitalism, we will get exactly nowhere if we try to fix capitalism first. FLOSS was a hack from the start. It hacked the capitalist concept of copyright to turn it upside down, or dare I say rightside left? Because that's what hackers do. Hackers don't wait indefinitely for the evil system to fall once and for all. Like most protagonists of cyberpunk novels, they find tricks to make life less unbearable for themselves and those they care about even as the system resists change. Because after all, it is the only way to bring about any change at all.
rini17 5y ago
The problem with contemporary capitalism is concentration. It's became too common to raise huge investment in order to become a monopoly and then take rent from such a position. All kinds of commons, not just Free Software, get plundered in the process. What to do... perhaps if customers prove they are subject to vendor lock-in, the court will proclaim the supplier as a monopoly. Then automatically tax the hell out such a corporation?
swiley 5y ago
The problem with Free Software is people thinking that the part you pay for is the copy of the code and not ongoing maintenance. Look at busybox (or even Linux itself) for example, people probably work on that full time and get paid for it but the code is free (in both senses.)
ctdonath 5y ago
Such rhetoric again fails to note why such work is “work”: a significant fraction of the effort isn’t fun & fulfilling, it’s unpleasant and nobody would do it except others will pay to get it done at a price higher than what the workers could earn doing something else. Food/housing/etc isn’t free. We pay others, and get paid, to efficiently rearrange workloads for better results at less effort. I write security software because few can do what I’m good at but millions need it; in return I pay others to make/do the myriad things I can’t do well. Few indeed would (out of love for the art) continue such work without profitable compensation; I like my job, but don’t wrangle encrypted keys just for fun & fulfillment.
simonh 5y ago
>Expecting the freeloading corporations that benefit from open-source software to contribute fairly is, I think, unrealistic. If you don't want people to benefit from work you voluntarily put into the commons, then don't put it into the commons. Corporations are just groups of people. Who gets to decide that this group of people over here can legitimately benefit from the commons, but these other people over there can't? That's not a commons anymore. If you want to put restrictions on who can or cannot benefit from your work, then put those restrictions on the work when you release it. But don't then claim you put it into the commons, you didn't. If you want to benefit privately from your work, what on earth are you doing giving it away? Surely a big bunch of people coming along, picking up that work and using it to provide incredibly useful services to lots of people, benefiting thousands or millions of other people at much lower cost than they otherwise could is a good thing, right? How is that not a massive success? The problem with people like this guy and Elastic, etc, is they don't actually want to give things away for free. They actually want to get paid. Ok, fine, I have no problem with that, just for goodness sake be honest about it.
Stranger43 5y ago
Very few successful opensource projects is the product of an single entity dedicated just to that project but is the product of an process where someone in company A develops something that company A need but don't mind sharing with companies B and C if it means improving the product beyond what their own resources can support. And due to cartel legislation the absolutely easiest way for this to happen is in the context of an open and transparent project. The fact that open source exists in an "intentionally created" loophole in the regulations designed to prevent big companies from "conspiring against the market" is a huge part of what took the mostly failed academic concept of "committee controlled" free software and turned it into an industry dominating "open source" movement with no clear leadership.
simonh 5y ago
Coming from a family that has suffered severely under Marxism, anti-capitalist sentiment that promotes Marxism as an answer like this makes me very sad. Capitalism is based on fundamentally democratic principles. Markets are basically continuous ongoing referendums on what people want, need or care about. It's based on freedoms to own property and buy or sell products and labour as sovereign individuals, and freedom of association to form companies. Marxism replaces markets with bureaucratic fiat. Resources are expropriated by the bureaucracy and allocated according to political priorities, it's a fundamentally coercive and authoritarian system from top to bottom. Take away the need for people to satisfy a market of their peers in order to earn a living, and who gets to decide what they work on and what it's value is? Marxists have an answer for that - it's the bureaucracy again. All power becomes centralised. This is not a theory, this is what actually happened everywhere this has been tried. Don't get me wrong, I'm no free market fundamentalist. I'm a Brit but probably closest to being a European style social democrat politically. Socialism has had many failures, but so has capitalism. The real world is a messy complicated place and no one answer ever fits every economic question we have to deal with. But Marxism is sheer political and economic poison.
- throwaway316943 5y ago
  Bingo. Currency and free markets are the best implementation of distributed democracy we’ve seen yet. Everyone can vote on everything as many times as they want constrained only by their participation in the system. I still believe we need a level playing ground though, anti trust and a strong legal system to prevent abuse. We should be careful about safety nets though, preventing failure and saving people from disaster are different things with different consequences.
  - simonh 5y ago
    Right, and just like democracy needs rules to make sure elections are fair, you do need rules to ensure the markets are fair. We do need safety nets too, can we really have bailouts for banks but somehow ordinary working people who fall sick are out on the street on their own? But it's a net not a pedestal. I do worry about basic income the article fantasises about developers getting a guaranteed state income that allows them to write whatever software they like. That really is a fantasy, most open source projects are single-contributor repositories that get a couple of downloads ever. I know, I created a few ;)
cortexio 5y ago
The problem is certainly not capitalism. Look if you are going to hand out free stuff, dont expect anything back. You cant buy investors/friends/etc.. by giving them free stuff. Companies have toilet paper. The toilet paper company said, hey, give us $5 and you this amount of paper. Just as open source people said, here is our software and you give us nothing. because it's free. You cant say afterwards, well, actually, i think everyone who used my stuff owes me $100. That's just scamming by lying that it was free. If you think your software is worth something. Sell it. No wants to buy it? well.. maybe it's not worth much. Some companies pay thousands of dollars for certain software. As for the marx stuff. Those kind of ideas always lead to dicatorship/slavery or they talk about some fairy tale where companies make decisions in a democratic way etc etc. It doesnt work. They are fantasies. You NEED capitalism. Who is going to do the shitty jobs? no one wants to do them. The nice thing about capitalism is that it makes the shitty jobs more valuable and so people do them by free will. No need for forcing people to do them. Do you really want to get rid of that?
Vaslo 5y ago
> The only way free/libre/“open-source”1 software can be a sustainable endeavour is to change what “sustainable” means. In an ideal world, housing and food would be decommodified and people could work on software projects for the love of it and place it in the commons for others to enjoy the use of. This is purely the problem of “other than capitalism”. We don’t need 1000 people getting paid via socialism to work on skins for a game. The advantage of pay is that it can be used to persuade people to work on things they are much less interested in. How many of you like your jobs but would probably do other things if not for your good pay? Pretty much everyone!
lamontcg 5y ago
Also, people are kinda assholes. If you've ever had to deal with open source project issues and bugs, it sucks. For totally unpaid side-projects I'm thinking of going to open-source-closed-contribution model with no public PRs or issue submission because its just 98% toxic.

64 points by nanna 5y ago

> If we want things to be different, it’s not enough to play semantic games with licensing terms. We need a sea-change in not just software development but in our society as a whole. This "all or nothing" line of reasoning doesn't convince me. No, the legal system is not perfect but that doesn't mean the only way forward is to refuse to participate in it and adopt a radical system that totally reimagines the fundamental idea of property.

meheleventyone 5y ago
I dunno it kind of feels hard to fight the inevitability of trillion dollar corporations running everything. It really does feel like there these immovable forces in an increasingly vital sector of society we’ve abdicated control over. I often wonder if something so amazing and vital as the internet and web could actually get made in the current climate. I feel increasingly worried about future iterations on similar ideas like the metaverse/AR which seems to be gearing up to be a fight between Facebook and Apple with Unity, Epic and Roblox on the side. I think we’re going to end up with something pretty closed and dystopian. Visiting the Bay Area, the spiritual home of it all really hammers home that dystopian quality. There is such a stark contrast between the glass palaced elite and the poor. Sometimes I find it very hard to feel positive about “tech” and it’s future.
- adamcstephens 5y ago
  > I often wonder if something so amazing and vital as the internet and web could actually get made in the current climate. I’d say the answer is no, it couldn’t. The internet was created during the tail end of powerful antitrust in America, which had the government actively fighting against the monopoly size of corporations. Both IBM and AT&T, had they not been kept in check with antitrust regulations, would have likely stifled the internet and the growth of the personal computer. Hell, even the last dying gasp of antitrust in its feeble attempt to check Microsoft, paved the way for Google and the monopolies created since. The answer is to actively support the ideas of anti monopoly and antitrust. To break up companies and punish them for suffocating the good parts of capitalism.
  - prirun 5y ago
    Part of Microsoft's "punishment" for monopoly practices was to give away free copies of Office to schools. With that, every parent has to have a copy of Office to read .doc files from their school. Ingenious! They use their punishment to increase their market share. I don't think breaking up companies should be the emphasis, but rather the merging of companies. AT&T was already broken up once. Now look at them.
    - adamcstephens 5y ago
      Yep, preventing the mergers first is part of the solution too. Unfortunately, we’ve allowed too many, and need to break up companies across industries. edit: and figure out a way to tell future generations not to give up on these laws next time? To your point, they may find themselves in this same place again.
- ctdonath 5y ago
  I’ve been around long enough to see many mega-corps rise and fall. Seemingly unstoppable juggernauts falter and disappear seemingly overnight. None of this is new; you just haven’t lived thru the cycle yet to see giants fall.
- JoeyBananas 5y ago
  This possibility of corporations running everything is exactly why we have FOSS licenses. Despite what this article says, many FOSS projects are doing fine and there are a lot of people who do work on making FOSS computing viable. The practical solution is not adopt communism, but to use FOSS software and not accept any gaps in the FOSS ecosystem. > I feel increasingly worried about future iterations on similar ideas like the metaverse/AR which seems to be gearing up to be a fight between Facebook and Apple with Unity, Epic and Roblox on the side. I think we’re going to end up with something pretty closed and dystopian. I fail to see how this lawsuit you speak of is relevant to FOSS. Are you aware of Godot engine, an increasingly viable unity alternative? The important advantage of Godot engine over Unity is that the incentives of the developers are more aligned with the incentives of the users. Unity subjects its users to a terribly complicated EULA that many don't fully understand. It restricts the amount of copies you can install, how much money you can make, what you can use it for and so on. Godot doesn't have any of that, and they're well-funded. Godot engine is an example of a FOSS project that exists simply because the open source development model is more efficient than closed source. Companies realized that a FOSS game engine would be in their best interests and therefore they decided to fund development. This goes to show that FOSS is not totally at odds with capitalism. Sure, the corporation funding Godot could try to take the project in a bad direction. If that happens, the people who care about FOSS rather than "Free software as cheap labor" could fork it.
meristohm 5y ago
How far back does your fundamental idea of property go?
sneak 5y ago
> adopt a radical system that totally reimagines the fundamental idea of property I'm pretty sure that's what copyrights over digital information are in the first place.

nautilus12 5y ago

What about a type of liscence that behaves like a union. If you pay into this union then you are free to monetize all software with this particular license? Then at least AWS has to pay elastic something if they want to use it

fsflover 5y ago
Then poor people will not be able to use the software.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  I suspect that's up to the software developer. If they want to write software in a manner that allows its use by poor people, then no problem. I write software like that. I use the MIT license for most of my software. I don't like GPL, because I don't like coercion; but I'm a contrary bastard. I like the "ASCAP" suggestion. I would be unlikely to use it, myself, but I think it's a viable option.
  - fsflover 5y ago
    > I don't like GPL, because I don't like coercion Permissive licenses allow coercion of users by corporations.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
      TomaTOE, ToMAHto. We'll just agree to see things differently, then. No probs. Cheers!
      - fsflover 5y ago
        You are of course right that GPL is a kind of coercion, too. The question is which coercion is more harmful to the society. It's the same as with any law.
    - toolz 5y ago

sokoloff 5y ago

> does anyone really think that the FSF would be able to stand up in a copyright court against Apple and Google? I do. I strongly suspect I’m not the only one.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ChrisLomont 5y ago
FSF annual budget is on order of 1.3M [1], a tiny portion of which can be spent on legal fees, the rest being normal operations - people and hardware and offices and such. So, if lucky, FSF can afford $200k / year in a court battle. Google v Oracle racked up around $2M a year for google in legal fees alone (at least early on - I didn't find a final cost for the decade of litigation) [2]. And either could afford vastly more as needed, especially if it could simply bankrupt their opponent and get a default win. I don't think the FSF can even remotely cover such costs. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation [2] https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-wants-4-million-from-oracle-for-legal-costs/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-wants-4-million-from-or...
- sokoloff 5y ago
  I think it’s a mistake to look at the FSF peacetime budget and conclude they couldn’t sustain a war. If Apple or Google were foolish enough to allow themselves to be pitted head-to-head with the FSF on a clear AGPL violation (the premise of TFA), FSF would easily raise the money required (in dollars and in pro-bono work). I’m not even especially a fan of AGPL and I’d crack my wallet open pretty wide for the FSF side here.
karatinversion 5y ago
And the fact that Apple refuses to use any GPLv3 software suggests that Apple's lawyers think so, too.
- giomasce 5y ago

fsflover 5y ago

It seems that basic income should be the solution here. Anyone will be able to work on their hobby without dying of hunger. With time, the amount of basic income can increase, leading eventually to a society free of exploitation.

andrew_ 5y ago
Why should people expect to be paid to work on a hobby?
- fsflover 5y ago
  Because it benefits humanity?
  - andrew_ 5y ago
    no it doesn't. it benefits the individual. it's a matter of choice; you choose to use what someone else is written rather than write your own. you choose to use what's been provided, rather than fork it. it benefits you, the user.
    - fsflover 5y ago
      A lot of hobbies benefit the whole society. I would say most of them do. Hobby means making something. Hobbyists often make something valuable not only to themselves. It also often involves collaborations. Especially in the field of software development.
      - cortexio 5y ago
        true, some hobby-ists improve society. but how many.. maybe 1 in a million? What about jobs that no one wants to do? Who does those? If so many people get paid by the government, wont that collapse the value of money, making 90% of all people live in poverty? Im not convinced it is a good idea.
- marcodiego 5y ago

andrew_ 5y ago

> Of course, as soon as you bring up the idea that the capitalist system itself is a problem, inevitably people will start objecting, saying that capitalism is what has enabled the creation of all these things in the first place. While many of the creations that they would point to in fact benefited a great deal from government subsidies and/or regulatory capture, it is true that we’ve seen an unprecedented boom under capitalism. However, that doesn’t mean that capitalism is the system we need to stay with. This kind of drivel drives me nuts. Let's just dump on the system that got us here an enabled amazing things to happen, whilst trying to be vague and non-committal about a suggested replacement. The author tries to slip by the fact that they're sympathetic with Marxist ideology - so they show their cards. We've experimented with the kinds of systems that the author subtly favors, time and time again, and they either turn into dystopian authoritarian madness or fail outright. I wish these folks would spend time in one of the failing states, or one in which they have little guarantee of any aspect of life (including liberties), before waxing estatic about utopian tomfoolery.

bantunes 5y ago
Sounds like a pig talking to another pig (that wants freedom) about how good they have it in their pens at the farm.
arp242 5y ago
Well, the industrial revolution with its child labour, or colonisation with outright slavery "got us to where we are" in many ways, but then we decided that wasn't such a great idea after all. And hey, fossil fuels got us very far too. But maybe we should stop with that too and move beyond them. I don't even agree with the author, or not exactly anyway, but I don't think this type of "it's the system that got us here"-type of reasoning is a good argument at all.
- andrew_ 5y ago
  Don't be so obtuse. we aren't talking about individual aspects, the author clearly suggests a fundamental change of the entire system. flawed child labor laws, or a lack of thereof, do not define capitalism.

toolz 5y ago

> Someone devotes a large amount of their time and effort to making something that many people both depend on and make piles of money from, but don’t recompense that original developer. I wonder how much free stuff that original developer used to get to the point where they could write working code to begin with? I find the problem with free software isn't capitalism, but greed. Some people are quick to forget how much free software/information they utilize without paying a dime back. > It seems clear that open source isn’t sustainable as things are now. Clear to you maybe, I on the other hand am bewildered to find that anyone can seriously think this is such a clear position they don't feel the need to back up such a claim with any data. Even their linked article doesn't make any real argument other than "what if?".

jqpabc123 5y ago

Open Source is socialism stuck in a capitalist world. A square peg trying to fit a round hole. This should have been obvious from the start. Good luck changing the world to fit.

throwaway316943 5y ago
I think it has more anarchist influence than socialist.
- jqpabc123 5y ago
  Same response as above. You don't need licenses with dozens of pages of legalese to prescribe "anarchy".
  - throwaway316943 5y ago
    Anarchy doesn’t preclude the use of contracts.
    - jqpabc123 5y ago
      A contract is meaningless without some entity (government) to enforce it.
      - throwaway316943 5y ago
        Our current method of enforcement is government but any unbiased third party can be used. It could even be automated to avoid human failings. When you buy a house who holds the money while the property exchange is made?
        jqpabc123 5y ago
        ... any unbiased third party can be used. Under who's authority? If government didn't exist, one of the first things people would do is recreate it. And your comments reflect this.

MayeulC 5y ago

> The problem with Free Software is capitalism I've spent a bit of time thinking about this a few days ago. I believe the real problem with Free Software is the copyright landscape. With everything copyrighted-by-default, with no expiration date in sight, it's much easier to handle proprietary software than free software. It actively hinders distribution and cooperation. Of course, the FSF builds on copyright. Imagine as a thought experiment if copyright would last 3 years for software. What would happen next? I'd argue such a short copyright term would be beneficial overall, extensible if a) you submit source code to a governmental archive that publishes it once it falls in the public domain b) extension is paid-for, like patents c) maximum length fall to 10-20 years (no longer than patents). Oh, and that doesn't only apply to software.

fsflover 5y ago
See also a step in the right direction: petition to make publicly funded software free, https://publiccode.eu https://publiccode.eu.

donatj 5y ago

I disagree with the problem. The problem is cathedral open source doesn’t scale. The problem is the general idea of an open source project being a full time job, especially if you are unwilling to work for free. If you want money for something, charge for it. It’s really that simple. I’m giving away lemonade at my stand away for free, being mad the donations don’t cover the lemons is just silly. I’d far rather my open source be a shared resource developed by its actual users. More bazaar, less cathedral. Fewer pigheaded decisions of a bdfl or corporation. Want to make a major left turn? Fork it. So many recent open source projects are essentially just a business with a bad revenue model instead of a great project with a business backing it. Horse before the cart.

jeegsy 5y ago
> I disagree with the problem. The problem is cathedral open source doesn’t scale. The problem is the general idea of an open source project being a full time job, especially if you are unwilling to work for free. A great summary of the situation.

throwaway316943 5y ago

> In an ideal world, housing and food would be decommodified That sounds more like prison than an ideal world. Considering the complete mess that industrialized agriculture is at the moment I can only imagine how much worse it would be if it was entirely centralized. Also the idea of not having ownership of my own housing is a strong incentive for me to fight against these ideas when I see them. My home is a very much an extension of my being in that it is customized to suit my needs and desires, I am not willing to accept a one size fits all that isn’t completely within my control.

rini17 5y ago
Cities in Europe consist of mix of communal housing (rental apartments built with support from government) and private. Some of the cities are top rated in quality of living. Hardly a prison. So I don't know where you got such idea?
- throwaway316943 5y ago
  What is the legal ownership model of this communal housing? You say they are rentals which means money is exchanged for the right to live there. How does this work without money?
  - rini17 5y ago
    Someone wants to abolish money?
    - throwaway316943 5y ago
      Do you take the argument to be that there is a single owner of housing to which everyone pays rent then? The reasons why that would be worse should be plainly obvious.
      - rini17 5y ago
        No. There is no single owner. Whoever wants to own their property, can buy/build one, there are enough of these for sale. I don't know of any case where municipality building houses (or another infrastructure like broadband) would make the situation worse for everyone.

marcodiego 5y ago

The problem with Free Software is: there is no problem with Free Software. People have choice no to use it, people contribute to it, it works, it helps open source, a few a very mature and used in mission critical applications... There is a problem with people trying to link Free Software with a single political line, be it socialism, capitalism or anarchism. Free Software has characteristics of the three lines: the freedom associated with capitalism, the community benifits associated with socialism and the diy aspect of anarchy.

mlang23 5y ago

I feel the incentive for free software / open source has changed. The >2000 explanation of why people code for free is basically "they hope to get hired due to their work". Maybe I was too naiv back in the 90s, but it didnt feel like it back then. And it is still not the truth for me personally. I publish code for free because I want to share with ohers. Yes, I've been invited to a conference or two due to what I wrote, but that was never the goal, and would have been far too little as a compensation for my time. Granted, I am not a major contributor, so I should probably keep my mouth shut. However, I feel like the incentive these days has been poisoned by capitalism.

JoeAltmaier 5y ago
Perhaps "the incentive" depends upon the individual. It's like folks saying "in the '60s everybody..." where they're describing what they did or somebody they knew did.
- ghaff 5y ago
  Yeah, in general, unless you're in the position of having a trust fund/investments that mean you don't need to work for a living, if you're going to be spending 40 hours a week on something, you probably want to get paid for it. Some people do have compulsive hobbies but that's mostly not sustainable. Of course, casual nights and weekend activities can certainly work as unpaid hobbies and they may even be intensive hobbies for a time. But the reality before people got as widely paid for writing open source code is fewer people spent a lot less time doing it.

krapp 5y ago

Capitalism isn't a problem with Free Software. The problem is free software people want to have their cake and eat it too. Billion dollar corporations using your software and never having to paying you a dime is a feature of the FOSS system, not a bug, the rights of the user are paramount and sacrosanct. You, the developer, don't own the software you write any more than anyone else, and because it doesn't belong to you, you have no right to make demands of its users beyond their continuing to respect the rights of the end user. If you can't make a living writing FOSS, that's not relevant to the philosophy. You chose a philosophy that doesn't care whether or not you can earn a living under it. If you want to guarantee people will pay for your software use a proprietary license. Otherwise, stop complaining that the world is playing the game by the rules you set and is beating you at it.

andrew_ 5y ago
there's not much I can add to this comment other than to say a wholeheartedly agree
shalmanese 5y ago
> Billion dollar corporations using your software and never having to paying you a dime is a feature of the FOSS system, not a bug. FOSS is libre, not gratis. Most FOSS happens to be gratis as well but that's not intrinsic to the FOSS model. Culturally, the FOSS community has been allergic to exploring new business models to see where there can be alignment with their production models. eg: I think models such as feature bounties could be a sustainable path for many FOSS projects but almost no FOSS projects look into such things.

cassepipe 5y ago

As someone who considers himself a commie (in the sense of desiring collective forms of property not in the police state sense although of course right wingers will shout that you can't have one without the other but that's another debate), and while I am sympathetic to the author's concerns I am not convinced by the line of reasoning. See, in a "capitalist" society, that is one where the capitalist mode of production is dominant, you can pretty much state that capitalism is the root of all problems in last resort. While it sometimes makes for complete and thorough analyses, it is often an hand wavy explain-it-all and intellectually lazy answer. Not because it is not true but because it is not relevant. And as every hn reader knows, saying something true is easy but saying something true and relevant is not. "L'heure de la dernière instance ne sonne jamais"

mikece 5y ago

The problem isn't "capitalism" but that most projects don't know how to raise money. We all know the value of project managers, testers, CI/CD specialists for open source projects: perhaps it's time to recruit and promote the role of donor advocate whose job it is to raise money for the project. Just because you build it doesn't mean people or companies will contribute: ask and it shall be given unto you.

AegirLeet 5y ago

If a person creates something that is useful to thousands of other people but capitalism can't even provide for that person's most basic needs, I'd call that a failed system.

mikece 5y ago
It's also a problem to call a failed system Capitalism when it's something between fascism, crony capitalism, and oligarchy. In a truly free capitalist landscape we wouldn't have the barriers to entry that exist in the US and most western countries today.

jordanmoconnor 5y ago

Thinking of software as media paints it in a much more obvious light. There are two forms of media - free and paid. Free media is funded with advertising. Paid media gets paid for by the customer. The benefit of free media is distribution. It can go anywhere, cheaply, and impact the largest audience. This is a common model for TV & large YouTube channels. The benefit of paid media is income. Generally, something that is paid for earns more than something that is free with advertising. However, with paid media there's a significant decrease in distribution. If the decrease is large enough, the creator would have earned more by putting it out for free with advertising to increase distribution. Now, here's the other catch, the benefit of mass distribution is power. Power of perception, mostly. You are now a voice for the vision you are trying to put into the world. You're impacting the way people think, and you're causing them to learn what you want to teach them. Open source developers of large projects do a chronically poor job at capturing the upside of distribution. That's the issue. They simply need to have advertising to fund their "media" that has a large distribution, or they need to charge for their "media". Or a hybrid approach works too – ads for freely distributed software and charge for proprietary or managed software.

karatinversion 5y ago
"Welcome to FreeBootloader 2.7. The system will boot in 90 seconds, but first, a message from our sponsors - Raid: Shadow Legends!"
chrismcb 5y ago
I'm not sure I agree with the assertion that something that is paid for earns more than advertising.

12thwonder 5y ago

I personally don't see that capitalism itself is the culprit of the issues mentioned but I don't like monopoly powered by free software. as long as competition is in place, I am kinda ok with big companies exploiting(?) free software.

avereveard 5y ago

the only logical fallacy is wanting people to pay for software you distribute for free, capitalism has no way to solve that, nor any other system. either you get the headspace that comes with the free software license or you charge for the software and use the money to sustain growth. it's actually quite simple, but every now and then some people think they're entitled money for work they willingly did give away for free and write a thousand word essay trying to externalize the internal logical fallacy of that proposition

kijin 5y ago

Right. And as with most problems that have to do with capitalism, we will get exactly nowhere if we try to fix capitalism first. FLOSS was a hack from the start. It hacked the capitalist concept of copyright to turn it upside down, or dare I say rightside left? Because that's what hackers do. Hackers don't wait indefinitely for the evil system to fall once and for all. Like most protagonists of cyberpunk novels, they find tricks to make life less unbearable for themselves and those they care about even as the system resists change. Because after all, it is the only way to bring about any change at all.

rini17 5y ago

The problem with contemporary capitalism is concentration. It's became too common to raise huge investment in order to become a monopoly and then take rent from such a position. All kinds of commons, not just Free Software, get plundered in the process. What to do... perhaps if customers prove they are subject to vendor lock-in, the court will proclaim the supplier as a monopoly. Then automatically tax the hell out such a corporation?

swiley 5y ago

The problem with Free Software is people thinking that the part you pay for is the copy of the code and not ongoing maintenance. Look at busybox (or even Linux itself) for example, people probably work on that full time and get paid for it but the code is free (in both senses.)

ctdonath 5y ago

Such rhetoric again fails to note why such work is “work”: a significant fraction of the effort isn’t fun & fulfilling, it’s unpleasant and nobody would do it except others will pay to get it done at a price higher than what the workers could earn doing something else. Food/housing/etc isn’t free. We pay others, and get paid, to efficiently rearrange workloads for better results at less effort. I write security software because few can do what I’m good at but millions need it; in return I pay others to make/do the myriad things I can’t do well. Few indeed would (out of love for the art) continue such work without profitable compensation; I like my job, but don’t wrangle encrypted keys just for fun & fulfillment.

simonh 5y ago

>Expecting the freeloading corporations that benefit from open-source software to contribute fairly is, I think, unrealistic. If you don't want people to benefit from work you voluntarily put into the commons, then don't put it into the commons. Corporations are just groups of people. Who gets to decide that this group of people over here can legitimately benefit from the commons, but these other people over there can't? That's not a commons anymore. If you want to put restrictions on who can or cannot benefit from your work, then put those restrictions on the work when you release it. But don't then claim you put it into the commons, you didn't. If you want to benefit privately from your work, what on earth are you doing giving it away? Surely a big bunch of people coming along, picking up that work and using it to provide incredibly useful services to lots of people, benefiting thousands or millions of other people at much lower cost than they otherwise could is a good thing, right? How is that not a massive success? The problem with people like this guy and Elastic, etc, is they don't actually want to give things away for free. They actually want to get paid. Ok, fine, I have no problem with that, just for goodness sake be honest about it.

Stranger43 5y ago

Very few successful opensource projects is the product of an single entity dedicated just to that project but is the product of an process where someone in company A develops something that company A need but don't mind sharing with companies B and C if it means improving the product beyond what their own resources can support. And due to cartel legislation the absolutely easiest way for this to happen is in the context of an open and transparent project. The fact that open source exists in an "intentionally created" loophole in the regulations designed to prevent big companies from "conspiring against the market" is a huge part of what took the mostly failed academic concept of "committee controlled" free software and turned it into an industry dominating "open source" movement with no clear leadership.

simonh 5y ago

Coming from a family that has suffered severely under Marxism, anti-capitalist sentiment that promotes Marxism as an answer like this makes me very sad. Capitalism is based on fundamentally democratic principles. Markets are basically continuous ongoing referendums on what people want, need or care about. It's based on freedoms to own property and buy or sell products and labour as sovereign individuals, and freedom of association to form companies. Marxism replaces markets with bureaucratic fiat. Resources are expropriated by the bureaucracy and allocated according to political priorities, it's a fundamentally coercive and authoritarian system from top to bottom. Take away the need for people to satisfy a market of their peers in order to earn a living, and who gets to decide what they work on and what it's value is? Marxists have an answer for that - it's the bureaucracy again. All power becomes centralised. This is not a theory, this is what actually happened everywhere this has been tried. Don't get me wrong, I'm no free market fundamentalist. I'm a Brit but probably closest to being a European style social democrat politically. Socialism has had many failures, but so has capitalism. The real world is a messy complicated place and no one answer ever fits every economic question we have to deal with. But Marxism is sheer political and economic poison.

throwaway316943 5y ago
Bingo. Currency and free markets are the best implementation of distributed democracy we’ve seen yet. Everyone can vote on everything as many times as they want constrained only by their participation in the system. I still believe we need a level playing ground though, anti trust and a strong legal system to prevent abuse. We should be careful about safety nets though, preventing failure and saving people from disaster are different things with different consequences.
- simonh 5y ago
  Right, and just like democracy needs rules to make sure elections are fair, you do need rules to ensure the markets are fair. We do need safety nets too, can we really have bailouts for banks but somehow ordinary working people who fall sick are out on the street on their own? But it's a net not a pedestal. I do worry about basic income the article fantasises about developers getting a guaranteed state income that allows them to write whatever software they like. That really is a fantasy, most open source projects are single-contributor repositories that get a couple of downloads ever. I know, I created a few ;)

cortexio 5y ago

The problem is certainly not capitalism. Look if you are going to hand out free stuff, dont expect anything back. You cant buy investors/friends/etc.. by giving them free stuff. Companies have toilet paper. The toilet paper company said, hey, give us $5 and you this amount of paper. Just as open source people said, here is our software and you give us nothing. because it's free. You cant say afterwards, well, actually, i think everyone who used my stuff owes me $100. That's just scamming by lying that it was free. If you think your software is worth something. Sell it. No wants to buy it? well.. maybe it's not worth much. Some companies pay thousands of dollars for certain software. As for the marx stuff. Those kind of ideas always lead to dicatorship/slavery or they talk about some fairy tale where companies make decisions in a democratic way etc etc. It doesnt work. They are fantasies. You NEED capitalism. Who is going to do the shitty jobs? no one wants to do them. The nice thing about capitalism is that it makes the shitty jobs more valuable and so people do them by free will. No need for forcing people to do them. Do you really want to get rid of that?

Vaslo 5y ago

> The only way free/libre/“open-source”1 software can be a sustainable endeavour is to change what “sustainable” means. In an ideal world, housing and food would be decommodified and people could work on software projects for the love of it and place it in the commons for others to enjoy the use of. This is purely the problem of “other than capitalism”. We don’t need 1000 people getting paid via socialism to work on skins for a game. The advantage of pay is that it can be used to persuade people to work on things they are much less interested in. How many of you like your jobs but would probably do other things if not for your good pay? Pretty much everyone!

lamontcg 5y ago

Also, people are kinda assholes. If you've ever had to deal with open source project issues and bugs, it sucks. For totally unpaid side-projects I'm thinking of going to open-source-closed-contribution model with no public PRs or issue submission because its just 98% toxic.