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If you don’t know the history: most open source software is freely available and built as a community effort by volunteers. FOSS has, by necessity, had a stron

If you don’t know the history: most open source software is freely available and built as a community effort by volunteers. FOSS has, by necessity, had a strong liberal culture from the outset. The genesis of many projects has been about sticking it to the man and winning back the freedoms taken away by big companies, especially hardware manufacturers. I’ll pay you to build me a minicomputer, but I’m damned if I’m letting you dictate what I can and can’t do with it. Telemetry is about gathering data and sending it to a single place. Having a central focus point of potentially personally identifying information, controlled by one entity more privileged than the others, is anathema to the idea of many of traditional open source projects.

perl4ever 5y ago
>a strong liberal culture Are you American? I would have said (small-l) "libertarian" not "liberal" in the American sense. For better or worse.
- aksss 5y ago
  “Liberal” today basically is the man. The word in American politics is associated with very illiberal policies, ironically.
duckmysick 5y ago
> The genesis of many projects has been about sticking it to the man and winning back the freedoms taken away by big companies I'm not sure it's working as intended. The current trend is for big companies to take FOSS, put it on a server, and run it as a service with extra quality-of-life trinkets on top - like GitHub or AWS.
Griffinsauce 5y ago
> Telemetry is about gathering data and sending it to a single place. Having a central focus point of potentially personally identifying information, controlled by one entity more privileged than the others, is anathema to the idea of many of traditional open source projects. This is the most clear eyed description I've seen yet, thanks. I guess my angle is not that of a FOSS developer but a regular user out in the world who has to get shit done. Most people (rightly, in that context) do not care about this one iota. This kind of absolutism limits the reach of the software, preventing it from reaching the stated goal of "sticking it to the man and winning back the freedoms taken away by big companies".

perl4ever 5y ago

>a strong liberal culture Are you American? I would have said (small-l) "libertarian" not "liberal" in the American sense. For better or worse.

aksss 5y ago
“Liberal” today basically is the man. The word in American politics is associated with very illiberal policies, ironically.

duckmysick 5y ago

> The genesis of many projects has been about sticking it to the man and winning back the freedoms taken away by big companies I'm not sure it's working as intended. The current trend is for big companies to take FOSS, put it on a server, and run it as a service with extra quality-of-life trinkets on top - like GitHub or AWS.

Griffinsauce 5y ago

> Telemetry is about gathering data and sending it to a single place. Having a central focus point of potentially personally identifying information, controlled by one entity more privileged than the others, is anathema to the idea of many of traditional open source projects. This is the most clear eyed description I've seen yet, thanks. I guess my angle is not that of a FOSS developer but a regular user out in the world who has to get shit done. Most people (rightly, in that context) do not care about this one iota. This kind of absolutism limits the reach of the software, preventing it from reaching the stated goal of "sticking it to the man and winning back the freedoms taken away by big companies".