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There are some useful questions to explore around that; for example: Is there anything intrinsic about those tasks that means that control of those computing d
by jka 5y ago
There are some useful questions to explore around that; for example:
Is there anything intrinsic about those tasks that means that control of those computing devices has to be rendered partially unto third parties by the everyday consumers who own them?
Or, to put it another way: can the useful affordances that everyday users find in proprietary software equally be implemented in free and open source software?
- kube-system 5y agoIt depends on the particular circumstances. In the situations where FOSS wouldn’t work well for end users, there’s almost never a technological barrier to implementation, but tangentially related issues of ownership, control, expectation, obligation, law, or expediency. A lot of these situations pop up when a system consists of hardware, software, and information, and users that are all from different parties. Sometimes someone other than the user has a legitimate interest in a system.
- jka 5y agoGood food for thought - could you provide an example?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- kube-system 5y agoLet's say there are three parties: Group [A] are the end users Group [B] is a software company Group [C] is a provider of non-fungible data [A] needs to access the information provided by [C] [C] wants to facilitate this, so they contract with [B] to build an exclusive software mechanism to do so. [C] believes this solution provides a competitive advantage, and requires [B] to perform work under an NDA. In this situation, [A] doesn't have a choice between FOSS/proprietary. They have a choice between getting the information they need or not getting it. Even if there is a FOSS solution that does a similar functions as the software built by [B], it is not useful to [A], because it cannot provide the information from [C]