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I don't really believe in win-win anymore when it comes to mixing FOSS with Corporate. The need for monetisation always wins in the end for big corporations. W
by _abox 5y ago
I don't really believe in win-win anymore when it comes to mixing FOSS with Corporate. The need for monetisation always wins in the end for big corporations. Whether they openly admit it or not.
For example: A lot of patches contributed by Microsoft are to make things run better on Azure and are irrelevant to most consumers. They view desktop Linux mainly as something that should exist under Windows (in my work there was a lot of pressure to move our development laptops to WSL2). They use their market position to push their views (think of the way they hassle third party browsers on Windows).
Canonical is trying to make the snap store something they and only they control (it is not possible to run your own even now). RedHat with IBM took over CentOS just to remove it from the market as a free way to run RHEL.
It's my belief that in the end they will always want something back, some kind of strings attached. The GPL is not sufficient to prevent that because it's purely about code, not about the business model behind it. Be it intellectual property, use of their services, data collection, whatever. And they will do whatever they can to gain a foothold over the competition, which is also involved in Linux.
Even if a current operator is benign, they can always be taken over by a less scrupulous party, as happened many times in IT history. I don't want my OS be used as a pawn in that game. This is what I like about FreeBSD, the MIT license while being more open gives corporate interests less guarantees their contributed work won't be used by competitors and because of that they tend to ignore it. With the exception of Netflix which hasn't really done harm to the ecosystem because FreeBSD itself doesn't really factor into their products other than as a server platform. Even so, FreeBSD is not free from corporate influence nor are many of the apps I use. But it is more so than Linux.
But yes it is more a personal principle than an explicit objection to some of the contributions made. I used to be a supporter of "big tech" influence a decade ago but too many things have happened. That was still in the days we believed Google really wouldn't be evil :) Now they rely on tracking and push clearly user-hostile tech like FLoC through standards bodies. As a result I've admittedly become more anti-corporate than the current situation warrants. But action = reaction. They have a lot to make up for.
Apple was the best in this regard IMO because their business model was all about hardware, so they could afford to give software away for free. But they too are becoming more closed, with increased reliance on app store and iCloud revenue. They gave us stuff like OpenCL but lately everything they've come out with is closed (think Metal).