3 ms·
What can we, as developers, do to take back computing and move it to being more free and less commercial?
by ohCh6zos 5y ago
What can we, as developers, do to take back computing and move it to being more free and less commercial?
- akomtu 5y agoForm a "software engineering association" with fees paying for full time lawyers and lobbyists and try to pass laws that would prevent the scenario above. But expect a very organised and well funded opposition: the anti-privacy trends have big sponsors at the top.
- bediger4000 5y agoDon't develop for Windows, or MacOS for that matter. If your OS is uncontrolled, so is the software.
- TameAntelope 5y agoDon't be a developer as a profession, and that'll pretty quickly resolve the need to be paid for software you create. I guess you'd also not be allowed to value your time or effort, either.
- contravariant 5y agoSame thing as always, make better free and non-commercial software.
- sz3 5y agoAt the risk of being reductive: Make more of our software copyleft? Even weak copyleft? As a thought experiment, imagine how the modern web might've played out if KHTML was released under the MIT license instead of the LGPL? Bearing in mind: Google has other ways of controlling the market (search, android, youtube, gmail, "switch to chrome" everywhere... don't call it anti-competitive...), but they've had to work much harder to exert control than they would've -- IMO -- if blink/webkit/khtml had a more "corporate friendly" license. Maybe I'm off base with my reasoning, but I see it as being about friction. We can't stop the inhuman profit-seeking machine from doing what it does, but we do have some (underutilized) tools to slow it down.
- danielmarkbruce 5y agoMany (/most?) developers want to get paid lots and lots of money for their software.