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Funny that no one yet mentioned the elephant in the room given that this is HN: Hacker and FOSS culture. Of course there are attempts to commercialize it, but p

Funny that no one yet mentioned the elephant in the room given that this is HN: Hacker and FOSS culture. Of course there are attempts to commercialize it, but people are naturally resistant.

bluefirebrand 2y ago
I would argue that Big Tech has successfully commercialized FOSS culture simply by using FOSS output to build commercial software Cloud Services like AWS probably would not exist without the foundation that FOSS provided
tsumnia 2y ago
I sort of disagree, as we've seen a significant increase in small scope tools like the FlipperZero, Arduinos, and Raspberry Pis. Each one has a slew of shields/extensions/whatever that subculture calls their plug and play option. That isn't to say the groups are mindless sheep or naturally resistant; just pointing out that the space does have some commercialization happening.
finnthehuman 2y ago
The DIY-spirited software scenes were so thoroughly commercialized that appealing to their aesthetics is now in the past. FFS, the "Hacker" in "Hacker News" is based on a venture capitalist co-opting a rebellious term to convince a bunch of impressionable youths that they can have this alluring label and that the cool kids software club is actually working for his vc firm. All the subculture has been thoroughly power-washed out of any commercial useful corner of their online communities. You can encounter more pressure to be a milquetoast office-job persona in the open source space than your actual office job. We're in so deep you can't even see how deep we're in.
- bakuninsbart 2y ago
  > FFS, the "Hacker" in "Hacker News" is based on a venture capitalist co-opting a rebellious term to convince a bunch of impressionable youths that they can have this alluring label and that the cool kids software club is actually working for his vc firm. Ok, I didn't see the forest for the trees there, which is quite funny. But I still get together with friends to build stuff for the sake of it, without any intention of commercializing the things we build, and there is still a very large corpus of FOSS software being maintained by people simply because they think it is cool, or because they are idealists who want free software to be free.
  - finnthehuman 2y ago
    I don't see why it would be mutually exclusive. It can be the case that a subculture was commoditized AND people still enjoy doing the stuff the subculture formed around.
- RGamma 2y ago
  MaKe YoUr HoBbY yOuR cArEeR.
sneak 2y ago
From Thinkgeek to the BSL to megacorps from the military-industrial complex cosplaying rms (Microsoft shipping VSCode) while ignoring software freedoms, this seems to me to be plainly false.
torginus 2y ago
Hard disagree - even before the domination of Big Tech, the reason open source became the way it is - the domination of GNU/Linux - was because of the commercial interests of server vendors pushing Linux (a server OS) as a product. It's the same reason Linux has had a limited success in other spaces (embedded, mobile, desktop) - as opposed to something like Windows, it's poorly engineered for the needs of these domains (lack of realtime, good IPC, binary compatibility, native audio, graphics capabilities etc.). If you think of early 2000s mobile hardware, which used to run a variety of mobile OSes, yet Linux was incapable of properly supporting this domain. All attempts to rally around Linux as a consumer OS in these domains failed, because it just wasn't really built for that. Yet Linux was powerful enough to suck the air out of the room and prevent the emergence of competitors. (I don't really consider Android Linux.)
- achierius 2y ago
  > I don't really consider Android Linux Why not? Obviously it's heavily modified, but it's not a hard fork: unless something's changed since I last checked, they re-apply their patches on top of upstream LTS releases -- so they very much depend on ongoing kernel development.
snapcaster 2y ago
Are you kidding me? who owns the site you posted this on?

Funny that no one yet mentioned the elephant in the room given that this is HN: Hacker and FOSS culture. Of course there are attempts to commercialize it, but people are naturally resistant.

bluefirebrand 2y ago

I would argue that Big Tech has successfully commercialized FOSS culture simply by using FOSS output to build commercial software Cloud Services like AWS probably would not exist without the foundation that FOSS provided

tsumnia 2y ago

I sort of disagree, as we've seen a significant increase in small scope tools like the FlipperZero, Arduinos, and Raspberry Pis. Each one has a slew of shields/extensions/whatever that subculture calls their plug and play option. That isn't to say the groups are mindless sheep or naturally resistant; just pointing out that the space does have some commercialization happening.

finnthehuman 2y ago

The DIY-spirited software scenes were so thoroughly commercialized that appealing to their aesthetics is now in the past. FFS, the "Hacker" in "Hacker News" is based on a venture capitalist co-opting a rebellious term to convince a bunch of impressionable youths that they can have this alluring label and that the cool kids software club is actually working for his vc firm. All the subculture has been thoroughly power-washed out of any commercial useful corner of their online communities. You can encounter more pressure to be a milquetoast office-job persona in the open source space than your actual office job. We're in so deep you can't even see how deep we're in.

bakuninsbart 2y ago
> FFS, the "Hacker" in "Hacker News" is based on a venture capitalist co-opting a rebellious term to convince a bunch of impressionable youths that they can have this alluring label and that the cool kids software club is actually working for his vc firm. Ok, I didn't see the forest for the trees there, which is quite funny. But I still get together with friends to build stuff for the sake of it, without any intention of commercializing the things we build, and there is still a very large corpus of FOSS software being maintained by people simply because they think it is cool, or because they are idealists who want free software to be free.
- finnthehuman 2y ago
  I don't see why it would be mutually exclusive. It can be the case that a subculture was commoditized AND people still enjoy doing the stuff the subculture formed around.
RGamma 2y ago
MaKe YoUr HoBbY yOuR cArEeR.

sneak 2y ago

From Thinkgeek to the BSL to megacorps from the military-industrial complex cosplaying rms (Microsoft shipping VSCode) while ignoring software freedoms, this seems to me to be plainly false.

torginus 2y ago

Hard disagree - even before the domination of Big Tech, the reason open source became the way it is - the domination of GNU/Linux - was because of the commercial interests of server vendors pushing Linux (a server OS) as a product. It's the same reason Linux has had a limited success in other spaces (embedded, mobile, desktop) - as opposed to something like Windows, it's poorly engineered for the needs of these domains (lack of realtime, good IPC, binary compatibility, native audio, graphics capabilities etc.). If you think of early 2000s mobile hardware, which used to run a variety of mobile OSes, yet Linux was incapable of properly supporting this domain. All attempts to rally around Linux as a consumer OS in these domains failed, because it just wasn't really built for that. Yet Linux was powerful enough to suck the air out of the room and prevent the emergence of competitors. (I don't really consider Android Linux.)

achierius 2y ago
> I don't really consider Android Linux Why not? Obviously it's heavily modified, but it's not a hard fork: unless something's changed since I last checked, they re-apply their patches on top of upstream LTS releases -- so they very much depend on ongoing kernel development.

snapcaster 2y ago

Are you kidding me? who owns the site you posted this on?