Memes @lemmy.ml

2y ago

Unpopular Opinion

127 comments

A lot of open source software is written by people working for corporations. Red Hat may have started out as a plucky co-op but it's now part of IBM. MySQL is written primarily by Oracle. The fact that the source is open doesn't mean it's all volunteer work.
That doesn't mean it wasn't a massive transfer of wealth, just that for a lot of it people were paid a fraction of the wealth they created rather than none at all.
Sidenote: Here's a good article about how software developers can wage class warfare. Some tips are: Don't help other people learn things, never write documentation, and make your code as opaque as possible so your boss doesn't get anything from you for free.
- Valve probably stands at the company who has "given back" the most in recent history (making Desktop Linux viable for the first time ever, mostly through gaming), but even Valve has corporate America skeletons in their closet. (Like the only reason they have a decent refund option now is because Australia basically forced them, and they had to change their flash sales for European laws.)
  
  Valve's bigger, and unforgivable crime, is their failure to release Half Life 3.
  
  Valve still is a corporation, decently good at open source, but still a corporation that develops and distributes a lot of closed source software. Like the github ceo once wrote: open source the engine not the car, that’s what drives open source development for them. When many use their software and contribute patches and more importantly report bugs, everyone wins.
- The utter irony of this being a monetized medium.com article
- An interesting read. The advocated actions have many similarities with the guild system.
  
  I think we'd have fewer security problems if we had a tech guild. It would keep unqualified people from becoming sysadmins, for one.

Here is a list of the volunteers of Linux 6.1: https://lwn.net/Articles/915435/
Huawai is the biggest contributor, followed by intel, google, amd... Most volunteers are all on a payroll. Companies working together on an industry standard is still noble, though.
- Everytime I go to post a minor correction comment, somebody else like you made a much better version of the same comment. This place is way better than Reddit.
  
  Thanks, this place is full of dreamers and sometimes it feels violent to bring realism and nuance into their wonderous worldview. I'm happy my comment got upvotes, the first readers can downvote you to drown at the bottom of a comment thread. Good to have multiple voices like ours here.

Sorry but this is such a bad take.
Linux is free to install, free to use and most importantly free to learn
What is the alternative? How many people who are now in great jobs would have been unable to teach themselves the skills they need if IIS or another proprietary technology had won the server market instead.
Something had to fill the space, would you rather it was a technology that created barriers for people with the fewest advantages in life?
(Also as others have said, a lot of OSS development is funded by companies. Linux in particular being a great example)

On the other side, Free and Open Source Software leveled the playing field for software development by quite a lot. Before FOSS you had proprietary databases, proprietary OSes, proprietary web servers, etc, at every level of the chain. Without FOSS Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office would rule the roost. Without FOSS smart phones might've taken years longer, and have far less choices. Without FOSS the web would be drastically different. Without FOSS development would be harder to break into, and anything you tried to produce would involve 15 different licensing fees.
- Without FOSS Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office would rule the roost. Without FOSS smart phones might’ve taken years longer, and have far less choices.
  Uhhh, Google Workspace isn't FOSS and the only FOSS Office project that has market share is Libre Office with a whopping...1%.
  Chromium may be "open source" but Google is definitely trying to make a walled garden, especially in respect to ads, and Chrome rules the roost. Chrome itself has plenty of proprietary software in it.
  How is this any argument for something else? Your examples are weak, MS Office does rule the roost, and Chrome only rules the roost due to it being a Google product, not because of its open source bona fides.
  Without FOSS smart phones might’ve taken years longer, and have far less choices.
  Android is literally the reason bloatware from phone developers made a resurgence. It made modern phones worse than the shitty proprietary OSes driven by shitty phone manufacturers from the 90's to 2007. Google allows manufacturers to install applications you can't uninstall without rooting the device and risking your security.
  How did that benefit consumers? To get a decent Android phone, you're paying a shitload of money, just like you would be for an iPhone (a completely closed source product) and iPhone at least doesn't have software bloat from your phone carrier/phone manufacturer.
  Further, Google is literally attempting to use their web dominance to make it nearly impossible to implement ad blocking with Manifest v3. Their ad profits are more important to them than FOSS. How is denying the ability to block ads a "benefit" to consumers?
  
  I agree with your points. But you can just download Android studio, hook your phone up in dev mode, and remove the bloatware packages as well as DT to prevent them from coming back. I did and I've not seen any carrier crap since.
- Everyone can equally profit off it. And hopefully, everyone (that can) will contribute.

"Bricks are used in most corporate structures... Brick-layers are boot-licking capitalist class-betrayers!"
What a stupid take...
- Yeah agreed, you can use that logic with just about anything
  
  you can use that logic with just about anything
  wheat feeds the workers, which do work, transferring wealth to the top, wheat is a hyper capitalist class-betraying crop!
  ~~this was never not a Pascal's mugging~~ thats not exactly what I ment

So, don't mistake this as me telling you you're totally wrong, because you definitely do have a point and it gets under my skin too (that's why I believe licenses like AGPL and, dare I say, SSPL should be used), but many of these companies actively contribute back to the open source software they're using.
- and are hardly the only companies using FOSS; everyone from non profits to miliary systems use it. this meme doesn't really work when you take the whole picture into account.
  
  Regardless of how you slice it, foss devs don't get fairly compensated for their work.
- SSPL
  TIL what that is.
  ... and [whistles], that's a doozy!
  From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Side_Public_License:
  [the SSPL] primarily replaces [the AGPL v3's] section 13 "Remote Network Interaction; Use with the GNU General Public License." with a new section that requires that anyone who offers the functionality of SSPL-licensed software to third-parties as a service must release the entirety of their source code, including all software, APIs, and other software that would be required for a user to run an instance of the service themselves, under the SSPL. In contrast, the AGPL v3's section 13 covers only the program itself (the copyrightable work licensed under AGPL v3).
  I get what they're going for and I sympathize with the goal, but I'm not sure there's any software in the world that could comply with that license because it would have to release an entire container or disc image with nothing but SSPL software from the kernel on up. Does a SSPL-licensed kernel or httpd even exist?
  
  They gotta want to do it I guess, lots of companies use like GPL code but don't tell anyone.
  
  So, without getting too into the specifics about SSPL because you and many of the critics of it I agree with in that it seems poorly thought out or too aggressive, I do think AGPL fails in some ways. Mongo and (I think) Elastic were both licensed under AGPL but made/changed to SSPL because of a perceived abuse by cloud services like Amazon. As for what exactly the cloud providers were doing that they perceived as wrong and what the best solution is I'm not too sure. It could be that Elastic's own managed version of its product wasn't getting any use because Amazon's was benefiting from economy of scale and vendor lock in ("hey, we already have everything on AWS, let's use AWS's Elastic offering") and if that's the case then it's not really a failing of software licenses and just a shitty and unfortunate situation.
  One of the things libre software is trying to accomplish is letting anyone use it for anything and allowing competitors to monetize it is a valid use. It seems like Elastic and Mongo may have been trying to have a primary revenue stream be money from offering their own managed service and cloud providers were out competing with them. It's hard to not see this as them being a parasite that will take over the host and eventually kill them both because the devs of the product will stop getting compensation.
  Some products (I think QT is another example) offer a GPL/AGPL version but for a fee will give you a more traditional license (non copy left) and this allows users to have a way to keep their own code closed source while providing revenue for the creators. Win win. AGPL was made to fix a loophole of putting a GPLed product behind a web interface and then saying "hey I'm not technically distributing anything so I don't have to release my source code." You'd think that most enterprise folks would pay but it seems like the cloud providers didn't need to because they found ways around AGPL or just didn't modify anything.
  Like I said in another comment, no matter how you look at the situation, open source devs are getting taken advantage of. Enterprise customers should set the example and monetarily support the devs of open source software they use. While they do sometimes it's not the norm. Even within the same company you see mixed behaviors. Microsoft has been contributing code back to git and adding new features but also "stole" AppGet. They even interviewed the dev and asked specific questions about it. It's just scummy. It's a reminder that something being legal isn't automatically ethical or moral.

That's not an opinion, that's a fact.

That may be true, but there is (usually) also an upside. Any fixes and modifications must be shared back. Thank you copyleft licenses. Thank you GPL.
- “must” is a strong word here, and the conditions which trigger “must” are amazingly narrow.
  The GPL is not as fearsome as people make it out to be, and I wish it was. It’s a very capitalist license, and there are ways around its provisions.
- Man, I'm so glad that the Border Patrol is using my tech to violently abuse refugees! It's extra awesome that they sent back some modifications! I love it when I get help from *checks notes... fucking Nazis.
  This is a joke, right? Cool beans that the people who decided to use the code for nefarious purposes helped make it cleaner. /s
  Seriously, that's really pathetic for an "upside."
  
  While we might not agree with immigration policy and power abuse, it's hard to put moral limitations on who gets to use our software. While the example you gave is far from trivial.
  The second we say someone can't use our software for whatever reason, that's the second the software is no longer truly free. It's same with Open data.
  If you set in writing that your software can be used by anyone, then you also take away the power of those in high places to interpret the licence in a discriminatory way.

I'd rather see it as having Internet, the backbone of a technology we profit a lot from, runs on free softwares.
That companies use it to make profit is the same as those using anything to make profit.
Companies are also using paper and pencils, desks and seats and all sort of things.

Here's an article all about how 'open source' coopted and recuperated 'free software' movement to the benefit of corps.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230703044529/https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-meme-hustler
The enduring emptiness of our technology debates has one main cause, and his name is Tim O’Reilly. The founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, a seemingly omnipotent publisher of technology books and a tireless organizer of trendy conferences, O’Reilly is one of the most influential thinkers in Silicon Valley. Entire fields of thought—from computing to management theory to public administration—have already surrendered to his buzzwordophilia, but O’Reilly keeps pressing on. Over the past fifteen years, he has given us such gems of analytical precision as “open source,” “Web 2.0,” “government as a platform,” and “architecture of participation.” O’Reilly doesn’t coin all of his favorite expressions, but he promotes them with religious zeal and enviable perseverance. While Washington prides itself on Frank Luntz, the Republican strategist who rebranded “global warming” as “climate change” and turned “estate tax” into “death tax,” Silicon Valley has found its own Frank Luntz in Tim O’Reilly.

On the other hand, I'd wager that any given person who uses Linux daily at work is far more likely to own a stake in their company than the average worker.
My Linux laptop is also literally my means of production, which I own. Karl Marx never predicted this.
- He also didn't predict a class of people born with no labor to sell because so much of it has been automated away. How are they supposed to use their labor as a bargaining chip if they can't find labor to do to begin with?
  
  Actually I think that's kind of exactly what he predicted. Technological determinism would inevitably manifest the violent downfall of capitalism.
- Marx did talk about individuals owning the means of production. For example farmers or craftsmen owning their tools before capitalism. Marx talked about the means of production being shared under communism and not owned by one specific person or capitalist. If anything Marx predicted FOSS lol.
  
  Except this is really reductionist and ignores there is very little "open hardware" out there, and few people producing it. So while you might have access to the "means of production" through software, you absolutely do not in hardware.
  Great that software tools are in the hands of the worker, but the means to fabricate the machines that code runs are definitively not owned by workers. (To say nothing of issues with getting drivers for a DIY motherboard working with Linux long-term.)
  Also, not everyone is born to code, so it's a bit elitist.

Tell me how the math works out on this one.
Because last I checked, Microsoft, Apple, Oracle and Google still are the biggest companies and their wealth rests primarily on closed source software.
I would think for the "largest" transfer of wealth, we would be able to pinpoint some poor exploited geeks coding software juxtaposed against some rich fat cats making money off of it.
But Linus Torvalds doesn't seem poor and IBM/Red Hat, while rich, is much smaller than Microsoft.
- I agree with this take, but Google does stand pretty tall on Open Source. Android is technically the most widely used Linux variant in use.
  
  Sure, they all use open source to varying degrees.
  But most of Android is actually contributed by engineers who are being paid by Google.
  We could argue that $300K in San Francisco is still exploitation, but there are worse forms of exploitation in any case.
  
  Android is technically the most widely used Linux variant in use.
  And I wouldn't be surprised if ChromeOS is second.
- In Linus' defense, I would probably pay the person that wrote and maintains the software that literally runs the world pretty well too. Can't afford not to.
- Apple I think relies heavily on the BSD project (I think they might be even using the same kernel?) and Google on Linux. There's also probably a lot of open-source software they use behind the scenes or which aren't as big.
  
  They use their own kernel but a lot of the userland is FreeBSD-based (and some senior FreeBSD contributers are also Apple employees)

They are also who mostly finances the development of very many Foss products. So still better than closed source, as small companies and the general public can also use those products.

This is why I don't agree with the GPL. It's perfect in every way, except for the allowance to utilize the licensed work or derivatives thereof for monetary gain. Fuck that shit. You got it for free, you give it away for free.
- Exactly.
- It only takes one paying customer to take the published FOSS code from the commercial software and re-distribute it for everyone to benefit from the commercial modifications made to it. That's the point, a commercial use of the software can not make the source proprietary.
  This is what Redhat recently found out when they tried to hide their RHEL source behind a paywall. Attempting to tie the hands of their customers with an additional license agreement forbidding distribution of the source is a violation of the GPL.
  
  Doesn't matter. You got it free, you give it away for free. You're clearly missing the whole point of the OP.
- So wait, you're saying that anything created or developed using opens source software should be given away for free?
  
  I am, and I'm tired of pretending it shouldn't.
- Derivative work CAN be sold or used for monetary gain. Its just you have to give the source code too and anyone receiving it can share too. I see GPLv3 perfect

Don't worry, it's like like anybody uses 10+ year old OS versions which have been EOL'd for over 5 years. Definitely not a concern since Linux is FOSS and you don't need costly contracts to keep up to date with the most basic of security updates.
https://www.shodan.io/search?query=linux+2.6.32-696.el6.x86_64

Those of us who work in tech need to have a serious reckoning about our contributions to this sort of dynamic and the sort of social environment it incentivizes us to gravitate towards, maintain, and create.
There also needs to be some discussion of class in tech and how the bull pen tech support grunts are going to have very different incentives from the senior technician making 7 figures on top of mad stock options.
- Nobody listened to Negativland enough when it mattered. They helped develop Creative Commons licenses and were pretty much the spearhead for the "no attribution but you can't use it for commercial purposes" license. I'm not sure if that one even exists anymore, but it seems like Creative Commons is also pretty dead-in-the-water these days. They understood the need to define ownership and be able to say "No, corporations can't just use it freely."

Isn't that why FOSS survives as a model and is encouraged so much, though, so there is something to enclose and charge bullshit fees for once you fork it?
- Not all licenses allow charging for forks. You can charge for your services always. And you can charge for code that is all your own. But, only certain licenses allow you to actually fork and charge for it without sharing those contributions. And many might not even really consider those licenses to really be FOSS.
- It's particularly popular for startups to use to bootstrap their tech company and build cred shortly before they reach the "we have to actually turn a profit" phase, at which point the bean counters try to squeeze every bit for a nickel. Once they have marketshare, they say, "we are helping the competition by releasing this!" and abandon the things they actively maintain.
  There is also a direct benefit for open sourcing: you can get other people to debug and improve your software for free. They go the enclosure direction once they want to squeeze their customers for more money, e.g. closing the source code and charging $x per use of the software to their service clients.
  Once they're a monopoly, companies can swing back to the open source direction because they have no competitors to worry about and can just get free dev work and good will out of it.
  
  Microsoft loves this. They bought GitHub for a reason

Software is like a flame. Sharing it by lighting another fire doesn't take away from the original flame.
- ^ This guy Jefferson's tapers.

Capitalism is when money.

This is absolutely not unpopular. Free software buys more porsches to incompetent business schools alumni than windows...
Well known, sad and frustrating

It was never unintentional. It benefits is all to have them use it, too.

A lot of the clients I do work for in the MSP I work in, this is half truth. Yes, a sizeable portion of servers are running a Linux based hypervisor, to serve windows VM's.
- Vmware? I've seen hyper-v used, but it's rare imo. And the reason for it being rare is the performance, at least that's how I see it. Vmware is just way more efficient. Not sure about Azure Arc HCI though, I recently had an old colleague tell me that they are switching to that.

TIHI.

Goes both ways. They can use my shit freely, and I can use theirs.

Every time I see this meme format, my brain plays a clip of "But you don't have to take my word for it."
- Take a look, it's in a book...

I believe many open source projects that are used by large corporations find a way to make money with that, at least by offering support or consulting or with sponsorships.
There are volunteer projects of which the developer doesn't profit of but are used by corporations but I doubt they are the "largest" transfer as written in the post.

I thought AWS is built on hosting open source projects too.

lemmy corporate apologist mode engaged

You should be aware that much of the effort of some big players like oracle and even microsoft goes into Linux. I am not aware of how this is for other FOSS projects but I would assume many companies have embraced open source. This may not be out of the goodness of their hearts but they definitely pour a lot of effort into these ojects and I think that is the beauty of FOSS, but also the beauty of the free market.

There are so many contradictions here I don't even know where to start. Is this one of those debate bait memes?

should use a dark background on the text
- That would have required a lot more of my labor than I was willing to give to it.

Closed licenses are arguably better for certain left projects, particularly self-contained ones. You can use bourgeois legal nonsense to stop corpos from using your work.
I've seen anti-war people write open source code that ended up getting used to help fly war drones.
- Closed licenses are arguably better for certain left projects
  What about licenses that restrict the software from being used in a certain way? I think I've heard of at least one open-source license that disallows the software from being used in the military industry.
  
  I mean yeah that's cool but are you really going to sue Lockheed-Martin? Like realistically if they wanted to they could take your code, say its theirs and what are you gonna do about it?
  
  A license that has restrictions like that doesn't meet the criteria to call itself "open source."
  
  I like the idea a lot but my understanding is that they're unenforceable. I'd go with one of those if I thought they worked, though.

Windows just keeps on winning
As for Linux, the word 'operating' in operating system is doing some REALLY heavy lifting here

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