The Guardian view on free software: big companies are in it for the money

theguardian.com

Article title is "The Guardian view on free software: big companies are in it for the money".

The submitted title of "Another example of how poorly conventional media understands Tech" is a bit too editorializing.

Got distracted by statements like “But the belief that everyone coding would solve anyone’s problems has been shown up as completely ludicrous. If anything, computer literacy has declined over the generations as computers have got easier to use.”

Edited title now, thanks.

>GitHub, by contrast, grew out of the free software movement, which had similar global ambitions to Microsoft. The confused ideology behind it, a mixture of Rousseau with Ayn Rand, held both that humans are naturally good and that selfishness works out for the best.

>Free software

>selfishness works out for the best

???

Uncharitable explanation is that someone read about half of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, thought that it was the definitive philosophy of everyone in Open Source, thought that they understood what it was talking about, and were wrong on both counts.

Still trying to come up with the charitable explanation, this article makes almost zero sense to me.

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