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Comment by jongjong | Hacker News Reader

The algorithms of all major search, social and media platforms favor open source projects which are developed by or backed by major platforms. A project cannot propagate without exposure to users and the major platforms decide which projects will have exposure to users.

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It is time to crack down on tech giants. Break them up already.

We can beat them, so stop joining them.

There need to be a license change for this to be possible.

A license change wouldn't be compatible with the Open Source Definition, but people moving away from Big Tech open source projects would be. Switch away from their languages and operating systems.

I think the poster above was suggesting anti-trust lawsuits though, get the US government to split them up.

This perspective is becoming increasingly common: "If only we had a different kind of license, the tech giants would not have it their way". But I find it so very very hard to believe it. Google - a single such corporation - has how many billions in revenue each year again? The proprietary software giants around 2000 would have been in a similar financial situation. Do we seriously believe that the open community could produce a piece of software that these giants could not simply ignore and either write their own or purchase a proprietary alternative instead? That we would have some sort FLOSS utopia if only Apache 2.0 was not slapped onto say Solr? Maybe a license can play a small part here, but it being the solution - I highly doubt it. Rather, I think we would end up in a situation akin to the AGPL, where software is produced but it ultimately doing very little to undo whatever fundamentally economic problem that is the root cause of it all.

Thats an interesting claim, do you have any details about how you found this out?

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