Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

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> It's a shame that all these companies that benefited from open source have poisoned the industry like this

Open Source and the OSI are an industry plant. Look at who sponsors it.

The monopoly hyperscaler conglomerates get free labor and use it to build the world we despise: tracking panopticons, phones we can't install things on, device attestation, browser monoculture with no adblock, etc. etc.

Google made people fall in love with BSD/MIT, and look what it did.

Just a few of the classic plays:

"That Belongs to Us Now" - (1) vendors build stuff like Elasticsearch and Redis, (2) the hyperscalers yoink it into their proprietary offerings and take all the profits, (3) original authors and their companies starve.

"Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" - (1) vendors take an open source project like KTHML or Linux and build their version, (2) they flood the market with their offering, pushing out the competitors, (3) they use anti-competitive means to get their thing in front of all eyeballs, (4) once they have marketshare, they do evil things like add tracking and remove freedoms

Open Source needs to replaced with "freedom for the people, companies must pay". Source available shareware with anti-hyperscaler teeth.

Even Richard Stallman's licenses are not strong enough. CC BY-NC-SA is better.

"Pure" Open Source is corporate welfare. It was a mistake. It enabled giants to hang us with our own rope.

> Open Source and the OSI are an industry plant. Look at who sponsors it.

This is ignorant to the history of Open Source software. Software has been open long before it was subsidized by large corporations.

"Computer software was created in the early half of the 20th century.[2][3][4] In the 1950s and into the 1960s, almost all softwares were produced by academics and corporate researchers working in collaboration,[5] often shared as public-domain software." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_free_and_open-sourc...

You're talking about a different thing to OP. OP is talking about the OSI and the specific incarnation of 'open-source' that came with it, you are talking about the more general social pattern of open collaboration.

> Software has been open long before it was subsidized by large corporations.

Software then was also rather different from software now. It's not a government-funded research project these days.

One problem with all of these licenses is that however the code is available, we can’t practically prevent the LLM companies from training on it (especially given that they don’t respect IP laws anyway). No idea what to do about this. Wonder if communities will have to move to some kind of fractured system where source is gated behind a login.

Rough times out there for transparent organizations.

> No idea what to do about this.

Same thing book writers did when the printing press brought the possibility for others to copy their books for free.

There are also other options that have been used historically but they tend to be a lot more bloody.

Why can't others just be "Others I disagree with"? Why it has to be some grand conspiracy?

I'm all for open source, most of what I do is released as MIT, almost never "Free Software", still doing the same thing since LLMs appeared, regardless of everything else.

I'm a real person, have nothing to do with OSI but willing to explain my position, as long as you take it as real opinions held by a real person, instead of going into conspiracy theory land. Ask me anything, I'll give you my honest perspective.

When you come into a convo saying even Stallman isn't extreme enough, it's probably a good time to take a step back and evaluate your life.

I don't see a reason anyone needs to stop and evaluate their life for this reason.

Is it a danger to anyone, or damaging in any way? I think not.

Does one have to be a danger before they should evaluate their life? I sure hope not.

I don't feel comfortable telling anyone they should evaluate their life for such a silly reason.

Can? Sure. Should? Very questionable.

I'd call your statement more "extreme" than any of the stallman's statements on software.

surethingderbud

I'm actually a capitalist.

But our 25 year lax regulatory environment has created a world where the largest players abuse consumers and the competitive ecosystem.

Open source is one of the many strategies these companies have abused to create grave harm to our society. It's let them get further with our support and with less expenditure. It's given them an ethical smoke screen.

- Social media algorithms are the tobacco products of our century. Kids are growing up with a distorted sense of self worth, people are getting angrier and more polarized, and all of it is highly addictive - all to fuel corporate profits.

- The most popular and important computer form factor is controlled by a duopoly and we can't even own / repair / install / have rights to our devices.

- All hardware is becoming locked to device attestation, meanwhile companies are lobbying for "age verification" (read: full-on identity tracking).

- Distribution is being locked to monopolies. 92% of "URL bars" are owned by one company, and typing something into a computer goes through a bidding war protection racket.

I can go on and on about it. I shouldn't even have to. You know this.

A lot of this is because of a lack of proper competition. Since the DOJ / FTC / EU / ASEAN are being toothless (the latter are slowly waking up), the next best thing we can do is take away their open source abuse. Stop letting them use our work against us and the rest of the population.

I hope you find your peace.

This is all expected in capitalism as these are mechanisms to extract more profit.

We need more socialists in power...

I share your worries, but I don't blame open source for it. They would have done the same (or worst) without it.

Also, open source is one more justification on why we need to increase taxes on the very rich. At this point all of them have built their fortunes on it. Just like they do on the rest of public infrastructure.

I think you should take many steps back and seriously reevaluate your life.

I find non-commercial licenses too extreme. People selling your free software or using it in a commercial way so long as they respect the license is a good thing

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