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Can the Linux Foundation Speak for Free Software?:
[Emphasis in original. --Ed.]
Although the Linux Foundation seems to represent Linux and the entire Linux user community, many community members have complained for years that the organization has defaulted to representing only the interests of its corporate membership.
This situation might not matter so much if organizations representing the community were strong enough to act as a counter-balance. The trouble is, they are not. In the last decade, the Free Software Foundation has backed away from its former activist tradition, while the Software Freedom Conservancy is almost unknown outside a small circle. Even Debian, while the dominant force among Linux distributions, makes fewer position announcements than it once did. As a result, the Linux Foundation has become the accepted public face of free software without any attempt to represent any except corporate interests.
The kindest interpretation of this situation is that the Linux Foundation has a public relations problem that it is unaware of and is overdue to correct. A more cynical interpretation is that, from its very start, the Linux Foundation has been a slow coup, gradually usurping an authority to which it has no right. Ask me on alternate days which one I believe.
Whatever the case, the solutions are the same. A concerted effort to get community members elected to at-large positions might help, although they would still be a minority. Many, too, might not want to legitimize the foundation by participating in it. A more promising response might be to see that community organizations are strengthened to provide a counter-balance, but that would be a slow solution if it worked at all.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 25 2020, @12:01PM (1 child)
> Major open source projects now get most of their code contributions from corporate paid full time developers.
The barriers to contribution, and to software in general, are higher now than in the early hey days. A lot of large projects are now too large to easily maintain, understand or help with. Don't even get me started on how hard it is to build things now.
The thirty million line problem [youtube.com] is as much a problem for open source as it is for software quality.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Saturday January 25 2020, @07:01PM
And yet we have an easier time pumping out software now that we aren't stuck writing it in assembler. That software worked, and people paid for it willingly. Now we have shitty free bloatware, and a couple of generations who have zero experience with the design skills necessary to produce working software in assembler, or in many/most cases, even c.
"Oh, but rust will fix that." Same as Java did???? Same as UML did??? Or Yourdon??? (Does ANYONE remember Yourdon any more)? Same as the shitty GoF book "Design Patterns" did? (can't believe I spent $70 for a hardcover copy, if it hadn't been sealed in plastic at the book store I would have spotted it for the bullshit it was immediately).
Funny how trends change. When I first took a dump all over "Design Patterns", people were merciless. Now ... plenty agree it was over-hyped and just didn't deliver.
We have people claiming decades of "programming experience" that is nothing more than 6 months experience cut-n-paste from stackoverflow, repeated 20 times. They are SO locked into "use a web server" as the solution to everything that they don't even think of finding a better way to solve a problem, and they wouldn't know how anyway. Hence they perpetuate the surveillance economy.
The reason open source software is shittier now than at the turn of the century? Simple - constantly improving stand-alone operating systems and software would destroy the business models of the big boys - RedHat/IBM, Facebook, Google, Amazon. You would have intelligent agents that would be capable of going out on the net and finding what you wanted without hitting their servers and services. That was supposed to be the big thing that the net would enable - massively peer-to-peer for everything. They do NOT want that. And neither, apparently, do people who won't shell out for software but want everything free. You got it for free, but you gave up your freedom.
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