Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Sunday March 31 2019, @12:51AM   Printer-friendly
from the be-sure-to-FLOSS-twice-a-day dept.

https://fossforce.com/2019/03/foss-on-the-road-to-nowhere/

The FSF and Linux Foundation are not the only organizations that could assume the moral leadership of FOSS. practices the same ideals that existed in FOSS twenty years ago. Similarly, after years of inactivity, the Open Source Initiative (OSI) has been struggling recently to again be relevant. However, both have a long way to ago before they can speak for the majority of FOSS, assuming they would care to.

Maybe the loss of a single direction is a sign of the success of FOSS. Maybe shared ideals can only exist at a certain point in a movement's development, and to wish otherwise is only meaningless nostalgia. Yet, despite the success of FOSS, today it has only partly transformed technology and business, and much remains to do. Unless we decide to content ourselves with what has already been done, I think that a sense of meaning — of making a difference — is more useful than seeing FOSS as nothing more than a shorter time to market.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Bot on Sunday March 31 2019, @02:33AM (4 children)

    by Bot (3902) on Sunday March 31 2019, @02:33AM (#822583) Journal

    when FOSS was the exception, people did it because they were either ideologically and morally inclined to, or because they foresaw that this model would bear good fruit.

    But then, FOSS success made it so that non free software hasn't got a chance in many scenarios.
    So what happens? that people with the commercial software mindset and ethics began to adopt FOSS because they were forced to.
    And hardware producer began to design for the fact that stuff couldn't be made obsolete by the ping pong between new hardware and driver updates.

    This means, FOSS that barely follows the licenses, or that uses the loopholes, and closed hardware.

    Add to this new smartphone raised generations that can't even game, let alone dev, vs. the generation that cut their teeth on amigas and DOS demos.

    --
    Account abandoned.
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +3  
       Insightful=2, Interesting=1, Total=3
    Extra 'Insightful' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   5  
  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday March 31 2019, @03:07AM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Sunday March 31 2019, @03:07AM (#822592) Journal

    I game on my gaming phone [wccftech.com]!!!

    --
    [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Pav on Sunday March 31 2019, @08:39AM (1 child)

    by Pav (114) on Sunday March 31 2019, @08:39AM (#822672)

    The Free Software Movement had real power. I remember commercial software developers begging for us to stop as our movement gathered steam. Our communities were where issues were hashed out and things got done. Unfortunately we lacked leadership (either lacking diplomacy like Stallman, apathetic about non-technical matters like Linus, or enthusiastic to show the Silicon Valley bosses to control and sell our communities like Eric Raymond). Now bosses control us again... the dog collars are on... if not on all of us individually, most certainly our community and industry.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday April 02 2019, @02:02AM

      by bzipitidoo (4388) on Tuesday April 02 2019, @02:02AM (#823371) Journal

      The tone of this question is fearful and despairing, and unwarranted. Fear is always good clickbait. FLOSS software will never be in decline. It takes only one release, one reverse engineering effort, to rip the de facto proprietary status off any data. There are thousands of people in the world who are talented enough to create clones. Consider all the old games that have gone open source, because copyright has nothing left to offer them but obscurity, obsolescence, and destruction.

      Copying is a natural right. We continue to waste a great deal of effort trying to paywall information, and otherwise maintain and enforce the artificial scarcity copyrights and patents need to function, instead of throwing our resources and thinking into building and improving viable replacements. Copyleft is brilliant, but at heart it is not nearly revolutionary enough, depending as it does on copyright.

      Copyright is so enduring because it pushes people's emotional buttons, not because it's good. It triggers our fear of loss (you're going to give away software that could be worth millions??) and our sympathies for those poor starving artists. It's a propagandistic con job, much like Make America Great Again. Like all such lies, its credibility is a passing thing. It can take centuries, and it has. The Gutenberg press could not break copyright, but looks like the Age of Information will.

  • (Score: 3, Disagree) by TheRaven on Sunday March 31 2019, @05:37PM

    by TheRaven (270) on Sunday March 31 2019, @05:37PM (#822769) Journal

    Even in the early days, most of the people doing open source (and not insisting that they called it Free Software) were doing so for pragmatic, often economic, reasons. That applied even to a lot of FSF people. Even Stallman didn't start out on an ideological crusade, he just wanted to be able to fix a bug in a printer driver and couldn't because he didn't have the source code.

    From a business perspective, open source is about having the option of a second source at any point. If my vendor goes out of business, I can always get someone else to maintain the code (though it may be prohibitively expensive). That kind of incentive naturally favours larger projects, because they're more likely to have multiple companies willing to support you.

    --
    sudo mod me up