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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.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Pav on Sunday March 31 2019, @08:22AM (1 child)

    by Pav (114) on Sunday March 31 2019, @08:22AM (#822667)

    Richard Stallman was right. What Free Software failed to do was extend those methods to business methods... There should have been a Free Software collectively developed version of the Co-op movement so we could sack the Silicon Valley bosses and financiers. Imagine what Free Software style Co-Op franchises could have done for the rest of society eg. burger flippers, baristas, taxi drivers etc... Instead, the big boys subverted Free Software so that they adopted the form but not the democratising function of Free Software and called it Open Source, and then did what we should have done ie. pushed OUR methods beyond I.T into the business world (ie. the gig economy). Hopefully Richard Wolff, or one of the other Co-Op pushers will get with the program, and we can start downloading and executing real-world software ie. business plans, and extend that radical worldwide collaboration we already know to earning a crust.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 01 2019, @02:22AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 01 2019, @02:22AM (#822952)

    > ... taxi drivers ...

    Are there any distributed ride hailing packages? I'm thinking Uber, but without the central company and money grab (and initial stake/subsidy) by a few rich investors and C-suite bosses. Operated as a co-op, the drivers would get the bulk of the fare, with only a small % going to the developers--who could still be well paid if the system was big enough.