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