A lot of open source software is written by people working for corporations. Red Hat may have started out as a plucky co-op but it’s now part of IBM. MySQL is written primarily by Oracle. The fact that the source is open doesn’t mean it’s all volunteer work.
That doesn’t mean it wasn’t a massive transfer of wealth, just that for a lot of it people were paid a fraction of the wealth they created rather than none at all.
Sidenote: Here’s a good article about how software developers can wage class warfare. Some tips are: Don’t help other people learn things, never write documentation, and make your code as opaque as possible so your boss doesn’t get anything from you for free.
Valve probably stands at the company who has “given back” the most in recent history (making Desktop Linux viable for the first time ever, mostly through gaming), but even Valve has corporate America skeletons in their closet. (Like the only reason they have a decent refund option now is because Australia basically forced them, and they had to change their flash sales for European laws.)
Valve still is a corporation, decently good at open source, but still a corporation that develops and distributes a lot of closed source software. Like the github ceo once wrote: open source the engine not the car, that’s what drives open source development for them. When many use their software and contribute patches and more importantly report bugs, everyone wins.
I don’t hate Valve, but let’s be real, they’re not adding to Linux out of the goodness of their hearts: They’re doing it to protect their profits because they see that Windows is quickly becoming more closed and has its own Xbox gaming storefront. It isn’t about belief in Linux as a product, it isn’t about improving it for everyone, it’s about improving it enough for gamers so that Steam won’t be eventually locked out of the digital games sales market by Microsoft. They’re basically just buying their way out of the vendor-lock-in of putting their store on someone else’s proprietary operating system.
I don’t think Linux desktop usage jumping from 1% to nearly 3% equals “everybody wins.” Sounds like to me a lot of fuckin people are still losing. Like 97% of them at least.
I don’t see the problem there. If someone is doing a good thing because it is profitable for them to do that good thing that’s fine.
I don’t get what you try to say with your last paragraph. It sounds like you are worried that the poor 97% of Windows and Mac users are losing something because Linux is rising. Which makes absolutely no sense.
Valve’s bigger, and unforgivable crime, is their failure to release Half Life 3.
Or, you know, how they pioneered loot boxes and gambling to children in their games
Here is a list of the volunteers of Linux 6.1: https://lwn.net/Articles/915435/
Huawai is the biggest contributor, followed by intel, google, amd… Most volunteers are all on a payroll. Companies working together on an industry standard is still noble, though.
Everytime I go to post a minor correction comment, somebody else like you made a much better version of the same comment. This place is way better than Reddit.
Sorry but this is such a bad take.
Linux is free to install, free to use and most importantly free to learn
What is the alternative? How many people who are now in great jobs would have been unable to teach themselves the skills they need if IIS or another proprietary technology had won the server market instead.
Something had to fill the space, would you rather it was a technology that created barriers for people with the fewest advantages in life?
(Also as others have said, a lot of OSS development is funded by companies. Linux in particular being a great example)
On the other side, Free and Open Source Software leveled the playing field for software development by quite a lot. Before FOSS you had proprietary databases, proprietary OSes, proprietary web servers, etc, at every level of the chain. Without FOSS Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office would rule the roost. Without FOSS smart phones might’ve taken years longer, and have far less choices. Without FOSS the web would be drastically different. Without FOSS development would be harder to break into, and anything you tried to produce would involve 15 different licensing fees.
Isn’t that why FOSS survives as a model and is encouraged so much, though, so there is something to enclose and charge bullshit fees for once you fork it?
It’s particularly popular for startups to use to bootstrap their tech company and build cred shortly before they reach the “we have to actually turn a profit” phase, at which point the bean counters try to squeeze every bit for a nickel. Once they have marketshare, they say, “we are helping the competition by releasing this!” and abandon the things they actively maintain.
There is also a direct benefit for open sourcing: you can get other people to debug and improve your software for free. They go the enclosure direction once they want to squeeze their customers for more money, e.g. closing the source code and charging $x per use of the software to their service clients.
Once they’re a monopoly, companies can swing back to the open source direction because they have no competitors to worry about and can just get free dev work and good will out of it.
This is why I don’t agree with the GPL. It’s perfect in every way, except for the allowance to utilize the licensed work or derivatives thereof for monetary gain. Fuck that shit. You got it for free, you give it away for free.
So wait, you’re saying that anything created or developed using opens source software should be given away for free?
I am, and I’m tired of pretending it shouldn’t.
“Bricks are used in most corporate structures… Brick-layers are boot-licking capitalist class-betrayers!”
What a stupid take…
Closed licenses are arguably better for certain left projects, particularly self-contained ones. You can use bourgeois legal nonsense to stop corpos from using your work.
I’ve seen anti-war people write open source code that ended up getting used to help fly war drones.
