I was surprised to discover recently that most of the big open source projects are now linked to those non profits poping up in the space in recent years. Organisations like Digital Public Goods Alliance [1] or Conservancy [2]
(The Sovereign Tech Fund is different beast it seems because it is actually the German state behind)
So most of those non profits look the same, are all lead by some professional–managerial class newcomer who have no real link to computer science. They are not really here to inspire people or recruit contributors, they are people in charge of keeping the money flowing, governance, compliance, etc.
My guess is this new architecture of the open source software ecosystem is an elegant way for tech (IBM, Google, etc.) to keep funding & control over key projects they rely on. While fiscally optimizing the whole thing & getting public money from the EU and others.
This is just my intuition, if someone could confirm...
What am I complaining about?
Those are not free, grassroot projects & organisations anymore. The day you will desperately need free software because the Orwellian architecture of the EU chatcontrol and cyber resilience act will be operational those non profits will most probably take the knee and comply.
This comment seems like it's written from an angle of libertarian distrust of government. Honestly, I think I trust the EU bureaucrats to have the interests of their citizens at heart much more than I trust Google or Amazon to serve the interests of their users.
Maybe the EU will eventually sell us out in the name of saving-the-children, but at least they don't have selling us out as their raison d'être.
It's true this is no longer the small hobbyist/tinker dream of the free software activists, but is that vision even possible in today's world? If you want to offer regular users the choice of libre software in near-parity with commercial offerings, you need a lot of money, a lot of developers, and big organizations. As far as I can see, that's just an objective truth.
> If you want to offer regular users the choice of libre software in near-parity with commercial offerings, you need a lot of money, a lot of developers, and big organizations. As far as I can see, that's just an objective truth.
How is this an objective truth?
Also why is it that what was possible yesterday is not possible today?
The GNU project was started in the early 80s when even in the western world only a very small minority had access to a computer.
Since then we put computers in the hand of almost everyone but now we can't write serious free software without a big corporation/government & money?
This is what happened in the early 00s, corporations like IBM understood they wouldn't be able to compete with free software now that we have the internet & everyone will have access to computers.
So they captured the open source projects & even Microsoft understood 15 years later that they had to do it too.
And now they have been successful in convincing you that no serious software can written without them and you consider that an "objective truth".
And on top of that the EU & others are telling you can't have serious & safe software without complying to their regulations...
Just look at the BSDs, they have been able to keep up with Linux (I mean they are in the same ballpark in term of security, features & performance) with a fraction of the money.
IMHO it's not possible today because of higher expectations from nontechnical users and radical complexity bloat in commercial software.
There is a path-dependence in software and it's almost inconceivable that a small team of hobbyists starting from scratch could build, for example, an office suite that could compete with MS Office or Google Docs. For better or worse, we're stuck with Libre Office.
Even Microsoft, with their massive resources, decided they weren't up to building and maintaining their own browser engine. They've chained themselves to Google's Blink along with everyone else.
BSD is an interesting example: less hardware support, fewer GUI options, good luck running BSD on a mobile phone. Can you imagine your parents trying to use BSD as their primary OS?
Eh, developers gotta eat. They can't all do open source as their second job. FOSS developers should be organized if they don't want these people to out organize them.
(The Sovereign Tech Fund is different beast it seems because it is actually the German state behind)
So most of those non profits look the same, are all lead by some professional–managerial class newcomer who have no real link to computer science. They are not really here to inspire people or recruit contributors, they are people in charge of keeping the money flowing, governance, compliance, etc.
My guess is this new architecture of the open source software ecosystem is an elegant way for tech (IBM, Google, etc.) to keep funding & control over key projects they rely on. While fiscally optimizing the whole thing & getting public money from the EU and others.
This is just my intuition, if someone could confirm...
What am I complaining about?
Those are not free, grassroot projects & organisations anymore. The day you will desperately need free software because the Orwellian architecture of the EU chatcontrol and cyber resilience act will be operational those non profits will most probably take the knee and comply.
- [1] https://digitalpublicgoods.net/
- [2] https://sfconservancy.org/
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