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’s bigger, and unforgivable crime, is their failure to release Half Life 3.
The real Half Life 3 is the friends and software we made along the way.
Or, you know, how they pioneered loot boxes and gambling to children in their games
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.
You’re right, but the thing is most of the time companies do horrible things to boost their profits. Like Unity in the last few days. Valve doing seemingly pro-consumer things to protect their profits is a rarity, and it’s really only a side-effect that there’s consumer benefit. They aren’t doing it to benefit consumers, they’re doing it to preserve their marketplace. It’s a side effect that it gives consumers more options. Valve is an unusually forward-thinking company when it comes to its long-term viability.
Maybe I want to root for the unprecedentedly forward thinking companies, because it’s like a glimpse of what a lot of companies probably look like in other countries, especially the Nordic countries, that haven’t had a history that led to their governments being able to be used as a tool to stifle competition, unlike the US
Okay, I may have misunderstood the intent of your comment. I thought you were saying something like we should be mad at Valve for helping Linux because it helps their profits. It now seems like you were just making sure everyone was aware of the context. Valve has always been one of the companies that is on a pedestal in gamers’ eyes. Like Bethesda prior to Fallout 76 and paid mods/creation club. I agree, we should hold them to the same level of scrutiny of other companies.
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.
I’m not the one who said “everybody wins” in regards to private corporations adding to open source projects while also not making clear what people are “winning” from it.
I don’t get your point at all. I know that you do not say that, but you don’t even have any counter argument.
The point is the claim was “everybody wins.” My point is “everybody” at best is 3% of the population who gives a shit about having control of their own software. No, mostly corporations win. Consumers get some fringe benefits at best. I’m not seeing regular people become multimillionaires simply because they use Linux instead of Windows. Mostly its weird fucking shut-ins.
The utter irony of this being a monetized medium.com article
“Bricks are used in most corporate structures… Brick-layers are boot-licking capitalist class-betrayers!”
What a stupid take…
Yeah agreed, you can use that logic with just about anything
you can use that logic with just about anything
wheat feeds the workers, which do work, transferring wealth to the top, wheat is a hyper capitalist class-betraying crop!
this was never not a Pascal’s muggingthats not exactly what I ment
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.
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.
Uhhh, Google Workspace isn’t FOSS and the only FOSS Office project that has market share is Libre Office with a whopping…1%.
Chromium may be “open source” but Google is definitely trying to make a walled garden, especially in respect to ads, and Chrome rules the roost. Chrome itself has plenty of proprietary software in it.
How is this any argument for something else? Your examples are weak, MS Office does rule the roost, and Chrome only rules the roost due to it being a Google product, not because of its open source bona fides.
Without FOSS smart phones might’ve taken years longer, and have far less choices.
Android is literally the reason bloatware from phone developers made a resurgence. It made modern phones worse than the shitty proprietary OSes driven by shitty phone manufacturers from the 90’s to 2007. Google allows manufacturers to install applications you can’t uninstall without rooting the device and risking your security.
How did that benefit consumers? To get a decent Android phone, you’re paying a shitload of money, just like you would be for an iPhone (a completely closed source product) and iPhone at least doesn’t have software bloat from your phone carrier/phone manufacturer.
Further, Google is literally attempting to use their web dominance to make it nearly impossible to implement ad blocking with Manifest v3. Their ad profits are more important to them than FOSS. How is denying the ability to block ads a “benefit” to consumers?
Everyone can equally profit off it. And hopefully, everyone (that can) will contribute.
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.
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)
So, don’t mistake this as me telling you you’re totally wrong, because you definitely do have a point and it gets under my skin too (that’s why I believe licenses like AGPL and, dare I say, SSPL should be used), but many of these companies actively contribute back to the open source software they’re using.
and are hardly the only companies using FOSS; everyone from non profits to miliary systems use it. this meme doesn’t really work when you take the whole picture into account.
Regardless of how you slice it, foss devs don’t get fairly compensated for their work.
I have two diverging responses to this - one, if they’re credited for their commits, in the purview of FOSS projects, they’re compensated as much as they expect; two - that said, I would love to see FOSS projects get more love and financial support from the community - which is why watching the GODOT project has been exciting. I’m not much of a dev, and not in a position to contribute to what they’re doing in code, but sending them some coffee money has been worthwhile.
That’s not an opinion, that’s a fact.
On the other hand, I’d wager that any given person who uses Linux daily at work is far more likely to own a stake in their company than the average worker.
My Linux laptop is also literally my means of production, which I own. Karl Marx never predicted this.
He also didn’t predict a class of people born with no labor to sell because so much of it has been automated away. How are they supposed to use their labor as a bargaining chip if they can’t find labor to do to begin with?
Actually I think that’s kind of exactly what he predicted. Technological determinism would inevitably manifest the violent downfall of capitalism.
Marx wasn’t a technological determinist though. He believed that a workers revolution would bring the end of capitalism. He even thought it would happen druing his lifetime.
Marx did talk about individuals owning the means of production. For example farmers or craftsmen owning their tools before capitalism. Marx talked about the means of production being shared under communism and not owned by one specific person or capitalist. If anything Marx predicted FOSS lol.
Except this is really reductionist and ignores there is very little “open hardware” out there, and few people producing it. So while you might have access to the “means of production” through software, you absolutely do not in hardware.
Great that software tools are in the hands of the worker, but the means to fabricate the machines that code runs are definitively not owned by workers. (To say nothing of issues with getting drivers for a DIY motherboard working with Linux long-term.)
Also, not everyone is born to code, so it’s a bit elitist.
You can use FOSS without knowing how to code though. I wasn’t completely serious I know Marx didn’t predict FOSS but I do think it’s an example of how the means of production being shared could look like. It would be great if that also included open hardware as well.
Edit: I realize it means the workers doesn’t actually own the means of production but it’s a step in that direction and I don’t think it contradicts what Marx said is my point.
A lot of the clients I do work for in the MSP I work in, this is half truth. Yes, a sizeable portion of servers are running a Linux based hypervisor, to serve windows VM’s.
Vmware? I’ve seen hyper-v used, but it’s rare imo. And the reason for it being rare is the performance, at least that’s how I see it. Vmware is just way more efficient. Not sure about Azure Arc HCI though, I recently had an old colleague tell me that they are switching to that.
It was never unintentional. It benefits is all to have them use it, too.
Don’t worry, it’s like like anybody uses 10+ year old OS versions which have been EOL’d for over 5 years. Definitely not a concern since Linux is FOSS and you don’t need costly contracts to keep up to date with the most basic of security updates.
https://www.shodan.io/search?query=linux+2.6.32-696.el6.x86_64
Software is like a flame. Sharing it by lighting another fire doesn’t take away from the original flame.
Goes both ways. They can use my shit freely, and I can use theirs.
I believe many open source projects that are used by large corporations find a way to make money with that, at least by offering support or consulting or with sponsorships.
There are volunteer projects of which the developer doesn’t profit of but are used by corporations but I doubt they are the “largest” transfer as written in the post.
TIHI.