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echelontoday at 1:46 PM5 repliesview on HN

> It's a shame that all these companies that benefited from open source have poisoned the industry like this

Open Source and the OSI are an industry plant. Look at who sponsors it.

The monopoly hyperscaler conglomerates get free labor and use it to build the world we despise: tracking panopticons, phones we can't install things on, device attestation, browser monoculture with no adblock, etc. etc.

Google made people fall in love with BSD/MIT, and look what it did.

Just a few of the classic plays:

"That Belongs to Us Now" - (1) vendors build stuff like Elasticsearch and Redis, (2) the hyperscalers yoink it into their proprietary offerings and take all the profits, (3) original authors and their companies starve.

"Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" - (1) vendors take an open source project like KTHML or Linux and build their version, (2) they flood the market with their offering, pushing out the competitors, (3) they use anti-competitive means to get their thing in front of all eyeballs, (4) once they have marketshare, they do evil things like add tracking and remove freedoms

Open Source needs to replaced with "freedom for the people, companies must pay". Source available shareware with anti-hyperscaler teeth.

Even Richard Stallman's licenses are not strong enough. CC BY-NC-SA is better.

"Pure" Open Source is corporate welfare. It was a mistake. It enabled giants to hang us with our own rope.


Replies

nathanielkstoday at 2:00 PM

> Open Source and the OSI are an industry plant. Look at who sponsors it.

This is ignorant to the history of Open Source software. Software has been open long before it was subsidized by large corporations.

"Computer software was created in the early half of the 20th century.[2][3][4] In the 1950s and into the 1960s, almost all softwares were produced by academics and corporate researchers working in collaboration,[5] often shared as public-domain software." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_free_and_open-sourc...

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bee_ridertoday at 1:59 PM

One problem with all of these licenses is that however the code is available, we can’t practically prevent the LLM companies from training on it (especially given that they don’t respect IP laws anyway). No idea what to do about this. Wonder if communities will have to move to some kind of fractured system where source is gated behind a login.

Rough times out there for transparent organizations.

embedding-shapetoday at 1:50 PM

Why can't others just be "Others I disagree with"? Why it has to be some grand conspiracy?

I'm all for open source, most of what I do is released as MIT, almost never "Free Software", still doing the same thing since LLMs appeared, regardless of everything else.

I'm a real person, have nothing to do with OSI but willing to explain my position, as long as you take it as real opinions held by a real person, instead of going into conspiracy theory land. Ask me anything, I'll give you my honest perspective.

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mghackerladytoday at 2:15 PM

I find non-commercial licenses too extreme. People selling your free software or using it in a commercial way so long as they respect the license is a good thing

wutwutwattoday at 1:52 PM

When you come into a convo saying even Stallman isn't extreme enough, it's probably a good time to take a step back and evaluate your life.

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