alt Hacker NewsI've been shouting this from the rooftops for ages now. OSS is a trojan horse, something meant to devalue the work of independent developers/small businesses and ensure that the only way the software can be supported is through the patronage of big tech, who earn the money to control such OSS through their unethical monopolistic practices. Look at the languages with funding, and where it comes from. C and C++ (both LLVM and GCC), C#, JS/TS, Java, Rust, Go, Python are all directly funded by big tech. The naive idealism results in everything falling into the hands of ~10 corporations plus some VCs who gamble on which ones will become worth acquiring by big tech, and then we wonder why everything goes to shit and our entire ecosystem is so user-hostile.
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This is why Free Software is important. It is about a lot more than just being open source.
And the indoctrination is so strong that even after all I've lived through and seen, my default is still "let's open source this".
I'm not saying that big tech isn't hijacking open source software, but that does not mean that free or OSS was always "meant to devalue" devs or small companies.
Until very recently, big tech pumped untold millions of dollars into obliterating FLOSS altogether, calling it a cancer that will destroy any enterprise it touches.