I’m unbiased towards the subject. I’m genuinely curious about how long-term FOSS ideology would work.
I’m using FOSS but I’d still consider myself a casual user. It seems like most FOSS I’ve seen is a free, buggy, alternative to mainstream software, which resolves a problem the user had.
From my perspective, (and do correct me if I’m wrong) FOSS doesnt seem sustainable. Everyone can contribute, but how do they make a living? My guess is they do other things for income. And what about the few contributors who do 90% of the work?
What if every software became FOSS? Who would put in the free labor to write the software to print a page, or show an image on screen, or create something more complex like a machine learning advanced AI software?
Would it simply be that everyone provides for each other? Everyone pitches in? What about people who have bills to pay? Would their bills be covered?
This concludes my right-before-bed psychology inquiry.
The implication that we can make all software FOSS and have nothing else about the world change is a textbook example of putting the cart before the horse. It’s like asking “what if everyone became vegan, who would pay the cattle ranchers?”
The world FOSS strives for, the world where it is the norm, has a fundamentally different economy from our own.
It’s not a valid thought experiment to ask “what if all software was FOSS (but nothing else changed)?” because that creates a hypothetical world that has a fallacy at its core. A world where entire social movements can blink in and out of power without regards for sociological and historical factors is a world unconstrained by logic as we understand it. The correct framing should be: “what would our world have to change to enable FOSS to be the norm?”
The distinction is subtle, but cuts to the core of the contention betweem movements aiming to change the world in radical ways and their detractors offering criticism that boils down to “but the future you propose doesn’t integrate seamlessly into the present state of affairs.”
We all want change, we just don’t want it to change things.
Well I think one of the ideas of the functionality of FOSS is that users who don’t like that software they use doesn’t have some feature, someone will add it and the new software will become the new normal. Not much would have to change beyond FOSS software being more commonly used for this to work really well. It already works with proprietary software if you squint hard enough. People hate a LOT of things in Windows, and so they make scripts and things to change Windows, and they freely distribute these scripts that are what makes Windows useable for a lot of people. This is similar to the idea of people just making changes to a hypothetical FOSS Windows, and is decent evidence for the viability of FOSS with very few changes to how end users actually use software.