In Debt: The First 5,000 Years, anthropologist David Graeber explores the fascinating history of debt and economies. It starts out by debunking the common myth that prior to coinage, everyone were trapped in this inefficient mode of barter. If you had a chicken to give and wanted sugar from Gandalf, but Gandalf was a vegetarian, you ha...
I mean, the point of open source as against free software was to make it easy to make money off of. It’s a little contradictory to turn around and call developers greedy for wanting literally exactly what big companies want from open source – value – especially when developers are trying to keep the lights on and these companies are literally just trying to extract as much value as they can.
I can’t really view this differently from, say, workers being called greedy for wanting better wages. It’s the same. Of course people want to be paid for their work, especially if they’re going to be expected to maintain something important for a private, for-profit business – or depending on the code in question, hundreds to thousands of them – especially when we still live in a capitalist society.
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Right, but my point is, they learned about the pragmatic benefits of cooperation from the ecosystem the free software movement had already pioneered for explicitly political reasons.
Free software, for all the faults of the FSF, is valuable but not just because the development model can help companies cooperate where it makes sense and soak up contributions from the community – it’s valuable because it aims to establish ecosystems of software (and increasingly hardware) that allow people to use their devices on their own terms.
But that doesn’t matter to big companies who showed up and saw – a variety of ways to lower costs by externalizing them in a variety of ways (getting other companies to underwrite part of development, using open source without contributing anything back, in Amazon’s case, copying the competition to undercut them, etc) and spun off open source into its own thing that explicitly had no higher aims regarding the need to establish a copylefted software commons to safeguard user and developer autonomy.
Showing up to an economic and political project to build a commons and turning it into a corporate cash cow in a variety of ways seems pretty inherently exploitative to me. Also, it’s not mainly about AWS creating “Amazon Basics” versions of open source software, although that’s definitely an interesting one. It’s much more about situations like, for example, how so many people used, but nobody thought to fund OpenSSL until there was a catastrophic security bug and the only explanation was “OpenSSL can afford exactly one developer to maintain mission-critical encryption software for like, everybody, because nobody contributes back.” Only then did companies start pledging money to make sure their “mission-critical” infrastructure was up to snuff.
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