An incredible article! Thank you for sharing. This post serves as an interesting extension to your previous post about capitalist efficiency in relation to tech. Capitalism’s efficient when it comes to co-opting movements and people in order to water down their image and effectiveness. “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” is just another form of that same trope specific to the free software movement. Major companies helping out sure is nice in the short-term, but reliance on them shouldn’t be risked in the long-term if the movement will only be watered down as a result. The long-term goal, as the article states, should be getting rid of the conditions that stop the free flow of information, which ultimately means the dissolution of the economy and big tech companies as we know them now.
That’s an excellent point, I didn’t even think of the connection with my last post until you mentioned it. And completely agree that reliance on companies ultimately does more harm than good. It would be much better to move towards a donation model for cases where money is needed sustaining projects. Good news is that copyleft ecosystem is still thriving, and there are lots of high quality GNU licensed projects around. I find that can mostly stay within GNU ecosystem on Linux nowadays.
I do think we need much more aggressive advocacy for copyleft going forward to counter corporate propaganda as the first step towards the long-term goal.
An incredible article! Thank you for sharing. This post serves as an interesting extension to your previous post about capitalist efficiency in relation to tech. Capitalism’s efficient when it comes to co-opting movements and people in order to water down their image and effectiveness. “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” is just another form of that same trope specific to the free software movement. Major companies helping out sure is nice in the short-term, but reliance on them shouldn’t be risked in the long-term if the movement will only be watered down as a result. The long-term goal, as the article states, should be getting rid of the conditions that stop the free flow of information, which ultimately means the dissolution of the economy and big tech companies as we know them now.
That’s an excellent point, I didn’t even think of the connection with my last post until you mentioned it. And completely agree that reliance on companies ultimately does more harm than good. It would be much better to move towards a donation model for cases where money is needed sustaining projects. Good news is that copyleft ecosystem is still thriving, and there are lots of high quality GNU licensed projects around. I find that can mostly stay within GNU ecosystem on Linux nowadays.
I do think we need much more aggressive advocacy for copyleft going forward to counter corporate propaganda as the first step towards the long-term goal.