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/tech/ - Technology

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File: 1625962966349.jpg ( 28.25 KB , 321x445 , holy.jpg )

 No.9981

Why is lib culture infesting Free Software (or rather, open source) so god damn much?

Contributor Covenant, RMS cancelling, master -> main, it just keeps on going. It seems like everywhere I talk about software that isn't here or 4cuck, 70% of people hold these retarded liberal views. Why is this and what can be done about it?
>>

 No.9982

>>9981
because most software devs are woke liberals and the general increasing wokeness of post 2010 society has taken over this area of society as well, same as literally any major corporation /thread
>>

 No.9983

Because corporations pay people to work on free software projects. These people have all day to work on these projects, so they rise to the top and eventually take over. These people also work for the silicon valley corporations that have a liberal agenda.

>what can be done about it?
It's hard because these corporations also do contribute good code. We need to make sure hobbyists are put in positions of power instead of corporate shills.
>>

 No.9997

Because it's the status quo. Next question, please.
>>

 No.10010

Liberalism is like a cancer. It infects the minds of the individual through the super ego. The only way to over come it is to stop giving a shit what the super ego thinks of you.
With in reason, anyways. Some times you are forced to conform such in the case of work.

However, the vast majority are sheep. It's just entrophy.
>>

 No.10012

>Why is lib culture infesting Free Software (or rather, open source) so god damn much?
Because being for FOSS is the right thing to do, plus lib corporations are hoping on the bandwagon.
>>

 No.10017

It's subversion. Notice these people are ALWAYS pushing pro-corporate licenses like MIT or unenforceable "ethical licenses". Almost all of them are employed by big tech. It's an anti-copyleft movement in woke clothes.
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 No.10020

>>10017
>pro-corporate licenses like MIT
This is a bigger problem than the SJWs.
>>

 No.10021

>>10017
GPL doesn't fix any problem. Audacity literally just became spyware after being sold to some advertising company.
>>

 No.10022

>>10021
But it does remain Free Software which means that any improvement they implement can be ported to a spyware free fork. If it had a pushover license, they could have just made the whole thing proprietary.
>>

 No.10023

Lib culture is rapidly taking over free software (and software in general) as the field of technology is deskilled.
As corporations seek to minimize the leverage 'rockstar programmers' have, it gets flooded with framework-only webshits who bring their disguising liberal anti-free software attitudes with them.

I went into tech to get away from these people. If I see one more post explaining why applels walled garden is actually the best thing ever I'm going to live inawoods.
>>

 No.10024

Programming used to be dominated by powerful neckbeards who didn't give a fuck about what people thought of them. The field had no prestige, you would only go into it if it spoke to you.
This changed when tech companies needed more warm bodies. They teamed up with universities to make CS a cool and desirable field. Highly public cash incentives bring in the NGOs and activists who want their cut, and the endless diversity/equity/inclusion seminars and trainings came with them. Being within California and Seattle predominately meant the radical liberalism that dominates institutions now took over the programming world ahead of schedule, and now the majority of the powerful figures within programming are the archetypal radlib who only loves identity politics more than their job. Some of these people, like Coraline Ada, are essentially part of a protection racket. The tech companies will give them protection money and publicity in exchange for exemption from negative publicity. They hunt down smaller projects instead, pressuring them constantly until they give in and give a boost to the racket.
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 No.10025

>>10024
I knew we were royally fucked when there was a "skill shortage" in tech.
"Skill shortage" is such perfect propaganda it's literally all porky needs. It attracts normies like the fucking great attractor.
>>

 No.10026

>>10025
It's also completely made up.
>>

 No.10028

>>10026
Well obviously. It's the reserve army of labour in practice.

The problem is that to make CS cool requires an absurd level of abstraction.
I don't just mean languages and frameworks like Ruby on rails, but they want the computer to meet them at their level. Unless they can say "Alexa build the fucking app for me" then it will never be cool enough.
>>

 No.10032

>>10028
They are working on that: https://textboard.org/prog/276
>>

 No.10044

>>10020
They are the same problem. The SJW attacks on RMS are to made to weaken the GPL.
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 No.10045

>>10032
These will not be good for a very long time, but I don't doubt that these garbage GPT-3 code generators will be pushed by porky anyway. They love gimmicky trash with the word AI attached to it.
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 No.10064

>>10021
There will be a dozen forks of Audacity within a month.
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 No.10065

>>9981
Lib culture is a formal means of ostracising people. It is not a set of beliefs but a set of tactics. Lib culture serves the purpose of destroying your rivals. Corporations are infesting free software with it in order to try to destroy it.
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 No.10071

File: 1626084366597.webm ( 18.2 MB , 640x356 , RMSquest.webm )

but anon free software was always lib. it's conception of "freedom" is very narrow. it never had an explicit socialist goal. rms himself expresses typical petty boorj notions of muh small businesses. free software's usefulness to the class struggle is mostly incidental, like porky not wanting to touch AGPL code. that said, it's still better than open source
>>

 No.10073

>>10071
I think Stallman is a market socialist with hippie social libertarianism.
>>

 No.10074

>>10024
>Some of these people, like Coraline Ada, are essentially part of a protection racket.
Why can't RICO laws be used against people like this?
>>10071
Stallman hides his power levels otherwise he would be fired by MIT.
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 No.10075

>>10071
He's a succdem.
>>

 No.10081

>>10071
Regardless of his personal politics, he has managed to transform the industry to a point where it has one of the few examples of a moneyless market of high-quality products and a huge body of free documentation and learning material for anyone with access to a computer to use and immediately he able to contribute to.
For all the activist love of teachers and artists and hatred of technology, and their lip service towards free culture and shared art, I don't see too many college professors filling blogs and YouTube with free college-grade lessons, or open sourced books, and artist communities on DeviantArt and Tumblr will threaten to sue you if you used even an image made by them to build new work from without paying them.
Techtopia has more potential to build a socialist society than the hordes of "artistically-inclined" LARPers.
>>

 No.10088

People whining about le SJWs have never fucking read a single thing Stallman has published on his website.
>>

 No.10103

>>10071 (me)
>>10073
>>10075
these anons are correct. perhaps we could say stallman represents the left wing of californian ideology?

>>10074
nah. stallman has zero tact or ability to hide anything

>>10081
a world with free software is certainly better than a world without it. but the movement has serious limitations. I saw this post recently that brings up some good points:
https://www.boringcactus.com/2020/08/13/post-open-source.html
>>

 No.10105

>>10088
Stallman is very progressive and had his brain melted by Trump, but I don't think he can be called a SJW. He lacks the dark triad personality and authoritarian tendencies necessary to be one.
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 No.10106

>>10088
Clearly you haven't either.
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 No.10107

>>10103
I read this long rambling article about post open source.
First of all Fuck you for linking me to somebody using idpol jargon.
And second free software isn't dead, because it was never alive it's a inanimate license.

The idea that you can change the world via formulations in legal documents is at best a power-fantasy for lawyers, but in reality it's idealist to even complain about this not being possible. Given that legalism is the ultimate way of creating change from above, it's incomprehensible why this supposedly anarchist person is even considering it.

If you apply a materialist lens to the licenses like free software and the dreaded open source "revisionism". The intended purpose was about keeping technically illiterate lawyers from messing up the technical side. The stakes are about corporate legal divisions trying to do backseat driving for product development. Free software will win over opensource in the long run because lawyers are terrible technical designers. Look at it this way they tried to make proprietary shit stick and it failed, and now they will try make opensource stick and that will fail again, and then they will accept that they have to grant the 4 stallman freedoms, because technology isn't magic, engineers aren't little elves that you can box in, to force them to bend reality to conform to your head-fantasy.
>>

 No.10108

>>10103
>https://www.boringcactus.com/2020/08/13/post-open-source.html
The guy hits some correct points, about "open source" being the shitty, corporate-cucked version of free software and that corps and others are using it to freeload off of open software.
But he is wrong to claim that "free software is dead". Free software has always fought an uphill battle and it's continuing to fight it. Free software is very close to going back to the bad days of the mid-90s, but it's not because RMS tried to move everyone to GPLv3. It's because devs got complacent and didn't see the need for GPLv3. They got drunk off of Linux and early open-source web tech success and started to believe that these succeeded not because a licence like GPL made widespread collaboration and sharing possible, but because they were fucking hot-shot rockstar programmers. I mean listen to Linus talk about OS shit. He genuinely believes that Linux succeeded because it's technically superior. It kinda is but that's half the story, the manpower it was able to attract because of the licence and the guarantee that people's work would remain open is equally important.
That companies actually put in a lot of work to avoid the GPLv3 fucking proves that it scared them shitless. If Linux had moved to GPLv3, it would have been a massive endorsement to software freedom. But what Linus and co. don't realize is that companies who can work around GPLv3 can fucking work around GPLv2 too! Google is already doing it with Fuchsia. Say goodbye to Linux being the dominant kernel on a lot of phones. AWS is releasing loads of extensions to open DBs, because everyone wanted to move to le cloud. Those are never going to be opened precisely because these DB projects didn't move to GPLv3. So we are in the state we are in not because GPLv3 is the wrong step, but because people failed to see the value of GPLv3 and predictably, we are now heading back to the days when all corps ran closed shops. Only now they can mooch off open software because again, suckers write open programmes under cuck licences that practically invite the corps to do that.

Also, this guy doesn't seem invested or seems to understand the value of software freedom. As he says here:
>and i am a programmer, and i don't give a shit. the freedom to not think about my operating system and just get work done overrules all of those for me, so i use windows.
He doesn't understand why software needs to be free, and doesn't see much value in it. Just as something nice to have. His values are fundamentally different to the whole idea of sharing work and seeing it be available to everyone. It's like reading an article about democracy from someone who doesn't mind monarchy. It's not going to be very insightful.
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 No.10112

>>10103
It's pretty clear that this person has no idea what Free Software is about. It's not about "the user's freedom to tinker with and contribute to the software". It's about the developer's (or the developer's employer's) power over the user. Free Software aims to remove that power, which is what the four freedoms try to do. It's no wonder that a programmer would be hostile towards them, as it works directly against the interests of the programmer.
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 No.10115

>>10112
>It's pretty clear that this person has no idea what Free Software is about. It's not about "the user's freedom to tinker with and contribute to the software". It's about the developer's (or the developer's employer's) power over the user. Free Software aims to remove that power, which is what the four freedoms try to do. It's no wonder that a programmer would be hostile towards them, as it works directly against the interests of the programmer.
How does it work against the interests of the programmer ?
>>

 No.10116

>>10115
Obviously the programmer is interested in preserving their power over the user.
>>

 No.10117

>>10116
>Obviously the programmer is interested in preserving their power over the user.
Programmers are also users, you have to use a computer for programming.
Users that can't program still have to use what ever software programmers make.
I don't see your point.
>>

 No.10134

>>10105
"SJW" means literally nothing.

>>10106
Nice rebuttal.
>>

 No.10136

>>10107
>engineers aren't little elves that you can box in, to force them to bend reality to conform to your head-fantasy.
they absolutely are. if there's one thing you can learn about engineers it's that in high profile fields (major tech companies, defense contractors, and anything involving the internet of things) it's that they'd be better classified as elves than as human beings. the heat death of the universe will arrive before any magical dynamic of software engineering forces companies to not be shits, and so long as they're coming up with new ways to ruin the world there'll always be some little engineer there to help them do it.

for most of the high profile companies, i hold their lawyers in greater respect than their engineers. the lawyer is like a court priest, he's consulted and sometimes he finds out clever ways of getting things done within the confines of the law. the engineer on the other hand is the little elf who will actually put together the panopticon for his 30 pieces of silver, and who'll think himself so very clever for doing it. fuck elves.
yes yes yes, i'm sure your dad who engineers boat engines or develops software for some delicatessen in newark is fine. but we're not talking about him, he's not an elf, he's just some guy.
>>

 No.10137

>>10136
Pathetic anti-STEM cope.
Engineers but and popularized shit to put loads of companies out of commission, made them contribute back to the software community and ensured that the internet runs on largely open software infrastructure. The battle is not won but at least it is being fought.
Wtf did all the larper activist fucks do? Take selfies at some controlled protest?
Yes there are cuck engineers who will sell out to governments and corps, but there are far, far fewer of these sellouts than the average larper protestard who will never do anything apart from posting meaningless shit on twitter and Instagram.
>>

 No.10138

>>10137
The phrase STEM is itself cope, a way for javascript rentboys and soldering sadacts to try and ingratiate themselves with scientists and mathematicians of a far higher standard.
>made them contribute back to the software community
pure liberalism. accepting software "contributions" from corporations is like accepting genetic contributions from a cancer cell. if you think that constitutes fighting the battle then you've already been conquered.

no LARPing protestor ever fucked up my start menu, my URL bar or my music player. no LARPing protestor ever developed an anti-adblocker, a user tracker or a social media service. no LARPing protestor ever found software solutions to hack away worker wages and protections in formerly stable industries (uber, etc.) no LARPing protestor ever developed a weapons system for America's far flung forever wars or took a contract from the NSA. there is no contortion of logic capable of making mere LARPers as contemptible as those who actively advance a worse world because they're so enamored with solving technological "how?" questions that they never stop to ask: "why?"
and in your heart, i suspect you are one of them: how, how, how. stop: why?
>>

 No.10143

>>10138
>Code monkeys are not real STEM
That's fine. I don't really care about who qualifies as STEM or not. It's just generally the case that anti-tech LARPers tend to be anti-STEM too.

>No larping protestor did bad thing
Another cope. LARPers do plenty of heinous shit in their day jobs. Protest larper college profs won't teach anyone without them taking on student loans, protest larper working class factory worker will happily assemble bombs in a factory to blow up brown people, protest larper who makes "anti-fascist" art, will also happily design pretty packaging and advertisement for corporate surveillance gadgets like phones and IOT garbage.

Like I said, there are sellout engineers, but the autism among engineers at least keeps them honest and consistent because they don't know how to play the social game. While the protest larpers are pretty much all two-faced social climbers who will bandwagon whichever is the winning side, so fuck em.
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 No.10144

>>10143
If you think designing the packaging for a phone makes you as culpable for the harm it does its users as writing the software it runs does then autism is the least of your problems.
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 No.10145

>>10144
>What I do isn't evil, what you do is
Typical normalfag holier-than-thou chicanery and completely expected
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 No.10146

>>10145
When I appear at your door and break your knees, I want you to think back to this terrible post and realize that you and I - we're the same - just balls bouncing around in the national lottery machine of life.
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 No.10147

>>10146
>When I appear at your door and break your knees
>>10138
the average larper protestard who will never do anything apart from posting meaningless shit on twitter and Instagram^W^W^W leftypol dot com
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 No.10148

>>10147
post code
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 No.10152

>>10103 (me)
>>10107
>The intended purpose was about keeping technically illiterate lawyers from messing up the technical side
in a way, yes. the GPL is a brilliant legal hack, and I'm hesitant of using anything else for my stuff, unless I go with something more permissive like BSD or even CC0

>engineers aren't little elves that you can box in
engineers are wagies who will bend the knee to porky same as every other wagie. moreso with programmers because they don't fucking unionize

>>10108
yeah they're wrong about free software being "dead". but right about its politics being shit, because it is politics by and for programmers and no one else

>we are now heading back to the days when all corps ran closed shops. Only now they can mooch off open software because again, suckers write open programmes under cuck licences that practically invite the corps to do that.
this is why I'm for AGPL

>>10112
>[Free Software] is not about "the user's freedom to tinker with and contribute to the software". It's about the developer's (or the developer's employer's) power over the user
first of all in the mind of the FSF users and developers are one and the same. if you can't code then you don't matter. you might benefit from the license all the same, but that's mostly incidental

>it works directly against the interests of the programmer.
this is stupid, programmers are users too. one of the reasons for the FSF even existing is because RMS got pissed off because the manufacturer of some printer he was using refused to give him the source code for the driver for it
>>

 No.10156

>>10152
That's a strawman, stop lying.
>>

 No.10160

>>10138
…and how many LARPing protesters license their creative works CC-BY-SA versus programmers licensing their software as GPL? Programmers are more committed to free culture than LARPing protesters.
>>

 No.10163

>>10156
Could you be less specific?
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 No.10165

>>10163
Free software means software that respects the users' freedom. Users and developers are not the same. In fact, the main difference between "Open Source" and Free Software is where they stand on this issue. Supporters of "Open Source" will proudly admit that they only care about the developer, that's why they advocate for licenses that give the developer the "freedom" to control their users.
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 No.10167

>>10165
>Users and developers are not the same.
This is a pretty narrow minded way of looking at things. Firstly, anyone can learn to add a few hacks to a piece of software.
And more importantly, maybe most users aren't interested in programming right now, but if programming tools make it super easy to program in the future, any user could also be a programmer. The GPL is not just for how things are now but also how software could be in the future.
>>

 No.10168

>>10167
We are talking about developers and users as related to a specific software, not in general.
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 No.10169

File: 1626297166344.jpg ( 24.64 KB , 238x399 , Vlcsnap-2013-05-03-17h07m5….jpg )

>>10165
>Users and developers are not the same
true. developer implies user, but user does not imply developer. most users can't code. the GPL and friends are written primarily for the type of user that does know how to code. which is a thing the post open source people point out
>Supporters of "Open Source" will proudly admit that they only care about the developer
but they don't, because they are fine with porky locking down derivatives (weak copyleft).
>>

 No.10170

>>10169
>developer implies user
Not necessary, many developers don't actually use the software they are developing. As I said, we are not talking about developers and users in general, but as they relate to a certain piece of software.

The user does not need to know how to program, since Free Software is about the control of the developer over the user, not about programming.

> but they don't
But they do lol. Others locking down the software they have written is a price they are willing to pay for the same privilege.
>>

 No.10195

>>10160
irrelevant because programming is one of the few cases where license nonsense actually becomes relevant. if you want to edit a photograph that's on the internet you don't need the author's permission to do so, they can't stop you. if you want to edit a program without the source, however, you're going to have to fuck around with a decompiler.

my recollection is that the FSF and GPL is not even strictly committed to free culture: the Mozilla Public License, for example, is a GPL compatible license and yet we all know that if I go around sticking the Firefox logo on my own stuff I'm liable to find lawyers at my door as soon as they catch me. Free code they're very concerned about, but combating the nonsense of intellectual property rights? far less so.
>>

 No.10208

I can't program or code,

How can I be inducted into the Stallman stan?
>>

 No.10211

>>10208
Stop using shit software. It's better for you to switch anyway. As the rightards say, vote with your dollars.
>>

 No.10213

>>10138
>accepting software "contributions" from corporations is like accepting genetic contributions from a cancer cell.
I have never in my life seen the genetic fallacy phrased so explicitly.
>>

 No.10215

>>10144
>If you think designing the packaging for a phone makes you as culpable for the harm it does its users as writing the software it runs does then autism is the least of your problems.
<I didn't take part in the holocaust, I just ran the trains! Go bitch at the people that ran the ovens!
>>

 No.10216

>>10213
You believe there is a "software community", and yet you think the only thing corporations are inserting is their enterprise quality code. So naive, little elf!

>>10215
You say, as you proudly stand by the ovens so they can snap another picture of you.
>>

 No.10271

>>10195
>Free code they're very concerned about, but combating the nonsense of intellectual property rights? far less so.
The guy who leaked the JSTOR archive, literally loads of scholarly articles containing a vast amount of knowledge, was a techie.
There is practically zero effort against resisting intellectual property bullshit except from people in tech.

Movie and music people: Literal DMCA cucks. No culture of making and sharing original movies or music beyond vapid, narcissitic, self-promotional pontificating on youtube or tiktok

Digital and physical artists: No culture of shared, collaborative public art or projects.

The only other culture I can think of that is as free (perhaps even more so!) with their knowledge and work sharing as tech workers are the people who share recipes online. At least that community hasn't bought into some retarded notion of copyrighted cooking.
>>

 No.10273

>>10271
>except from people in tech.
ignoring that this isn't true when you stop and think about it for a moment (are we to ignore everyone in every hobby who'll upload files on request? or are we to replicate the fallacy of intellectual property a thousandfold by giving infinite credit to mediafire for every file uploaded to mediafire?), the question must be put: people in tech, or specifically FSF/GPL advocates, because the accusation of not caring about free culture was leveled specifically at the latter.
(in the specific case of Aaron Swartz, i submit for consideration that web.py was released as public domain, not under the GPL.)
>Digital and physical artists: No culture of shared, collaborative public art or projects.
eat grass.

nevertheless agreed that cooking:based.
>>

 No.10274

>>10273
The FSF is a single issue organization, it is intentionally not concerned with anything else other than Free Software. They do support "free culture" when it intersects with Free Software, for example they have a copyleft license for written works that they use for their software manuals (GNU Free Documentation License) and they have campaigns against DRM.
>>

 No.10275

>>10216
>You believe there is a "software community"
I don't.
>>

 No.10291

File: 1626678534514.gif ( 67.68 KB , 402x414 , not a bad idea.gif )

>>10271
>copyrighted cooking.
>>

 No.10295

Because although the movement of FS might have noble goals, it is heavily dosed on idealism and individual action.

Slowly tech corporations have realized that FS can be recuperated, coopted, and that since it doesn't actually affect their profits, majorly, it can even be given material assistance. But even if that benefits FS, it does not particularly undermine capitalism. The actual praxis that could fight the bourg. libtard capitalist bullshit likely would entail the expropriation of said tech corporations, but sole reliance on legal sorcery hardly is conducive to the success of that program.

People, in this thread, also are quite up their asses if they can both decry the idiocy of libshits but also pretend that most tech employees totally are secret communist rebels and aren't super high off the Californian ideology, who would relent the moment recruiters waved the stock options in front of them. Most people get over the urge to be the special snowflake in high school, but somehow even on this board on this site there is a prevalence of that jilted PMC elitism which seems very difficult to banish. Do whine about the masses' stupidity all you want, but go and fester eternally in the irrelevance that you deserve. In any case, this is a field that'll continue to be decent employment for some time, so at the end of the day you could just forget all this silly radicalism and collect those quarterly bonuses. After all, if trucker Bob had only put in the time to read books about overflows and Unix security like you, he'd not be chased by all these profit obsessed corporations, now would he?
>>

 No.10327

>>10295
based
>>

 No.10426

>>10295
>They hated her because she told the truth
>>

 No.10427

>>10295
Free Software is actually existing communism regarding software.
>>

 No.10428

>>9981
master/slave -> employer/employee.
whitelist/blacklist -> liberal/communist
black hat/white hat -> gang/community [hacker]
blackbox/whitebox -> challenged/educated [box]
dummy [content] -> differently abled content
kill [a process] -> (literally from the apple docs:) cancel [a process]
man-in-the-middle-attack -> CIA-visitor-pattern
master branch -> owner branch
sanity check -> raising voices. Incorrect: "I'll just run this quickly for a sanity check." Correct: "I will support and raise the voice of my program to see if we can support them in their struggles."

Object oriented programming -> Individual centric programming
Class -> SocioeconomicStrata
Object -> Individual
Generics -> MainstreamOpinion


Also, functional programmers are pretty problematic. Are they implying that anyone who doesn't use their white supremacist languages are suddenly "non-functional"? Umm sweetie, we don't do that here.
>>

 No.10431

>>10427
the closest thing to communism in software is stuff like those GTA source code remakes (which are unlicenced lol)
that or piracy.
in both cases, making available and improving something which the bourgeoisie arbitrarily gate off.

free software is like going off and starting your own commune which still sells some commodities here and there because where the fuck else are you going to get a pneumatic drill.
>>

 No.10434

>FS can be recuperated, coopted, and that since it doesn't actually affect their profits, majorly
The state of non-techies.
FS has put several companies out of business and destroyed the market for lots of software products to the point where people take them being free for granted.
Let me know when your favourite YouTubers hurt the profits if a Hollywood studio or kill one, like free software killed the Unix vendors. It will never fucking happen.
>>

 No.10435

>>10434
Name some of them please, I'm feeling aroused.
>>

 No.10437

>>10435
Sun and SGI. Both pretty prominent in the 90s, couldn't compete with Linux.
>>

 No.10439

>>10437
Or Windows/Mac OS. They might have been devoured by the duopoly eventually with or without Linux intervention.
>>

 No.10445

>>10439
They're pretty much dead or on life support in server space. Free software has won the server-side market for software. Pretty much the overwhelming majority of server-side OS, web/mail/auth/etc servers, databases, run off free software. The battle there now is against closed cloudshit and hardware.

The only thing keeping windows/Macos alive is… normies.. who somehow have to have them for either fashion reasons or because they value being like other normies over freedom. I will take this opportunity to remind everyone that Apple was about to go out of business in the 90s, they couldn't compete, the only thing that kept them alive was cucked normie mentality who literally bought their products at high prices even after knowing they were substandard just because they liked flashing a corporate apple logo at other normies for social reasons.
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 No.10447

>>10434
>FS has put several companies out of business and destroyed the market for lots of software products to the point where people take them being free for granted.
This is an incredibly naive analysis.
Let's say the year of the GNU/Linux desktop arrives: Okay, you've destroyed Microsoft, great. Now everyone's using a (largely) free-as-in-freedom, (largely) free-as-in-beer operating system - but you all you've done is altered the cost distribution of capitalism as a whole. Now the KPMG office doesn't have to shell out for Windows licenses, great, so profits at Microsoft hit zero but profits at KPMG are going to go up a little. Aggregate this across all commercial computer owners and you've got a large redistribution, possibly even a positive net effect.

That's before you look at something like network effects. You could make Twitter FOSS tomorrow and it would mean nothing because the value in Twitter isn't the code, it's the network-effect. You can go off and make your own "competitor" but the only people who'll use it are rightoids and nonces. You could say "look, it's running on free software!" but the world would be no-more free. (For the apex of this, consider the much loved brag - most servers run on free software! – most servers serve nothing but reheated capitalist shit! It's a condemnation of free software that it does nothing to stop that! )

>>10445
>The only thing keeping windows/Macos alive is… normies..
And this is just stupid. It's software support you big dummy, it's fucking software support. If people can't do their excel spreadsheets with 100% compatibility for work, they're not going to use your stupid OS. If people can't install this or that arbitrary program for university, they're not going to use your stupid OS. Nobody wants their livelihood hanging by a thread of a dodgy VM update.
(and the thing that kept them alive wasn't first and foremost "normie mentality", it was microsoft giving them money to go "Look, we're not a monopoly!")
>>

 No.10448

>OS and Twiiter being free makes no difference
This is my main peeve with a lot of normies. They don't understand the value of free knowledge and are blind to the possibilities it creates.
The same thing that lowers barriers for KPMG, lowers them for KPMGs competitors too, or for dirt-poor pajeets to improve their situation or for societies opposed to US-cpaitalist influence needing software infra independent from US corps. It doesn't just help KPMG, it helps everyone.
We are already seeing this with countries trying to become independent of their dependency on hardware from US corps like Intel. The same battle is being fought for software too.
>FOSS Twitter
As useless as I think twitter and other similar sites are, a free software Twitter would definitely hurt Twitter as a company. First of all knowledge of their APIs would improve interop with other social media, second, if someone """improves""" twitter, not to make it more secure or private or the other boring shit, but to further exploit normie narcissism even better than twitter does while giving them the familiarity of twitter and interop with it, it will take off overnight and leave Twitter in the dust.

People seem to think that FS claims to be the bedrock of free culture and will usher socialism in. It can't do that singlehandedly but it is one of the very few working examples of it in a single sector.

>If people can't do their excel spreadsheets with 100% compatibility for work, they're not going to use your stupid OS.
Yes they can, retard. Most people don't even need all the features from MS office spreadsheet that they can't use on competing or open products. The starkest example of normcucks dropping this compatibility shit to move en masse for social reasons was the iPhone. All companies were in on Blackberry before that, but all it took was a shiny alternative that they could flash in each other's faces for them to completely change all their corporate interop setup from Blackberry to iPhone.
95% of universitards don't need a Mac. They have simply made it the culture to have one. The nvestment into corporate products for reasons of social upmanship definitely exists and is a normie mentality.
Also MS giving Apple money helped but it wouldn't have gone anywhere without their willingly enslaved consumer base that kept them viable.
>>

 No.10449

>>10448
>It doesn't just help KPMG, it helps everyone
It helps everyone including capitalists. It helps KPMG's competitors, who are financial services firms
Strike back against capital by destroying a software company to the benefit of every other company! (and you may well say "y-yeah, and ordinary people too!", but you can say that about a lot of things. that's the primary official argument for free trade!)

It's not even an example of socialism in software. If you make the software free and then sell support, or you sell only the labour of writing code (which is then GPL'd), you're running a capitalist business just as much as if you're hawking windows. You may think it's much better than doing as Microsoft does for this or that philosophical or practical reason, but in purely Marxist terms there's no distinction to be made.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
>Since free software is not a matter of price, a low price doesn't make the software free, or even closer to free. So if you are redistributing copies of free software, you might as well charge a substantial fee and make some money. Redistributing free software is a good and legitimate activity; if you do it, you might as well make a profit from it.

>Except for one special situation, the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL) has no requirements about how much you can charge for distributing a copy of free software. You can charge nothing, a penny, a dollar, or a billion dollars. It's up to you, and the marketplace, so don't complain to us if nobody wants to pay a billion dollars for a copy.
>>

 No.10453

>>10449
Free Software consists of a commons of software that everyone has universal and unlimited access to. It is not socialism in software, it is communism in software. But only in software, which is why you can operate businesses around it.
>>

 No.10460

>>10453
whenever i feel sad that my labour is being exploited in the factory, i stop and smile for the small taste of communism i enjoy knowing that i can modify the software the molding machine runs.
>>

 No.10484

>>10449
There's nothing stopping KPMG from switching to Linux now. The only reason their employees are forced to use non-free software is managers have the normie mindset of "must use Windows/Mac."

Furthermore, when enterprises move to Linux, it's not free as in beer. This is because they need someone to run and maintain their systems. Unlike hobbyists, they don't install Gentoo, they get a contract with a company like Red Hat or even hire their own staff to run it. That's not to say there are no cost savings, Red Hat is probably cheaper than Microsoft.

The difference is when Red Hat is contracted to run Linux systems, if they find a bug and fix it, they are legally obliged to publish the patch as per the GPL. This benefits hobbyists who get fixes and improvements to their free operating system for no cost. The same thing doesn't happen with Microsoft Windows.
>>

 No.10527

>>10484
>The difference is when Red Hat is contracted to run Linux systems, if they find a bug and fix it, they are legally obliged to publish the patch as per the GPL.
That's not true, if they only patch the bugs in their system and don't release it anywhere else then every user already has access to the source code and they are under no obligation to submit the fix or even acknowledge the existence of a bug.
>>

 No.10530

>RMS cancelling
Maybe he shouldn't have said what he did? Even for very based people, there are consequences for saying very poorly worded statements. It doesn't seem to have ultimately affected things, isn't he reinstated?

>Why master -> main
See
>>9983
>Because corporations
This is the only thing that needs to be said. Corporations need to look good.

>>10022
This is where you are wrong. The thing that makes the GPL "strong" is that you can't relicense it without the consent of the contributors like you can with BSD or MIT. Audacity is still governed by the GPL but developers now have to agree to a developer agreement to relinquish their vote should a time come when that becomes an issue. The claim was that this was necessary since many old developers who worked on the project had since dropped off the face of the earth and e-mails sent to them about license changes bounced back. I think Stallman intended necessarily for it to be very challenging and problematic to change licenses for a large project.
>>

 No.10531

>>10081
> I don't see too many college professors filling blogs and YouTube with free college-grade lessons, or open sourced books
Guess it depends on who you are talking about, then. Some of my favorite processors wrote a textbook that they licensed with Creative Commons licenses so that students could freely acquire the book at no direct cost.
>>

 No.10532

>>10105
>SJW
You have to go back
>>

 No.10578

>>10021
Yeah, but does Audacity still have the support of GPL supporters?

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