Personally I believe this is a very poor take

  • refalo@programming.dev
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    4 months ago

    Open source is the very worst thing currently going on because it is so incredibly exploitative, it’s far more exploitative than any actual company is of the workers who work at the company.

    Even the people who are getting paid in open source are getting massively underpaid to do it compared to how much the people who are using their code are making, it’s nothing compared to the power that is accreted by the people who have co-opted that work thanks to the open source model. And then mark zuckerberg gets to define how the internet works despite having paid for almost none of the software that his company actually needed to make that work.

    It’s like feudalism or serfdom, these people did the work and got nothing for it. It’s like you took the worst aspects of capitalism for workers and the worst aspects of socialism for workers and put them together, that’s open source. You get no power and you get no money.

    It’s exploitative whether the people chose to be exploited, just because someone chooses to let you exploit them does not meant that you didn’t exploit them. And for the record that’s how most exploitation works; convincing people to do something that turns out to be very bad for them and very good for you, and that’s exactly what the open source movement has turned out to be.

    I really don’t see the “we post stuff on github under a gpl2 or lgpl or apache or mit license”, all that is to me now is just exploitation. You can say that there’s solutions but until someone demonstrates that those solutions work, it’s the standard “real communism has never been tried” argument. AGPL is the only thing that I’ve seen so far that’s an attempt to fix these fundamentally unfair compensation practices.

    • pmk@lemmy.sdf.org
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      4 months ago

      Getting paid in money is one motivation for people, but not the only one. Some people do things because they want to, regardless of payment. And some of them want to give what they made as a gift to anyone. The flip side is that no one can force them to do anything, it’s all voluntary.

    • ⸻ Ban DHMO 🇦🇺 ⸻@aussie.zoneOP
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      4 months ago

      It really depends alot on the situation, I do agree however, when you compare Open Source and Free Software, Open Source seems to be designed to be exploitative which is why it is supported by large companies. As you said the AGPL is really the only way to go as it means you get access to every modification a large company makes to your software, which is why the Linux kernel (albeit GPLv2, which is also a good copyleft license) has become such a big project, running on the phone I’m typing this on and the servers our Lemmy instances are on.

      It’s probably not the answer to everything and FUTO are trying to fix this (probably the wrong way though) but AGPL is really the best license to avoid exploitation, that way if they use it, you get in return more source code.