Reading about FOSS philosophy, degoogling, becoming against corporations, and now a full-blown woke communist (like Linus Torvalds)
Linux and open source in general completely blow apart capitalist arguments that profit motive is necessary for innovation and technological advancement. Open source ecosystem primarily run by volunteers has produces some of the most interesting and innovative technologies that we’ve seen. The reality is that people make interesting things because they’re curious and they enjoy making stuff. Pretty much nobody makes anything interesting with profit being the primary motive.
Also without open source the capitalist tech sector would collapse
It wouldn’t necessarily collapse (it wasn’t exactly suffering before FOSS stuff “hit the shelves”, so to speak) but the gatekeeping that comes with it would certainly cause a tremendous amount of stagnation
I work in software development. Almost all modern architecture would collapse without the open source ecosystem.
Almost all modern architecture would collapse without the open source ecosystem.
If you yanked it away all at once, sure. Just like society would collapse if we quit delivering gasoline and diesel to the filling stations, or electricity to the grid.
If the opensource ecosystem “went closed” today, meaning: no new developments or changes allowed to be used by commercial entities, there would be an initial surge-panic to bring maintenance of the open source tools they use in-house, probably under shared development agreements - it would be interesting to see how the corporations handle that hypothetical scenario, but I don’t think they’d collapse at any greater rate than they already collapse as part of the course of regular business.
The ironic thing I think would come out of the open source community “cutting off” business use of their newly developed things is: I would predict business to adopt the open model to keep their customers off their backs, not have to handle support the way they did in the 1980s/ early 90s - that was super expensive as compared to: here’s a link to our website, you can find what you’re asking for in there.
capitalist arguments that profit motive is necessary for innovation and technological advancement
I don’t know who is arguing this because it’s incredibly stupid. The greatest scientific minds of history, the mathematicians, the physicists, the inventors, were not capitalists, they’re people with passion for their work.
If we move to a society that guarantees basic human needs and good education, we’re only going to have more scientists and engineers that progress technology even faster.
I don’t know who is arguing this because it’s incredibly stupid.
It’s not a hard question to solve: who profits from the argument?
