What comes after open source

It may only be artificial. I suppose HN is as susceptible to astroturfing as any online platform. If that's the case, we would just need an expressly pro-union discussion forum or a subreddit to become popular for the idea to take off. Edit: Huh. Incidentally, I just stumbled upon /r/devunion which appears to be exactly that, although it's shut down.

We've been over this with Microsoft Word making its format difficult to convert - stifling competition.

All these internet giants don't even have a file format for you to try and convert! Brilliant on their part.

Once you have your friend-list and stuff-you-posted as json, go ahead and switch to a different application - it'll be a 2 click import and you're set.

Regarding search and gmail - I fail to see how they have any hold over you, just use duckduckgo and one of the many other email service providers.

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Two main reasons to touch a computer: study formal systems, create wealth.

Mathematicians learned (in the Renaissance) to share their work. So if all you want to do is study the nature of formal systems you're good to go. (I can vouch for this. You don't need money to learn (although it helps.) Personally, I was more interested in the former and only "cashed in" later in life when being a homeless scholar got old.)

If you want to produce wealth using automation, there are two main strategies: maximize wealth, extract "rent".

The latter is relatively familiar: e.g. keep the generator and sell the electricity. In computers it's the "smart phone" that (while ostensible a portable computer) functions as a kind of shopping mall and arcade: the thing is designed to get your money. (It's impressive! People line up at the Apple store to be told how much money to put in the box to make the sacred artifact work again. No wonder Apple is sitting on a huge hoard of cash.)

The former, maximize wealth, is a little more obscure. Bucky Fuller is perhaps the best exemplar of the concept. In a nutshell, we have the technology already to create a "utopian" economic reality. Everybody could have the food, shelter, medical care, etc. to live a decent life, if only we applied the technology we already have to our basic needs. We can't solve every problem through tech, but we can and should solve the problems that are in reach.

From the POV of someone trying to maximize humanity's total wealth, the Free (copyleft) licenses are a tool, as steveklabnik says:

> The FSF sees copyleft, and therefore copyright, as a legal tool to enforce software freedom.

But "software freedom" is just an obvious corollary to building the automation feedback loop to achieve economic phase transition to a post-scarcity regime.

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As for how software should be produced going forward, first, there should be a general contraction in the amount of code in the world and of the number of people writing it. The current situation is a kind of "Thundering Herd" attack on human attention and memory.

To support contraction you need a formalism (notation or language) that makes it easy. Most of the necessary research has already been accomplished. The limiting factor is uptake. I suspect that it would be a thankless task, an uphill battle, to try to get existing computer industry to adopt, so that suggests that you have to take it directly to consumers (and businesses.) Just bypass everything.

I think - I'm not sure - that developers have "forgotten" that they are users, too.

It's probably also an age-related thing. There's a large group of developers who don't remember - they weren't even born yet! - how software used to be in the 1970s and 80s. How everything was extremely proprietary - and costly to purchase. Heck, just a simple C compiler could set you back hundreds or thousands of dollars (and we're talking dollars back then - not today's).

They also don't know or remember times of a company going under, and taking the support of that proprietary software with them, and the mad (and expensive) scramble to find something else, depending on what the software was for. They never experienced Borland going under, as developers (or any number of other development tools companies for that matter - Lattice C, anyone?). Or the number of companies that supplied software to businesses going under, or being acquired (usually by CA or IBM - with varying levels of "continued support").

They forgot - or never understood - why Stallman created the FSF and the GPL in the first place. Recent events, and probably future ones unfortunately, will likely make them recall their history, hopefully.

Me, personally, as a developer, always liked the GPL. It isn't great for a business; it makes it difficult to sell such software, because you have to provide the source code - but from a developer perspective, I've always looked at it as the currency being paid as being the source code.

In other words, by using the GPL for my code, I'm saying "if you use my code, and develop something, and distribute it - I want to be paid". Other licenses, they don't have to do anything - not even a mention in some cases (outside of the BSD - which they can then easily bury elsewhere). But with the GPL - they do have to pay you, as the developer, something in return: They have to pay you with source code.

Source code won't feed you. It won't keep the lights on, or a roof over your head. However, as a software developer, being paid in source code is valuable. It means that (in theory) my code can be made more useful for others, that those additions and changes can live on, and that the product - in theory - won't go away if or when I go away, or the company I am a part of goes away. The code - and the product it is - will remain available. The legacy of it can remain. It won't be buried.

To me, that's valuable - in some ways, more so than cash. Maybe because source code is what we make; it's our legacy - the artifact and mark we leave behind. In a way, it's our art. We want it to continue to exist, for people to look at it and hopefully enjoy it, to know who created it.

With both licensing (and to an extent, DRM, which is related) getting in the way - it is possible to erase this legacy from the society.

To end this - I've found great pleasure in unearthing very old code from various places and "things" on the internet; most of the time, it's been a private endeavor, but at some point I want to get the code back out for general use (that is, I want the code to live on). In some cases, I've found this code in weird scanned research papers from the 1960s and 70s, dealing with strange subjects (for instance, I found some stuff on 3D programming in BASIC in a set of papers by someone at the USGS in the 1970s). Technically, the code isn't "open source" (I'm not sure what it is, since it was paid with tax dollars - probably not public domain, but I don't know) - but I think the author and their code should be recognized, as a contribution to the history of computing.