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We all depend on open source. We will defend it together

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Re: We all depend on open source. We will defend it together

#121

Post by trumpdong »

warumdarum wrote: post #71
cryo32 wrote: post #29

No we won’t. We’ll make grand statements about it, leave it for commercial entities to corrupt it, then complain loudly about the state of it when we really did nothing about it. I expect we’ve got a future of “undo forks” as I’ve called them which is rolling back to pre-insanity times and rethinking again. That’s only something people unencumbered by commercial requirements can do.

Its worse. Open source will be hijacked by hype warfare companies to extract free labour and build the things they want instead of the things we want.

But that's already what open source is...

Re: We all depend on open source. We will defend it together

#122

Post by madprops »

Concerning globo-list. Centralization/takeover, aka an eventual "we will manage you"; which might be the true colors of the Linux Foundation. Forks would just get absorbed and used internally instead of depending on the performance of random informal earth citizens. The site is not even pleasant to read with that font. Villainy is parodied in this world heavily, names like Discord, Palantir, AI Companies talking about doom scenarios and enjoying it: so it's cool and expected to be a villain, to wrestle with the other kinds of power. I just want some fresh choices to polish the kind of company I want to get around me, which would likely be the opposite of who signed that letter.

Re: We all depend on open source. We will defend it together

#124

Post by high_5 »

jdw64 wrote: post #78

After reading this. I realize how different Asian and Western consciousness really are. My entire technology stack was built on Microsoft's ecosystem, not on open source. This was Microsoft's attempt to expand their base for the corporate hiring market and OS market share. Conversely, open source was a huge barrier for me. When I have a product I've built, I have to get past open source, but accessing open source com…

The Personal Computer culture in the SV developed from the counterculture in the valley: https://kbsm.org/technology/california-tech-culture-that-sha... It then hopped on the Free Software movement with redefining it as "open source" while the Internet was booming. And all of that is now being reaped by the corporations the "tech-hippies" themselves helped to create.

Re: We all depend on open source. We will defend it together

#125

Post by forgetfreeman »

warumdarum wrote: post #71
cryo32 wrote: post #29

No we won’t. We’ll make grand statements about it, leave it for commercial entities to corrupt it, then complain loudly about the state of it when we really did nothing about it. I expect we’ve got a future of “undo forks” as I’ve called them which is rolling back to pre-insanity times and rethinking again. That’s only something people unencumbered by commercial requirements can do.

Its worse. Open source will be hijacked by hype warfare companies to extract free labour and build the things they want instead of the things we want.

Oh that ship sailed over a decade ago. Industry appeasement is a big part of what killed Drupal.

Re: We all depend on open source. We will defend it together

#127

Post by flir »

jdw64 wrote: post #78

After reading this. I realize how different Asian and Western consciousness really are. My entire technology stack was built on Microsoft's ecosystem, not on open source. This was Microsoft's attempt to expand their base for the corporate hiring market and OS market share. Conversely, open source was a huge barrier for me. When I have a product I've built, I have to get past open source, but accessing open source com…

Great comment. Really interesting to see "scratch your own itch" described as an "aristocratic hobby".

If the language barrier disappeared overnight, would the situation still be the same, do you think? What would an Eastern open source movement look like, and why hasn't one developed?

Re: We all depend on open source. We will defend it together

#128

Post by jdw64 »

fbcpck wrote: post #112
jdw64 wrote: post #78

After reading this. I realize how different Asian and Western consciousness really are. My entire technology stack was built on Microsoft's ecosystem, not on open source. This was Microsoft's attempt to expand their base for the corporate hiring market and OS market share. Conversely, open source was a huge barrier for me. When I have a product I've built, I have to get past open source, but accessing open source com…

I think this is conflating opensource-corporate and english-non-english. If you ask american/european/english-speaking developers about coding, it will mostly be about/in the context of corporate environments rather than open source too! The majority do not actively or primarily contribute to open source projects, but instead corporate environments as well. In an alternative timeline where the lingua franca isn't eng…

You're right. Ultimately, the absolute number of developers matters a lot. But when it comes to coding style and paradigms, it's overwhelmingly dominated by the English-speaking world.

For example, object-oriented programming or conditional statements generally follow a What -> Action -> Target order. But my native grammar follows a What -> Target -> Action order. So I have to translate SOV logic into SVO code syntax.

The reality is that English speakers are numerous, Japanese and Korean speakers are relatively few, and while Chinese speakers are quite numerous, there's still some cognitive load due to differences in thought patterns. It's almost like a difference in the sheer volume of accessible knowledge.

Due to the cumulative cost of translation, this feels like a bigger hurdle than people realize.

So sometimes language gives a sense of identity tied to 'ethnicity' and 'nation,' but when it comes to the competition for knowledge, I feel that the number of native speakers matters more. There are points where I agree with you, and points where I don't. It's complicated

Re: We all depend on open source. We will defend it together

#129

Post by brynet »

Defending open source should begin with real, tangible support for both the projects and its developers. Not just words.

With my OpenBSD developer hat on, getting new hardware in the hands of developers is really important, many of us are hacking on 5-10 year old thinkpads that need replacing.

https://www.openbsd.org/want.html

The OpenBSD foundation is ~50% away from its fundraising goal for 2026!

https://www.openbsdfoundation.org/campaign2026.html

Re: We all depend on open source. We will defend it together

#130

Post by doginasuit »

jdw64 wrote: post #78

After reading this. I realize how different Asian and Western consciousness really are. My entire technology stack was built on Microsoft's ecosystem, not on open source. This was Microsoft's attempt to expand their base for the corporate hiring market and OS market share. Conversely, open source was a huge barrier for me. When I have a product I've built, I have to get past open source, but accessing open source com…

It is a distortion to frame the problem as corporate vs. open source. These corporations compete with open source but they are often sustained by it, and in any case they operate within a space that is impacted by it. A healthy open source community is generally to their benefit. The inverse is also true, to the extent that corporations support and integrate with open source, it benefits from a healthy commercial market. All too often, they take and do not give back, so many people in these comments here are pointing out the same contradiction that you have highlighted. But it is not so much a matter of predators and prey, we all share the same ecosystem.

The corporations themselves are not a monolith. Their leadership and engineering teams are made up of diverse perspectives on open source, and those perspectives can shift. These same questions are debated within the company and the balance is always shifting in a way that can either benefit or undermine open source. I'm personally skeptical for some of the reasons you described, but I wouldn't rule out the possibility of a better relationship to open source.

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