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Sudo maintainer, handling utility for more than 30 years, is looking for support
(www.theregister.com)
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this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2026
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Programming
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The fact that the FOSS model is still considered the best thing ever is so sad to me. The "free" part is clearly not working. Or rather it is working as is now intended: free labour for the private sector to exploit.
The Telekommunist Manifesto for the longer version of this ๐
I remember seeing a thread about redis on r/linux where lots and lots of people were basically defending Amazon as if from an anarcho-capitalist position. This confused me as I always saw foss (and foss users) as leaning socialist and anti-corporate.
I spoke to someone about that and they linked me this article (and the article linked in the first sentence) which really opened my eyes.
The TL;Dr is basically:
Wow, super based article! Thanks for it, I will also look at other articles from the author :D
How is the free part not working? FOSS is the cure of the industry. Or do you think Adobe and Microsoft is working that great? Imagine if we didn't have FOSS...
I don't deny its great contributions to the public and free culture, but I think it has become insufficient. The industry abuses it as much as it can, so I believe the only way to defend ourself is to migrate to a copyfarleft licensing model. With it, we can keep the same openness and freedom for the commons, but force the private sector to choose: either pay for our work, or fuck off.
I'm not so sure the "open source" part is working either when you think about how AI tools were trained.
It's really sad, because the accessibility of developing software and collaborative nature of the open source community is a big part of what drew me to software engineering as a career, and it's always been one of the first things I mention about why I love it. But, of course, these fucking evil companies found a way to take every individual part of something good and twist it into something awful.
FOSS will always be incompatible with capitalism. There is no incentive for the capitalist class to pay for the open source they consume.
Wrong. In example Valve is putting money and work into FOSS. AND they make money of it and rely on it. Even Microsoft does contribute to Open Source, believe it or not, even is one of the top sponsors for Linux.
The pittance that most of these companies do contribute is in no way a fair share of the profits they reap from using FOSS.
Valve is an exception to the rule.
You're arguing that the factory owner giving a few bucks to someone who produced a tool that improved productivity of the factory is somehow a just compensation.
There has been the "4opens" criteria, that has been more on point than free/libre/open source.
In hindsight, defeating corporate and AI piggery might have needed single-maintainer closed source with open protocols. Software components? Maybe it would have led to the compound document model instead of the app model, architecturally enforcing openness.
Funny, you are using with lemmy something for free, which is to some extent in the spirit of FOSS.
"Haha funny you use a phone and buy things yet you are anticapitalist haha" ahh argument
The copyfarleft licenses are not incompatible with the spirit of FOSS, they work exactly the same for the people, the only difference is that companies can either fuck off or pay
Yes the CopyLeft licences is the epitome of FOSS spirit