It's still "free love". Open source can do so many things. Ad-supported sites are still ridiculously plentiful. Even audio and video is supported by ads. There are high-quality games with ridiculous amounts of content that are free.
Do people also charge money for things and make a living? Yup. That shouldn't be a surprise. And people shouldn't be painted as bad for wanting to make a living providing things that other people want.
Nobody believes that a new AC unit or floor boards should be free. Yet some think that all software must be free, just because it's possible to losslessly copy software but not AC units or floor boards.
A healthy society both needs a venue for people who want to provide things at no cost - the payment being the enjoyment of doing it when other sources of income exist - and for people to charge for the fruits of their labor.
It’s not necessarily ideologically inconsistent if people believe they should primarily be paying for materials/consumables. I do think it makes sense that people should have to pay reasonable amounts for labor as well, but it’s unfortunate that there are very few options to both pay for something and have control over its source code and self-hosting and some of the trust in the long term that we have with free software.
The main option right now for what you described is to contribute labor or money to open source projects, which many people do - but not nearly enough. The sad reality is that the vast majority of people, even well meaning ones, don't want to pay for things if they don't have to. And it is generally the case that if you are paying for something, you have a societally accepted moral standing to complain about it as a paying customer.
does this article have a thesis? the article seems to be a random bag of lukewarm takes.
it starts off being sad about some attendees at a developer conference existing?? note that the conference itself specifically reserved and invited an "AI track", so concerns on that side seem ridiculous. on the other side, sure, cryptocurrency is a little tangential but what is cryptocurrency if not an attempt at a decentralized open-source store of value? I'm certainly no cryptocurrency fan but this venue doesn't seem particularly far off.
then the article meanders around about how technological development has rapidly reduced costs in the space and adds some general concern porn about standardization. the whole thing is some dumb background level of nostalgia for a world that never existed.
it's not like open source is dying because of profit motive. if anything, a lot of open source is kept alive because of companies with a profit motive investing in it. you can claim the contributions from corporations to open source are insufficient, but you can't claim... wait, again, what exactly is this article claiming?
Why wouldn't it, look at everything else? Humans will destroy old growth, irreplaceable rain Forrest just to make a few million dollars. There is very little if anything stopping us from ruining nice things.
“Like an archer and arrow, the wise man steadies his trembling mind, a fickle and restless weapon. Flapping like a fish thrown on dry ground, it trembles all day -- Siddhartha Gautama"
The important part of the message there is "the mind is a fickle and restless weapon, flapping like a fish thrown on dry ground". People's minds are seething to fill a void, which often manifests in mindlessly grabbing money to buy things we don't need and acquire power for a brief period of time.
The only way to a better future is to better educate children about their minds.
Alexis de Tocqueville's "Democracy in America" [0] is a good read on
what he called the "restiveness" of the Western (meaning immigrant
north American) mind - that being a frontier spirit. When compared to
Schopenhauer's European pessimism over "despair" and stasis it's a
good way to live and unsurprising that a vigorous "work ethic" grew
from it.
But it scales to a few thousand or a million people. A global
population of 8 billion empty, needy "fickle and restless" minds
"flapping like a fish thrown on dry ground"... we can't sustain that.
There is not enough excitement, adventure, wild frontiers, amusement
and frippery to satisfy it.
Which is why religion, and the arts, and things people do to find
meaning beyond toil and low pleasures not only travelled to America,
they prospered there like never before.
It's only relatively recently that we've started to use technology to
undo that and work against creation of meaning rather than towards it.
I can give examples of things I think fit that, but not offer
arguments - because some people can claim "meaning" in almost
anything.
A fairly clear one would be widespread "over-zealous use of
intellectual property technology to stifle culture". It's getting
easier to do with all kinds of digital handcuffs, TPMs, and mechanisms
that take agency and meaning away from the owner of a computer and
place it in the hands of who really controls the computer. It's
concomitant with "surveillance capitalism" but I think marks a
qualitative change from computers as enabling tools in the 20th
century, to systems of social control in the 21st. That marks a
significant change in the "meaning" of computers qua purpose, optimism
and opportunity (for everyone not just geeks and developers.) I feel
quite sure artists who worry about AI would say similar but in a
different way.
Easy to be "free love" when you are getting investor money from all over the world thrown at you for 20+ years. Tech was always going to have to face reality. Heck things aren't even that bad yet.
One possible avenue is making interfaces to basic services so complicated that we'll need AI to negotiate them on our behalf.
We've done it before. Kids in 1985 knew what files and directories on their computers were. I went to a bad segregated school on the South Side of Chicago, and I knew, because we had a class. Kids these days don't know. Maybe 15 years from now they'll call the kids who can navigate their phones through touch "techies" because all they'll know how to do is to politely ask their phones to do things. Maybe that will be the adults.
During the PC era it was making big technology accessible and it had a spectacular success on Wall Street due to this big shift. I believe no other Silicon Valley development has been as focused on actual tools for humans to use.
We are now left with Wall Street expectations that are out of scale for the usefulness of the technology being developed. The technology seems to be developed with a focus on being a service with the widest possible addressable market and the lowest possible cost per click.
Most of the world's problems don't fit those parameters. Luckily most tech news is white noise.
There is a lot of good work and it doesn't get much oxygen. The recent thread on the paper "What goes around comes around and around" is a good window on how to do good work.
On the surface it is surprising that the 1990/2000s (often ex-hippie) free software writers or entrepreneurs got so greedy.
The worst people are those who fight over the control of old free software projects, usually using DEI as a shield to a) establish a tyranny b) silence all opposition and c) secure their $250,000 jobs at Google, Facebook, Microsoft since they now have gotten rid of vast amounts of competition while pretending that they want to "grow the team".
This kind of behavior is not limited to software though. It was the Hippies of 1970 who slowly grew more powerful, and in the 1980s/1990s sold out entire manufacturing economies to Asia and Eastern Europe while pretending that The West is now a knowledge economy. And they got rich in the process of dumping IP while at the same time destroying local workers' livelihoods by replacing them with cheaper immigrants.
DEI? This reads like someone who wakes up in the morning mad about DEI and trying to force it into every argument on the internet to “own the libs.” It makes zero sense here.
Can you provide an example where someone, using DEI, took over an open source project, ruled tyannicly, ended people's rights to speech and then used that to get a 250k job at Google, Facebook or Microsoft?
How much of this is related to interest rates? The fed rate is simultaneously the minimum ROI for the owner to continue running the business instead of selling everything and buying treasury bonds
Anyone is welcome to get involved or sponsor the projects. But frankly my experience with most VCs I have met has been that they try to avoid deep, decentralized open source platforms like this, so they can make quick wins on the latest fad. Mostly individuals here and there get it. But 95% of the time it turns out they have no money or liquidity, and I don’t have time chasing and finding out who does. That’s the nature of these things. It’s a lonely job.
Honestly, even though it’s completely free and open source, and gives people the tools to do what until now they could only do with Big Tech platforms, I expect many people on HN here will ding all of it — because that second project (Intercoin) is about blockchain-based applications.
So you can see the fate of open source free projects by how this post does.
Just wanted to let you know that the qbix.com website navigation doesn't work, at least for me on mobile Firefox. Clicks sometimes open the submenu, but usually not. Clicks on the submenu don't work (they always seem go to the content in the background) and clicks on the main menu items usually don't work either.
Hi, great that you looked at it, unfortunately it doesn't work for me yet. I made a video. Good examples are at 3 seconds in (video starts playing) and 16 seconds in (I end up at the FTL website instead of the menu option). Halfway the video you can see that the Communities button doesn't work at that moment in time (earlier it did). Good luck!
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-CVVxIicNqQJ8iz9EP0nBlroPAs...
Do people also charge money for things and make a living? Yup. That shouldn't be a surprise. And people shouldn't be painted as bad for wanting to make a living providing things that other people want.