The reality of good competition is that competitors are built on good, cheap open source. No matter how decentral, a lot of users will want guards at the offramps and onramps. The only path for... everyone to create stronger competitive checks on services they rely on is to make sure that the open foundations are extremely strong.
The alliance any up-and-comers can make with the ecosystem is to develop more of what they host in the open source. In return for starting much closer to the finish line, we only ask that they also make the lines closer for those that come after them.
That's a bit of an indirect idea for today's Joe Internet. Joe Internet is going to hold out waiting for such services to be offered entirely for free, by a magical Github competitor who exists purely to serve in the public interest. Ah yes, Joe Internet means government-funded, but of course government solutions are not solutions for narrow-interest problems like "host my code" that affect only a tiny minority. And so Joe Internet will be waiting for quite some time.
The problem is funding. To be a real github competitor you need some serious infrastructure investment, which means you need to generate revenue and you start doing all sorts of stuff that is hostile to your free-tier userbase.
Personally I wouldn't mind paying for access but I doubt there is a critical mass of users that can be weaned off of free access. Competing with free networks is hard. Codeberg, as far as I can tell, basically has a donation model where you can volunteer to pay and be a "member", but 0.5% of users choose that option, that is, they made a one time payment of 10 euros. That's enough to fund how many months of bandwidth and a couple of recycled servers. For cloud infrastructure standards are pretty high, you want replication, backup, anti-DDOS, monitoring, etc. All of that costs money. It would also help if they made it easier to donate with a paypal link instead of a SEPA QR code that requires an international bank transfer.
Maybe we need a display that just shows each user approximately what they cost.
Not a wikipedia banner. No guilt verbiage. No unrelatable total site/year numbers like "2.6M out of 5M goal" etc.
Just like some little bit of ui in a corner somewhere that passively just sits there and shows it's state like a red/yellow/green light or a battery meter or something. And what it shows is some at-a-glance representation of what you are costing the service, positive or negative.
If the org is open and low profit or even non profit, or even reasonable profit but organized as a co-op, this can be a totally honest number, which will probably be suprisingly small.
(and if any full-profit type services don't like having that kind of info made quite so public because it makes it hard to explain their own prices, well golly that sure sounds awful)
This will obviously have no effect on some people.
But I know that something like that will absolutely eat at some people until they decide they will feel better if they make that dot turn green.
And everyone else who just wants to take something for free and doesn't like being reminded of it, has no basis for complaining or claiming to be outraged at being nagged or browbeaten. It's a totally passive out of the way bit of display making no demands at all and not even hindering or speedbumping anything.
Even when you click on it for more info and the links to how to donate etc, the verbiage is careful not to make kids or drive-by laypeople or anyone else without real means feel bad or feel obligated. We don't need your soup money, don't sweat it.
Maybe even include some stories about how we all wound up in our high paying IT jobs because of the availability of stuff other people wrote and let us use for free when we were kids or former truck drivers etc, and so that's how you can understand and believe we really are ok with you now using this for free.
Can't possibly get any lighter touch than that.
And yet the fact that the little thing is just there all the time in view, that alone will make it like a voluntary itch that if you know you can afford it, you should make that light green. It's like a totally wholesome use of gamification psychology.
I guess it will also have to somehow show not just what you cost yourself, but also what all the non-paying users are costing and what your fraction of that would be to cover those. At least some payers would need to pay significantly more than what they cost.
But I'd be real curious to see just how bad that skew is after a while if a lot of individuals do end up paying at least for themselves, where today most of them pay nothing.
That may make the need for whales much reduced and really no whales, just a bunch that only pay like twice what they cost. Or even less, a heavy user that costs more might be able to totally cover the entire cost of 10 other light users with only 10% more than their own cost. It could eventually smooth out to being no real burden at all even for the biggest payers.
That's getting to be a bit much info to display all in a single colored dot or something without text or some complicated graphic, but I think this much could be shown and still be simple and elegant. Even a simple dot can have several dimensions all at once. size, hue, saturation, brightness, let alone any more detail like an outline or more complex shape.
About the only thing I can see that is a bad thing is I bet this is a recipe for unfairly taxing women more than men. You just know that far more women will make that light green even if it's not easy, and far more men will happily let it ride forever even though they could afford it effortlessly, just to spend that $3 on a half of a coffee instead.
Just can't help humming in my head reg yoo la toe ree cap chur
Any system that can juice itself by increasing both funding and cost will scale both until the natural incentive gradients (are you smart? do you actually want to do stuff or do you just want a desk job?) vanish into the noise. When everyone went to college, nobody learned anything.
University is one of those things you always want to be capability rather than means gated, but those of means will always want their kids to get in regardless of how they were raised. After all, they worked hard. Why should their kids? They will ally with every convenient rationalization in order to moralize for the politics, taking advantage of arguments about "disadvantaged backgrounds" etc to treat everything as a means problem, but the goal is to dilute the capability aspect, and that robs talent.
If you have exceptional talent, you need to know the truth. Systems naturally try to optimize the dumb-rich to smart ratio so that there's a lot of subsidy available for anyone who actually needs to be there, but consequent GPA inflation demands that we make the education somewhat meaningless, so you're really on your own to set goals, and any good ones are way higher. Check the boxes, take the free lunch, and then treat the overall coddling like a charade that must be ignored. Then again, isn't self direction always that way?
Are there still people under the impression that the correct way to use Stack Overflow all these years was to copy & paste without analyzing what the code did and making it fit for purpose?
If I have to say, we're just waiting for the AI concern caucus to get tired of performing for each other and justifying each other's inaction in other facets of their lives.
The trend is global and inherent to online psychological coupling and self-selection bias. The longer we go without healthy information spaces, the more the population will regress.
There does however seem to be a "free/libre" vs open source rift along the Atlantic ridge, and it is being wedged apart by the US government flirting with a return to isolationism mixed with bullying and self-enforced credible threat geopolitics.
It is really counter-productive for Europeans to think American OSS people are monolithic with US tech giants and the US federal government. Nonetheless, pluralism is good, and innovation will win, so I suppose it's just another hairpin in the game.
As a US citizen, when I see the phrase "European digital sovereignty," I'm a bit concerned that our OSS enthusiast and activist allies in that geography are learning to associate American OSS with American tech companies and US government. This could deepen the old free/libre vs open source divide that seems to have polarized along the separation by the Atlantic ocean. If so, in a time where Americans may be soon head-to-head with a runaway tyrannical government, our EU allies will be busy retreating into free/libre commensalist thinking that seem tunnel-visioned on using government funding to escape MS Word, something that is going to be the last thing on their minds if actual sovereignty concerns emerge.
The more general goal will remain to protect all individual freedoms from all tyrannical governments, not to depend on them. It will remain to use better information technology to enhance the functioning of all governments and to create healthy competition in all markets to protect consumer choice. American OSS has not forgotten this one bit. Our country is just having a moment, and it won't help if EU OSS participation writes us off as casualties while EU OSS focuses on "uniquely European" solutions.
I don't think anyone is confused about American OSS and American corporations run amok with wealth accumulation and regulatory capture. It's a European conference held at a time when governments are waking up to the realization that foreign-owned proprietary software is a bad idea, and the idea of "digital sovereignty" has been around for a bit and did not originate at FOSDEM. The governments also seem to understand that OSS helps with transparency and minimizing costs by investing into a commons (though the message bears repeating; FSFE, EDRI and such do a good job getting it out), so hopefully they'll stick with that and not replicate the US model.
How did I lump both together when I specifically called them out separately, lol.
Everybody understands OSS/free software is global (though copyright/left is still subject to export controls and other laws.) No question about that. And I was specifically talking about proprietary software there, you even copied that in your reply...Proprietary software is bad; foreign-owned is even worse, like the EU has learned recently when Microsoft cuts your email short, for example.
The "US model" is obviously big monopolies or duopolies run unchecked, allowed to buy, prevent and starve competition, then seeking regulatory capture to secure a moat. That is what people know, for better or for worse. No laymen knows the FSF, or what that guy in Arkansas in the xkcd is doing for the digital infrastructure.
I think the main challenge for Europe will be to manage those public investments in an effective way for people's benefit. As far as I know, there are few precedents, and maybe nothing of that scale. China pulls off of open/free software significantly, mostly to avoid US proprietary software, but to my knowledge they don't give much/anything back. So it seems challenging, but I'm also excited for how/if they pull it off.
By the way, I donate to both US and EU free software and digital rights organizations. It was not my intention to nurture your conception of a divide, if that is what you took from my comment.
> The more general goal will remain to protect all individual freedoms from all tyrannical governments, not to depend on them.
This is more of an American pov and will probably be a disconnect for Europeans. Their governments don't screw them as much, so they probably don't see them as tyrannical. Those governments investing in proprietary software to move away from other proprietary software would be a mistake; so government investment into free/open source should be seen as a win, not something to shy away from in the name of individual freedom.
> How did I lump both together when I specifically called them out separately, lol.
Dude, "American OSS and American corporations" is simple conjunction, a union, treating two things as one so that you can make a single predicate statement about them. If you mean to make separate statements about the two things, maybe don't group them into the same sentence phrase?
I asked you not to group these things together. If this provokes you to begin regurgitating "free/libre" ideology all over again, you obviously think that being asked to separate American OSS and American corporations is somehow incompatible with OSS or "free/libre". American OSS marched in front of Microsoft to demand refunds. Get it right.
At this point you're clearly misconstruing my statements, and/or have some problems with reading comprehension. Your others comments don't leave much to be positive about, either.
You would have been able to see this by looking at a graph of my karma against the hour of day. There's truly an ideological dispersion across the Atlantic.
OSS and FOSS are global, not American or EU or anything. The geopolitical situation is on another plane. FOSS can and will be used as a tool for strategic autonomy, for better and for worse.
Why would one at this very moment look with suspicion at a FOSS contributor for the sole reason (s)he's American?
1.) it's quiet clear the European sovereignity is a pitch to get resources into the OS eco system.
2.) it's very easy: after governments companies ans users will follow as os proofed to work.
3.) this is not us vs eu,.it is just us vs. The rest of the world. Canada and Mexico are threatened by Trumpy as well and located on another side of the Atlantic and probably their government are interested into OS as well.
4.) As there is not an os business model of US will work , money and users will be else where starting in Europe. It will be easier for Open Source somewhere else.
5.) so this is my last bit: your comment sounds like American don't want to protest against Trump because it is too dangerous. Well, that's the result as 50% of people voted for Trump. In your scene: Less resources for open source in the us
> your comment sounds like American don't want to protest against Trump because it is too dangerous
At this time, we are still openly committed to the 2nd amendment in defense of the 1st, 3rd, 4th, 6th and so on. I am encouraging others to participate in open-carry demonstrations to make it clear to the authoritarians that they will not get the intimidating optics of an unopposed crackdown against a helpless crowd that they want. Personally, I grew up shooting things, so handling bootlickers will be natural if it comes to it.
Technically enabled solutions to better communicate, organize, and represent the will of the people would help a lot. Bomb-shelter thinking will not help much. If the US devolves into a Russian style authoritarian state, one where I will no longer be welcomed off the plane, the EU will have more to worry about than Windows. My ideas on the technically enabled side are complex but sound, so I encourage any interested in doing full stack Rust to get a hold of me by clicking links. I'll be finishing up some shader programming and feedback rendering today as the next piece of my strategy.
> the EU will have more to worry about than Windows
The US can, right now, crash pretty much the entire western industry/economy by disconnecting their digital services.
The US already threatens the western world with that power. They already use it.
Of course the EU has to care about that. The reason they accepted the dependency was that for a long time they were looking up to the US, and couldn't imagine that the US could become an enemy in the space of a few weeks.
Now the US has proven that they could realistically go from this state that the western world trusted to declaring war to allies in a matter of weeks. Of course everybody is scared.
The EU will have more to worry about than Windows, but it also has to worry about Windows. Trump banned the head of the ICC from Microsoft, successfully disrupting their prosecution of America, via pure software means.
Outside the constitution, outside their jurisdiction, and not lawful.
Popular sovereignty always works. One way or another.
The most wrong opinion in the debate is to claim that we will be punished for open carry demonstrations. Only an abuse victim excuses the attacker, and allowing the attacker to do what they want is just catch 22.
Leptos etc. WASM is mature enough to just go for it. Same code sharing arrangement as using TS on the backend but using the backend language on the frontend instead.
Yeah. You can bind C in swift. You can expose C interfaces from Rust. Write non-iOS code in Rust, then bind. Now you have iOS support with common client code in Rust.
You can compile Rust to WASM. You can run Rust on the backend. It's gaining popularity on k8s for memory consumption. You can write music visualizers in Rust. You can pivot to killer drones or embedded in Rust. It has very few foot guns compared to C and all of the advantages of C.
The people who want Swift to succeed off of Apple hardware are basically waiting for someone else to do it. Rust users will just invade Apple from every side. It is very clear which platform is the better investment of anyone's time.
I can't believe I'm even wasting keystrokes thinking about this. I saw a bunch of upvotes and can only imagine this has to be wishful thinking from Swift users.
I don't agree that sibling to my comment: "make money by getting papers cited". it is not a long-term solution, much as Ad revenue is broken model for free software, also.
I'm hopeful that we see some vibe-coders get some products out that make money, and then pay to support the system they rely on for creating/maintaining their code.
Not sure what else to hope for, in terms of maintaining the public goods.
Any "exposure" economy has real money somewhere else turning the wheel. If that money isn't sensitive to healthy signal, neither is the downstream. Well-wishers are just alternative perpetual motion machine enthusiasts.
The alliance any up-and-comers can make with the ecosystem is to develop more of what they host in the open source. In return for starting much closer to the finish line, we only ask that they also make the lines closer for those that come after them.
That's a bit of an indirect idea for today's Joe Internet. Joe Internet is going to hold out waiting for such services to be offered entirely for free, by a magical Github competitor who exists purely to serve in the public interest. Ah yes, Joe Internet means government-funded, but of course government solutions are not solutions for narrow-interest problems like "host my code" that affect only a tiny minority. And so Joe Internet will be waiting for quite some time.
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