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Cake day: July 18th, 2023

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  • Not really. The problem with FOSS licensing is that it was too altruistic, with the belief that if enough users and corporations depended on the code, the community would collectively do the work necessary to maintain the project. Instead, capitalism chose to exploit FOSS as free labor most of the time, without any reciprocal investment. They raise an enormous amount of issues, and consume a large amount of FOSS developer time, without paying their own staff to fix the bugs they need resolved — in the software their products depend on. At that point the FOSS developer is no longer a FOSS developer, and instead is the unpaid slave labor of a corporation. Sure, FOSS devs could just ignore external inputs, but that’s not easy to do when you’ve invested years of your life in a project. Exploiting kindness may be legal, but it should never be justified or tolerated.

    Sure, FOSS licenses legally permit that kind of use, but just because homeless shelters allow anyone to eat their food, and sleep in their beds, that doesn’t make the rich man who exploits that charity ethically or morally justified. The rich man who exploits that charity (i.e. free labor), and offers nothing in return, is a scummy dog cunt; there are no two ways about it. The presence of lecherous parasites can destroy the entire charity; they can mean the difference between sustainability and burnout.

    FOSS should always be free for all personal, free, and non profit use, but once someone in the chain starts depending on FOSS to generate income and profit, some of that profit should always be reinvested in those dependencies. That’s what FOSS is now learning; to reject the exploitation and greed of lecherous parasites.








  • WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
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    1 year ago

    Should … Should we tell OP that nobody understands all of any moderately large codebase, especially the sub-dependencies … or that even the thousands of developers who wrote most of that code don’t understand how their own code works anymore?

    I could read the same book every year and I still won’t remember most of the minor events on my deathbed. Doesn’t mean I won’t remember the key components that make up the story — coding is like that, except the minor events and key components can be rewritten or removed by someone else whenever you go to read them next.