How do we feel about Meta joining the Fediverse?

archchan@lemmy.ml to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 13 points –

Personally, I want nothing to do with them and I'm not willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. I moved to the Fediverse to get away from all these corpos.

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Meta is a corporation with a really horrible track record

and even if they didn't, it's still a corporation; it only cares for profit

I have very negative opinions on them joining

We would be opening the door to allow a large corporation to do what they've done with open source for a while. They'll privatize the public commons.

But all this work [GPL licensing] was ridiculed. Microsoft, through Github, Google and Apple pushed for MIT/BSD licensed software as the open source standard. This allowed them to use open source components within their proprietary closed products. They managed to make thousands of free software developers work freely for them. And they even received praise because, sometimes, they would hire one of those developers (like it was a "favour" to the community while it is simply business-wise to hire smart people working on critical components of your infrastructure instead of letting them work for free). The whole Google Summer of Code, for which I was a mentor multiple years, is just a cheap way to get unpaid volunteers mentor their future free or cheap workforce.

Our freedoms were taken away by proprietary software which is mostly coded by ourselves. For free. We spent our free time developing, debugging, testing software before handing them to corporations that we rever, hoping to maybe get a job offer or a small sponsorship from them. Without Non-copyleft Open Source, there would be no proprietary MacOS, OSX nor Android. There would be no Facebook, no Amazon. We created all the components of Frankenstein’s creature and handed them to the evil professor.

This article is actually pretty great.

https://ploum.net/2023-06-19-more-rms.html

And for emphasis:

We created all the components of Frankenstein’s creature and handed them to the evil professor.