I had a journey

imAadesh@lemmy.ml to Linux@lemmy.ml – 1357 points –

Reading about FOSS philosophy, degoogling, becoming against corporations, and now a full-blown woke communist (like Linus Torvalds)

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Linux and open source in general completely blow apart capitalist arguments that profit motive is necessary for innovation and technological advancement. Open source ecosystem primarily run by volunteers has produces some of the most interesting and innovative technologies that we've seen. The reality is that people make interesting things because they're curious and they enjoy making stuff. Pretty much nobody makes anything interesting with profit being the primary motive.

Also without open source the capitalist tech sector would collapse

It wouldn't necessarily collapse (it wasn't exactly suffering before FOSS stuff "hit the shelves", so to speak) but the gatekeeping that comes with it would certainly cause a tremendous amount of stagnation

I work in software development. Almost all modern architecture would collapse without the open source ecosystem.

Isnt every important server run on linux?

Half the user-facing internet broke for a few hours when one guy withdrew a shitty one-liner piece of JavaScript (the whole leftpad thing) because someone somewhere added it as a dependency to a dependency to a dependency until it was pulled into an enormous frontend library. The internet relies more on random open source contributions than a lot of people are aware of.

I do too. To be clear, I did NOT mean that we could go without it today. What I meant was that if we didn't have it to start with, things would've likely still developed albeit much more slowly.

I'll also preface this by saying I definitely slightly misread everything before and so my reply was kinda crappy

What I meant was that if we didn't have it to start with, things would've likely still developed albeit much more slowly.

I dont think we will ever know, but Im not sure I agree. I dont know what the landscape would look like without relying on open source and patent theft. A lot of the stuff would probably not be financially viable.

The counter point would be - with only state protectionism in the form of IP the crony-capitalist sector would monopolise and dominate.

capitalist arguments that profit motive is necessary for innovation and technological advancement

I don't know who is arguing this because it's incredibly stupid. The greatest scientific minds of history, the mathematicians, the physicists, the inventors, were not capitalists, they're people with passion for their work.

If we move to a society that guarantees basic human needs and good education, we're only going to have more scientists and engineers that progress technology even faster.

And while we are at it... novelists, poets, painters, musicians, philosophers, ...

Tragically, however, it may spell the end of the sandwich artist.

Capitalists argue this because it gives them the appearance of a moral high ground.

Enshittification shows how untrue this - capitalism by its very nature will always devolve into worse and worse offerings because it's reliant on squeezing out ever more profit.

Capitalism will only ever puh out the bare minimum of technological advancement. And keeping people in indentured labour (aka employees) to the capitalist system so that they either have no time to come up with innovations themselves or they own the intellectual property of any indentured workers means that the overwhelming majority of innovation is monopolised by capitalism too. Which also contributes to the appearance of pushing advancement.

The innovation argument is shaky at best many of the corporations innovations are brought or copied really. Is a story that became pretty common in the latest decades one guy come with a good idea some other mofo takes it and profits with it.

That's why it's important to use hard copyleft licenses like the GPLv3 instead of merely open-source MIT or BSD licenses wherever possible when you publish software.

Indeed, the corps did a whole campaign lobbying for permissive licenses precisely so they could plunder open source work. Hard copyleft should be used for any serious project.

What's more is that corporate driven research is necessarily biased towards whatever is profitable which is often at odds with what's socially useful. For example, it's more profitable to research drugs that help maintain disease and can be sold over a long time than drugs that cure it. Profit motive here ends up being completely at odds with what's beneficial for people who get sick.

And of course, any research that doesn't have a clear path towards monetization isn't going to be pursued. This is precisely why pretty much all fundamental research comes out of the public sector.

This is true to some extent, but the best, most successful open source software is nowadays to a large extent made by for-profit businesses developing it for their own use but sharing it with the world.

There is a strong correlation between "is this kind of software mainly used by businesses vs. individuals" and "does this kind of software tend to be open source". Hardly anyone uses proprietary version control or web server software anymore. But (other extreme) in the area of video games, nearly all of them are still proprietary and probably will be for a long time. Software such as web browsers or office suites sits somewhere in between, both kinds exist there.

Biggest and most popular projects are attractive to companies as well as individuals for the same reasons. However, the original point was that companies are not needed for open source to exist or for innovation to happen.

I disagree somewhat.

A lot of high tech development comes with a greed motive, e.g. IPO, or getting bought out by a large company seeking to enter the space, e.g. Google buying Android, or Facebook buying Instagram and Oculus.

And conversely, a lot of open source software are copies of commercially successful products, albeit they only become widely adopted after the originals have entered the enshittified phase of their life.

Is there a Lemmy without Reddit? Is there a Mastodon without Twitter? Is there LibreOffice without Microsoft Office and decades of commercial word processors and spreadsheets before that? Or OpenOffice becoming enshittified for that matter? Is there qBittorrent without uTorrent enshittified? Is there postgreSQL without IBM's DB2?

The exception that I can see is social media and networked services that require active network and server resources, like Facebook YouTube, or even Dropbox and Evernote.

Okay, The WELL is still around and is arguably the granddaddy of all online services, and has avoided enshittification, but it isn't really open source.

The idea that these things wouldn't exist without commercial analogs is silly. You do realize that things like BBS boards and IRC existed long before commercial social media platforms right? In fact, we might've seen things like social media evolve in completely different directions if not for commercial platforms setting standards based on attracting clicks, and monetizing users.

all the for profit things we use are worse because they are for profit.

most of the time a site or service UI is made worse it's because AB testing found the worse UI wastes user's time and the metrics read that as engagement.

Exactly, most of the bloat on commercial sites isn't there for the benefit of the user, but rather in order to monetize them. It's ads, trackers, metrics, and all the other garbage that you don't actually want.

Linux and open source in general completely blow apart capitalist arguments that profit motive

Wrong! Linux and open source only shows that the profit motive is not the only motive. One should broaden the definition of profit to encompass value in all its forms. ie A person can gain value from the satisfaction of DIY as it can be self-empowering. One can gain emotional value from sharing. It also invokes the law of reciprocation - value exchange but without a $ sign. The Open source ecosystem is also heavily funded by business who relies on open source components. It is a capital investment.

If the profit motive is not the only motive that drives innovation, as you just agreed, then it isn’t necessary, logically. And not sure why you would then go on to expand the definition of profit into meaninglessness after agreeing there are other motives.

What? How the f do you transition from 'not only' to 'isn't necessary'? That is not logic - that is mental gymnastics with a triple back flip! Profit is the PRIMARY motivator! People wish to move away from discomfort more than anything else. Currency is the best way of alleviating discomfort!

  1. If X is a necessary motive for Y, then in the absence of X, Y cannot happen.
  2. Innovation can happen in the absence of a profit motive.
  3. Therefore, the profit motive is not necessary for innovation.

People can grow food in the absence of technology - but subsistence living is a hell of time!

nb. Marxists still have no answer for the calculation problem.

So I guess you agree that the profit motive isn’t necessary, because you moved to a completely unrelated point

The profit motive as used in capitalist sense strictly refers to financial gain. My whole point was that people do open source development for broader reasons than just base financial gain.

And while companies do some funding, the ecosystem can exist without them perfectly fine.

This is so wrong. It's not volunteers writing this code it is people employed by companies who are paid to write this code. You do know people have to eat.

Open source has existed long before companies started getting involved with it. Meanwhile, people having to eat has nothing to do with the argument being made which is that capitalism and profit motive are not required for creativity and technological progress.