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Comment by MrTonyD | Hacker News Reader

If you list the Fortune 50 you will find that they all get huge benefit from Open Source. I've worked with Wall Street Banks, Monsanto, NSA, Big Ag, Big Tobacco, Big Pharma, and other companies which are extracting incredible profits from our society - often at a great cost to our society. Does it make sense to give free help to those who harm?

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How would closed, proprietary software make the situation any better?

Free & Open Source software benefits everyone, which sadly includes bad actors and companies you (and maybe I!) don't like. But don't forget about the "everyone" part, which is the most important one!

Not always - I can't see FOSS like Hadoop or Spark benefitting anyone except large corporations and (maybe) universities.

Of course, not everything is useful in the same way. In any case, being useful to public universities alone is a big win.

But in my opinion, any software being FOSS is benefitial, even if you cannot deploy it yourself for your toy projects. If anything, you get to play with it or learn from its source. Maybe parts of it are useful to you for your own project. You cannot do this easily (if at all) with closed proprietary software.

Governments are large organizations that are supposed to represent and benefit everyone.

I think we get too caught up in binary thinking - why limit our choices to the current definition of Open Source. Isn't it possible to redefine open source using laws which could be implemented by the government? We could simply ask ourselves "What is good for our society and the world" and then work to define Open Source to fit that model. At any rate, I don't believe that we should be giving free software to companies which are helping to undermine the values of our society. On the other hand, I would like to see all software be free to everybody who is trying to help or trying to learn. We have to stop thinking in the current dichotomy.

> Free & Open Source software benefits everyone

Good software benefits everyone.

Whether it's open source or not is irrelevant.

I disagree, good software doesn't necessarily benefit everyone, and when it does, there are different degrees of benefit. I cannot benefit from software I can't look at or use.

It is definitely not irrelevant whether software is FOSS or not. It's the whole point of the GNU project, the FSF and of the Free and Open Source software movements. I'm not going to write a manifesto about the reasons here, but surely you must be aware a lot has been written about this in the last few decades that cannot be dismissed with a flippant "it's irrelevant".

You've worked for all those bad companies, making money while providing them services, and you want to pin the blame on Open Source Software?

I'm still having a hard time understanding what you're saying with regards to Oracle. Oracle does indeed contribute a lot to OSS (mostly due to their acquisition of Sun), but it is also one of those "rich companies" and owned by multi-billionaires who extract most value from OSS. So what exactly are you saying?

I'm not really trying to say a lot with respect to Oracle. Except perhaps that their interest in Open Source is really not philosophical - it is strictly profit driven. That has real implications to those who adopt Open Source or view it from a philosophical perspective.

The prevailing view that corporations benefit society the most simply by focusing on profits for shareholders is almost entirely philosophical (we cannot prove this, although many economists would probably like to).

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