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Comment by didgetmaster | Hacker News Reader

>Nonfree software is controlled by its developers, which puts them in a position of power over the users...

The implication is that FOSS developers have no control over their users. Sure, you COULD fork your favorite tool's repository and spend many hours trying to figure out how to make it do 'what you want instead of what the developers wanted'; but very few people are really willing and/or able to do that.

Nearly all software (open source or proprietary) except trivial programs, are controlled by the developers who build it and maintain it. They are given that power by the mere fact that most programs are sufficiently complex that few others can and will assume control instead. If someone does (and that someone isn't you) then the new boss is same as the old boss (to quote a line from a song by The Who).

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Sure, you COULD fork your favorite tool's repository ... to make it do 'what you want ...’ few people are really willing and/or able to do that.

Free software makes it possible for me (my business, etc) to pay someone other than the original developer to make the software do what I want. No proprietary license gets me that.

In the context of personal use software by an individual it may not make sense to pay, but in the context of groups of individuals or a business it becomes viable.

While it'd take many hours to figure out how to make some random FOSS code to do what I want if what I want is anything particularly interesting, finding out where to comment out the code that eg phones home, or makes annoying noises, and then sharing that patch with everybody else is much easier and more realistic. Sure, it doesn't entirely remove the power of the developers and particularly the people who control the official releases page, but it feels like a real, meaningful check on their power. It becomes even more meaningful if you're not just some rando but maybe the "user" in question is an org who can actually devote resources to maintain changes to some FOSS code, saving you from having to enter into some sort of partnership with the developer.

> The implication is that FOSS developers have no control over their users. Sure, you COULD fork your favorite tool's repository and spend many hours trying to figure out how to make it do 'what you want instead of what the developers wanted'; but very few people are really willing and/or able to do that.

Few people are willing to do it because the kinds of restrictions/annoyances imposed by free and open source software are much less severe than that of nonfree software. Sure, there might be the odd feature or two missing in a FOSS project that you would like but that the author blocks from being added to the project for XYZ reasons. I'll concede that those kind of decisions give the maintainer of a FOSS project some semblence of "power". But it's not like proprietary software, where trackers, atrocious adverts and news links (looking at you, Microsoft start menu) and other arbitrary restrictions are a continuous reality. If those things were in a FOSS project, you can bet that _someone_ would make a fork with that stuff removed.

The actual entities that control people through software are very rarely developers, but institutions and corporations. And one of the things that software freedom really does allow is for those developers to jump ship without abandoning the software when those entities become abusive or change the deal.

And this does happen! The response to Oracle's anti-F/OSS, user-hostile moves when they bought Sun is a powerful example.

Free software also means that you can pay developers to take the software in a different direction if you can't do so yourself.

There are lots of user-serving forks in the world. Cinnamon and MATE really did serve Gnome 2 users who were pissed off and disappointed about what they saw in GNOME 3. LEDE really did resurrect OpenWrt by giving people a way to push the project forward when development had stagnated. yt-dlp saved a bunch of youtube-dl users who would have been left in the lurch.

Of course creating and maintaining a fork requires non-trivial resources. But forks do happen and their possibility absolutely makes a difference to end users, lots of the time.

I didn't mean to imply that there are not numerous examples of open source projects that have been successfully forked to provide meaningful value in a whole new direction. However, the article seemed to be saying that open source magically takes control away from the developers and gives it to the end users. I just think that is the exception instead of the norm.

Hmm, I may have misread you. I'm still glad to have emphasized the points I did, because I think they're important for the broader discussion. Sorry for any misunderstanding!

Plenty of companies including every one I’ve worked for maintain their own forks of open-source software, often while waiting for maintainers to apply patches.

I’ve also contributed patches upstream to open source software plenty of times and the majority of time the maintainers have been willing to accept it.

Tons of Linux distros maintain their own set of patches on top of loads of software to make it work better with the rest of their system.

Sure, there are examples where it’s infeasible to change things but in practice it’s a lot more likely than with proprietary software.

With Guix making custom changes it's trivial.

Are you saying it makes it easy to maintain patches parallel to the existing software? The difficulty keeping forks up to date (losing maintenance benefits of upstream work) and "re-basing"(?) the custom changes in a clear and clean way is my biggest stumbling block to "just fork it".

Would also be appreciated to see an example.

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