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Comment by netcan | Hacker News Reader

I think it's worth recalling why that optimism, at least in part.

Information wanted to be free, for the first decade of the web's existence. Projects like Linux, Wikipedia, the www itself. These open, free ways of doing things were proving a case for optimism.

They were so much faster & better than corporate alternatives that you couldn't help but expecting that open projects had the competitive advantage.

Meanwhile, online culture was very different. There was room for morons and blowhards, touts, spammers and occasional shill... but those people didn't run the show.

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Of course we were optimistic when the internet was young:

• All the world's people will effortlessly be able to communicate and collaborate together? Surely this will bring about an age of open-mindedness and harmony!

• The bulk of the world's information will go digital, and become accessible to anyone? Surely this will relegate ignorance and superstition to problems of the past!

I've never considered myself an optimist, but if someone back then had predicted the internet we have today, I would have written them off as a hopeless cynic.

This is important, the reproducibility of information made the potential for endless bounty seem so prominent at first. I also don't think the antithesis is discussed here; copyright law, the DMCA, and all the ways in which IP helped make tech the dystopia it has become.

> They were so much faster & better than corporate alternatives that you couldn't help but expecting that open projects had the competitive advantage.

That was the first mistake.

Free products don't have a "competitive advantage". They destroy market segments. "Free" is the area denial tactical nuke[0] of business. "Free" is the singularity of business models - as price approaches 0, math starts to break out, and the local fabric of the market unravels. "Free" turns competition into a race for growth.

Being "open source" is optional here. Which is why it's not F/OSS that won on the general market, "free with ads" did. F/OSS is mostly used as a weapon to deny market segments to competitors, forcing them to either leave or play the same "free"/growth game. This is used both offensively, to break into existing market segments, as well as defensively, to "pull the ladder behind you".

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salted_bomb

This doesn’t make sense to me. People will always pay when there is value to them. Or at least perceived value. Libraries are free but people still pay for books and subscribe to audible.

But nobody is lending books for money, like people used to lend videotapes. Thar particular type of business has been salted by libraries.

People will pay when it gets them something they value, but the moment someone offers that for free, completion on price of that thing becomes impossible. Instead, competition moves to ancillary aspects of a thing, such as e.g. delivery, or integrations, or lifestyle marketing.

Case in point: neither Amazon nor Audible compete with libraries on just letting you read books - they compete on delivery (ease of access).

I don't know if you meant it (apologies if not) - but libraries, and CC, and FOSS software, and Wikipedia are all good things in humanity. We should aim for more such good things.

"Salted" or not -- it's up to supporters of free markets/capitalism to figure their shit out.

I very much agree that the things you mention are all good things. Condemning them in general is not what I meant, though I can see how my comments could be read that way.

No, my point is more specific: it's that those things play with the free market about as well as NaN plays with floating point math. That by itself isn't bad; the market isn't the best answer to everything. However, in case of F/OSS, I wish people acknowledged that, by destroying the ability to just sell software on a free market (including software components), it's in big part responsible for today's SaaS-ified software reality.

> ... by destroying the ability to just sell software on a free market (including software components), it's in big part responsible for today's SaaS-ified software reality.

Could you please elaborate on this or point me to a source where that exact mechanism is explained? Because this runs somewhat opposite to my experiences where FOSS was more of a desperate way to escape proprietary software, particularly OS like IBM with which you would have to wait for fixes from "the market" for days instead of being able to fix it yourself, like this article explains (in vastly superior English to mine): https://cacm.acm.org/practice/free-and-open-source-software-...

I think most people think of themselves as not the problem but some guy will post some Show HN and it will be all middlebrow dismissals. All those people are the people involved here. Lots of guys who “yeah, my GitHub is only empty because I’m a professional and don’t make it public” blah blah. But you know they spend all their time aligning stakeholders and have never written a line of code but have opinions.

well, we're not in the best economy to just "make stuff for fun and share free information". One thing we forget is that such a position is a privilege in and of itself. Either for the young who have guardians to provide for them, the well off who don't need to worry about next months' rent, or the obsessive who give everything in their life as their own.

My GitHub is very rusty, but I'm delaying Open source plans until I have a fully time job. It's just not worth it for me otherwise to try and be this FOSS advocate while I can't keep things stable in my own backyard.

The ability to have hobbies is available to pretty much everyone. Sure, "privilege" buys you more time for hobbies but everyone has some time to do with as they choose. Most use it to wath TV or other similar passive consumption.

What if your GitHub is empty because you philosophically don't believe in the F/OSS movement?

What if it's empty because you don't want to feed even more code into the deep learning grinder?

Hell, what if it's empty simply because you're selfish and you don't like sharing?

If you still have a Github account in 2024 then you are obviously part of the problem.

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