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Comment by Vampiero | Hacker News Reader

It's not that FOSS fails, it's that unethical corporations worth billions of dollars go unpunished for abusing it (because the law exists to protect them).

FOSS is fundamentally anarchy (the good kind that shows that human beings are not all pieces of shit). Anarchy can't exist in a capitalist society because it shows people that they don't HAVE to live like slaves. They can live as members of tribes, as evolution intended for us.

So as always the organism is originally healthy and successful until the parasite that is capitalism spreads and suffocates it for its own reproduction.

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> They can live as members of tribes, as evolution intended for us.

Please, quit the cheap sophistry.

Evolution doesn't intend or plan anything for us, and you will have a very hard time convincing people that we would be better off living in a tribal/clan society than whatever we have today.

Evolution intends in the sense that it follows an abstract fitness function. I didn't think I'd have to explain that here. I know how to implement evolution algorithmically.

And no matter what you think about tribal societies, we still live in tribes every day. You and your close friends are a tribe. Your family is a tribe. Forums and now social media communities are tribes. HackerNews is a tribe. Open source projects are tribes, indeed they fork over ideological differences all the time. Political parties are tribes, indeed they split and antagonize each other all the time. Nationalities are tribes. Companies are tribes. Social classes are tribes. Subcultures and "identities" are tribes.

We are not built to handle global contexts, so we collapse them into tribal ones. We do that for everything. There's always an in-group and an out-group and a hierarchy if we're talking about a cluster of people.

A tribe assumes a strict hierarchy and mobility only though power and violence.

I can agree with you about the issue of societies failing to organize themselves past a certain scale, but this is not a problem with "Capitalism".

Fair, I used a very loose definition then.

My issue with capitalism is fundamentally split in three parts: that profit is the driving force behind action; that short term effects are prioritized over long term ones; and that global markets operate at a scale that does not allow individuals to have any real agency in their environment due to the points outlined in the previous comment.

It just fosters the kind of behavior that goes against my idealized version of what society should be according to my understanding of the conditions in which we thrive.

i.e. it turns people into selfish venal assholes and it destroys our chances at a better future with each passing day

Perhaps I'm also using a wrong definition of anarchy then. But it's honestly the closest label I know for this concept. A less centralized society.

But profit _is_ the driving force of human action. Doing anything voluntarily is by definition profitable, otherwise you wouldn't do it.

This smears out the definition of profit beyond usefulness.

I can pretty much guarantee hunter-gatherers hunt to not starve, children play for sheer joy, and nobody's thinking of profit.

There are better psychological/anthropological terms to apply to human drives than calling them "profitable". That's weird economist thinking, trying to bring everything under their purview.

Worse, it’s an attempt to get us to agree that humans only do things for profit, in order to advance an ideology and make our thought more malleable when an author turns around and starts writing about public policy and ethics applied to things that actually are about profit.

At least that’s what is going on when the schools of “thought” this kind of stuff comes from attempt it. This particular poster might not be. But usually it’s a cheap rhetorical trick, coming from folks who present themselves as simply following logic. Gross.

"My issue with capitalism is fundamentally split in three parts", then you go on to describe things that are not exclusive to Capitalism AT ALL.

Again, please quit the cheap sophistry.

> the kind of behavior that goes against my idealized version of what society should be

Are you listening to yourself? You sound like a college sophomore who is sure has a solution to all of humanity's problems...

> turns people into selfish venal assholes

... and can only assign blame on others.

I can bet you nourish some well-developed fantasies about what you would do if you were given enough power over any "less centralized society", and they are a lot more about imposing your view over everyone than ensuring your small community can prosper and be happy.

> I can bet you nourish some well-developed fantasies about what you would do if you were given enough power over any "less centralized society", and they are a lot more about imposing your view over everyone than ensuring your small community can prosper and be happy.

Damn, you sound very angry for someone who is having a calm discussion on the internet. More importantly, you seem to be assuming a lot of stuff about me but we've never met. And you have no clue about how much of it is right.

So please just, kindly, shut up. You look like an ass.

"then you go on to describe things that are not exclusive to Capitalism AT ALL."

Why are they required to be exclusive? If I said that uncontrolled train crossings lead to more train crashes, would you retort that train crashes aren't exclusive to uncontrolled crossings?

> Why are they required to be exclusive?

They are not required to be exclusive, but it would require that we can establish cause and effect.

If you tell me that your "issue with Capitalism" is that "we have people driven by profit/greed and wealth is unevenly distributed", but a quick look through history tells you we can always find "people driven by personal gain and wealth inequality", then what does "Capitalism" has to do with it?

"A quick look through history" is what I'd expect from someone who skims over a book and completely misses the point because they think they know it all.

Indeed I gave you three constraints but you're only looking at one independently.

When else in history were markets global? Why am I arguing with someone who can't even read?

> When else in history were markets global?

Right, so the fundamental issue is that we are living in a globalized world, which reduces any room for nuance and imposes an uniform and homogenized culture, top-down policy-making, and a totalitarian approach by the ruling class.

Thing is, this would still be our reality regardless of the economic system. Globalism would be a problem even if the Soviet Union had won the cold war.

We would still be subjected to uniform culture, top-down policy-making and totalitarianism.

The people would still be acting by their own personal interests.

People would still favor short term benefits over long term prosperity.

So, again: what does Capitalism has to do with it?

What is unethical about the actions of the corporations who use the software? They did so in accordance with the license.

The fact that Open Source is about sharing, and they don't share. They only take. It doesn't have to be written in legalese somewhere, it's the spirit of what makes Open Source what it is.

And I'd argue that doing something for profit is also against the spirit of open source, but that's a different argument. The thing is that open source is for the most part an effort from hackers, hobbyists and professionals who want to foster a positive ecosystem for people like themselves. To make their passion better and simpler and more fun and more accessible and more interesting and safer and more efficient and more general... So that more people might fall in love with it.

It's not to push a product or to convince people that they need it. And that sentiment comes from the fact that open source is the reason many people got into programming in the first place! Thanks to all the free resources out there. So they want to give back to the community. That's how I feel about it at least.

But then again, when huge corpos contribute to open source it's great because they have a lot of inertia. So I think that's a good thing, it's a positive feedback loop. My previous point is not black and white, even though I am obviously bitter about a lot of things.

A regular user who just downloads a build and runs it on their system (i.e. the most common use case, because it's the one that takes the least effort) also doesn't share anything. Why is it worse if a company does the exact same thing?

Are you purposefully playing dumb or what? If you don't see how the answer is obvious, I'm afraid nothing I say is going to make you change your mind.

Okay, thank you for confirming you have no answer.

Licenses are about legal agreements, not about ethics. Legality doesn’t imply ethicality (nor vice versa). If this was about legality, people would say so.

Then why is there not a file outlining the ethical expectations, alongside the legal agreement? The companies using the products have no way of reading the developers' minds regarding expectations of reciprocity.

The idea really isn't so far fetched, lots of projects today have non-legal outlines of expectations of community members. For a single example, codes of conduct are very common.

I don’t think this is a discussion about what the project owners specifically expect ethically (users would be free to disagree), but about what we collectively find to be ethical or unethical in this space. If there is disagreement about the ethicality, then one party having it written down doesn’t change anything about the disagreement. And there is nothing that binds one party to submit to the other party’s notion of ethicality, unless you turn it into a legal matter by making it part of the license.

Again, this thread is about whether we as a society, or as the software development community at large, consider the behavior ethical or not. It is not about the specific open source developer imposing specific rules.

Which megacorporation abused Gitea here? And how?

I'm sympathetic to some of what you're saying, and I believe the original hacker ethos spurred some of the original FS impulses, but...

FOSS licenses don't, and can't, embody anarchism (or any socialism) because they make no distinction between humans and capital-holding entities, lumping them all under the term "users".

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