Sorry but this is such a bad take.
Linux is free to install, free to use and most importantly free to learn
What is the alternative? How many people who are now in great jobs would have been unable to teach themselves the skills they need if IIS or another proprietary technology had won the server market instead.
Something had to fill the space, would you rather it was a technology that created barriers for people with the fewest advantages in life?
(Also as others have said, a lot of OSS development is funded by companies. Linux in particular being a great example)
So, don't mistake this as me telling you you're totally wrong, because you definitely do have a point and it gets under my skin too (that's why I believe licenses like AGPL and, dare I say, SSPL should be used), but many of these companies actively contribute back to the open source software they're using.
and are hardly the only companies using FOSS; everyone from non profits to miliary systems use it. this meme doesn't really work when you take the whole picture into account.
Regardless of how you slice it, foss devs don't get fairly compensated for their work.
I have two diverging responses to this - one, if they're credited for their commits, in the purview of FOSS projects, they're compensated as much as they expect; two - that said, I would love to see FOSS projects get more love and financial support from the community - which is why watching the GODOT project has been exciting. I'm not much of a dev, and not in a position to contribute to what they're doing in code, but sending them some coffee money has been worthwhile.
Here's an article all about how 'open source' coopted and recuperated 'free software' movement to the benefit of corps.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230703044529/https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-meme-hustler
The enduring emptiness of our technology debates has one main cause, and his name is Tim O’Reilly. The founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, a seemingly omnipotent publisher of technology books and a tireless organizer of trendy conferences, O’Reilly is one of the most influential thinkers in Silicon Valley. Entire fields of thought—from computing to management theory to public administration—have already surrendered to his buzzwordophilia, but O’Reilly keeps pressing on. Over the past fifteen years, he has given us such gems of analytical precision as “open source,” “Web 2.0,” “government as a platform,” and “architecture of participation.” O’Reilly doesn’t coin all of his favorite expressions, but he promotes them with religious zeal and enviable perseverance. While Washington prides itself on Frank Luntz, the Republican strategist who rebranded “global warming” as “climate change” and turned “estate tax” into “death tax,” Silicon Valley has found its own Frank Luntz in Tim O’Reilly.
This is why I don't agree with the GPL. It's perfect in every way, except for the allowance to utilize the licensed work or derivatives thereof for monetary gain. Fuck that shit. You got it for free, you give it away for free.
It only takes one paying customer to take the published FOSS code from the commercial software and re-distribute it for everyone to benefit from the commercial modifications made to it. That's the point, a commercial use of the software can not make the source proprietary.
This is what Redhat recently found out when they tried to hide their RHEL source behind a paywall. Attempting to tie the hands of their customers with an additional license agreement forbidding distribution of the source is a violation of the GPL.
Doesn't matter. You got it free, you give it away for free. You're clearly missing the whole point of the OP.
Wouldn't that basically kill all projects.
Part of the reason why I know Linux and open source software is because i can use it at my job and make money. If that isn't allowed then i am basically forced to use Windows along with the rest of the world.
Not only that but a huge portion of linux code is contributes by people getting paid by these large companies.
Linux would be reduced to some weird hobby project no one knows about or really cares about and we would be all stuck on Windows or some other proprietary OS.
Linux definitely wouldn't be stranded without corporate input. A.) A large portion of Linux has been written by volunteers, not employees of a corporation giving back to the project, and B.) The majority of the time these corporate contributions are things like drivers for their own closed source hardware to work with Linux. I've only ever contributed to open source voluntarily, with the exception of three pull requests that were written so that, surprise surprise, our corporate shit could work with the open source shit. I'm not saying there wouldn't be disruptions if we axed all that code, just that it wouldn't be the project-ending amount you suggested.
Derivative work CAN be sold or used for monetary gain. Its just you have to give the source code too and anyone receiving it can share too. I see GPLv3 perfect
Nobody listened to Negativland enough when it mattered. They helped develop Creative Commons licenses and were pretty much the spearhead for the "no attribution but you can't use it for commercial purposes" license. I'm not sure if that one even exists anymore, but it seems like Creative Commons is also pretty dead-in-the-water these days. They understood the need to define ownership and be able to say "No, corporations can't just use it freely."
Isn't that why FOSS survives as a model and is encouraged so much, though, so there is something to enclose and charge bullshit fees for once you fork it?
It's particularly popular for startups to use to bootstrap their tech company and build cred shortly before they reach the "we have to actually turn a profit" phase, at which point the bean counters try to squeeze every bit for a nickel. Once they have marketshare, they say, "we are helping the competition by releasing this!" and abandon the things they actively maintain.
There is also a direct benefit for open sourcing: you can get other people to debug and improve your software for free. They go the enclosure direction once they want to squeeze their customers for more money, e.g. closing the source code and charging $x per use of the software to their service clients.
Once they're a monopoly, companies can swing back to the open source direction because they have no competitors to worry about and can just get free dev work and good will out of it.
My best guess about their purchase is that they wanted to do a bunch of copyright infringement of code hosted on GitHub to train their language models. Are you thinking there's also a motivation to get free dev work another way, too?
Closed licenses are arguably better for certain left projects, particularly self-contained ones. You can use bourgeois legal nonsense to stop corpos from using your work.
I've seen anti-war people write open source code that ended up getting used to help fly war drones.
Closed licenses are arguably better for certain left projects
What about licenses that restrict the software from being used in a certain way? I think I've heard of at least one open-source license that disallows the software from being used in the military industry.
A license that has restrictions like that doesn't meet the criteria to call itself "open source."
You're free to use whatever license you want for software you write.
The term "open source" has an actual definition, just like the term "free software" does. Both definitions say you can't restrict who can use the software or what they can use it for.
Free/libre software is not the same as open source, but I agree that it is difficult to enforce prohibitions with source available.
No, I mean that item number 6 of the Open Source Definition specifically states you cannot restrict the use of the software for any particular field or endeavor. That includes use in military applications.
If you have restrictions like that in your license, it's not open source.
I like the idea a lot but my understanding is that they're unenforceable. I'd go with one of those if I thought they worked, though.
Could be! I think even having a source available closed license is probably difficult to enforce for the same reason: corporate law is mostly about who has a pile of cash to burn and that's not me lol
Don't worry, it's like like anybody uses 10+ year old OS versions which have been EOL'd for over 5 years. Definitely not a concern since Linux is FOSS and you don't need costly contracts to keep up to date with the most basic of security updates.
https://www.shodan.io/search?query=linux+2.6.32-696.el6.x86_64
A lot of the clients I do work for in the MSP I work in, this is half truth. Yes, a sizeable portion of servers are running a Linux based hypervisor, to serve windows VM's.
Vmware? I've seen hyper-v used, but it's rare imo. And the reason for it being rare is the performance, at least that's how I see it. Vmware is just way more efficient. Not sure about Azure Arc HCI though, I recently had an old colleague tell me that they are switching to that.
That would have required a lot more of my labor than I was willing to give to it.
There are so many contradictions here I don't even know where to start. Is this one of those debate bait memes?
Software is like a flame. Sharing it by lighting another fire doesn't take away from the original flame.
Windows just keeps on winning
As for Linux, the word 'operating' in operating system is doing some REALLY heavy lifting here
