@yogthos given that Open Source was intentionally capitalist, and Free Software has repeatedly failed to position itself as anti-capitalist, I'm not sure this is a bug in those system…

@yogthos well, it makes about as much sense as thinking that unlicensed copying is stealing…

i guess it would also mean that public goods are impossible.

@yogthos Having dealt with the corporate world, they actually are somewhat averse to free-as-in-beer software, paying Linux distros such as Red Hat and Ubnuntu for supported systems. Still, it's a valid point that many programmers donated free labor to the profit of others.

@yogthos

I mean that cuts both ways though. A huge amount of development in the Linux world is done by people working for corporations. And anyone can make use and build on that work.

So you could just as well argue that it's the opposite and one of the few avenues to allow work done in a capitalist system to actually benefit the public and thus could be one of the largest transfers of wealth in the opposite direction.

@yogthos I think a nonzero amount of this, is that talent dried up in the paid-for sector.

Solaris was huge in the early days of the web; but all the "cool kids" ran Linux at home. It got harder and harder to find sysadmins skilled with Solaris, whereas Linux experience was everywhere.

Because of this, the Linux admins were cheaper to hire.

Software licensing isn't the biggest IT budget item anymore, salary is.

@yogthos "the onus is not on one who posits the master/slave dichotomy, but on the one who argues there is a distinction between slaveness and blackness. how, when, and where did such a split occur? the woman at the gates of columbia university awaits an answer."

(frank b. wilderson iii)

@yogthos And FOSS enthusiasts *lose their minds* if you suggest maybe a noncommercial license is okay.

@yogthos also https://j3s.sh/thought/drones-run-linux-free-software-isnt-enough.html

@yogthos funny, everytime I go to any government website, I always see signs of Microshit... like this one
https://www.va.gov/homeless/events.asp

@yogthos I don’t know which corporations you’re talking about. There’s an awful lot of Windows Servers out there. Almost every company uses AD and Exchange. They have *nix servers for certain purposes, but not for everthing.

@yogthos 70-90% of WEB SERVERS run linux. so many corporate servers run windows but are behind intranets.

I bought a few HPE servers new, and guess what: they all had a windows boot manager entry.

It's also that linux is the choice of load balancer, even at MSFT: netcraft shows microsoft.com as running linux. They may in fact be running windows, or maybe freebsd (e.g. 4chan/HN).

Disclaimer: I work at microsoft but not windows or azure.

@yogthos Open Source is the playground of the rich.

https://sfba.social/@drahardja/110626599633506095

@yogthos

Using Free Software in commercial applications is a thing, but it's not a theft or transfer of assets, because software is zero marginal cost. The inverse of this argument was made by Microsoft in the 1990s arguing why government use of FLOSS was bad for the American economy.

I worked as a sys-admin for the government for over a decade and our use of Free Software saved the taxpayers enormous amounts of money.

@yogthos It honestly depends on the license. A number of idealistic people developed the "free as in speech" copyright concept in the 1960s and 1970s. Then there was the "copyleft" idea, and there isn't even one GPL, there are like five variants.

Meanwhile the BSD license exists, in a few clauses, is quick and easy to read, and just says "do whatever you want, just retain the author's name in the source and don't sue us when something breaks." Very capitalism-friendly.