this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
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The problem is capitalism, not which kernel everything runs. And the reason FOSS isn't universal is also capitalism.
It's more complicated to make money producing FOSS, capitalism or not. Lots of reasonable developers would still choose closed source even without capitalism.
Making money is a capitalist adjacent idea. The premise that we need money to figure out how to allocate resources is foolish
I'm still waiting for someone to propose in detail an alternative.
Yeah, that's the problem. We don't have the requisite technology to build a Star Trek utopia. If only we did…
Well, if everything ran Linux...
Money not necessarily, we need to calculate costs (and minimize it) in distributed fashion.
And the only reasonably successful way we've found so far for doing so is...money.
There's a bunch of ways to allocate resources but ideas like money have an advantage of allowing people to choose how they live.
A good example would be that not every person would be satisfied living in an apartment in the city. Some prefer living more rural for any number of reasons. Some want to be inside playing video games and others outside biking on a mountain. Some want to be able to do both. Giving them the ability to choose small apartment in the city or bigger house in the woods is important for happiness.
The biggest issue is the discrepancy of resource allocation between individuals not the method that allocation is done on paper.
Dirty secret is that FOSS is a product of capitalism and nothing else.
A bunch of nerds being allowed to own and control the means of production created personal computers while the central planners in both communist countries and big companies both thought it was a dumb idea. A bunch of nerds being allowed to own and control the means of production meant that someone could decide to release their product free with source code. Private ownership of intellectual property such as source code allowed people to release their privately owned code under a license specifying that changes must be made public.
From there, the proof in the pudding is in the eating. How many FOSS projects do you use, and who made them?
Perfect! Now if we had a way to end it...