this post was submitted on 31 Dec 2023
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people are always going to be floating ways to save capitalism in the face of communities privileging freedom over greed.
this completely misses the point of free software, and fails to solve the problems Mr. Perens identifies with Open Source. He claims it fails to serve the "common person" (end users) and then proposes a solution that serves... only devs.
All these problems are already solved by free software. the rebranding of "open source" was a compromise on the principles of free software to make the movement palatable to profit-seekers. In the end, it predictably failed to improve anything. The solution isn't to reinvent the wheel, it's to stop making the wheel square because the square lobby insists they'll only use it if it's square. The solution is copyleft, and free software being used more than it's defanged cousin.
That's a feature, not a bug. On one hand, if people knew about free software they wouldn't be as good consumers. On the other hand, internals should be opaque to users; just as devs don't want to have to know how the logic gates in the CPU are routing their code to write code, end users shouldn't have to worry about the politics of the communities that developed their code.