What even does "Open Source" mean at this point?

Posted Jul 23, 2024 21:11 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: What even does "Open Source" mean at this point? by atnot
Parent article: Zuckerberg: Open Source AI Is the Path Forward

> Articles like this make me wonder what FOSS even is. Not as an abbreviation, but as a movement.

There never was any such “FOSS movement”. Free software camp and open source camp were always two distinct factions, even before Open Source have decided to “invent a way to market free software to corporations”. But the two movements are closely related.

> The core of FOSS, to me, has always been a rebellion against people telling us our way of working shouldn't work:

Yes. That's the common part. Even when free software and open source movements believe in different things they both follow them faithfully.

> Humans are competitive, there would be no innovation without strict intellectual property, progress can only be driven by rare geniuses with vast power and wealth, the market is the only way to distribute resources and responsibilities, etc.

Note that this rant, while not uncommon and short is already self-contradictionary. Intellectual property is, by definition, a government-granted monopoly thus if market is the only way to distribute resources and responsibilities then “intellectual property” shouldn't exist for the only justification for it's existence is perceived failure of pure market to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.

It's internally inconsistent position to promote the market as infallible and simultaneously, claim that one of the primary tools that is supposed to fix the market failure is Ok, too.

> This has all of the language of FOSS, it uses the arguments we use. But instead we have a project that's run by one of the fiercly anticompetitive monopolists, under their top down control, which only they can train and only they can even really run at scale, released merely to use the community as a cudgel against their competitors.

Well, if people may subvert the regulatory tool that is supposed to promote the Progress and use it stop said progress, instead, then why wouldn't they apply the same trick to other things?

Practically any principle, pushed to it's logical conclusion, starts becoming self-defeating (thing about how FSF, in it's attempt to push for more freedom, started promoting locked-down devices, e.g.)

Corporations just push principles beyond the point where they become self-defeating consciously and knowingly.