You are allowed to charge money for open source.

Its the recipe that makes the food you're eating that would need to be publicly available and free to redistribute.

I agree.

Even more broadly, politically - copyleft in general is very unpopular with people, even amongst leftists and self-identified communists who you'd think would be all about that since y'know, good of the commons and the fact that communist states literally didn't give a fuck about copyright and the literature seeing it transparently as another government method of enforcing corporate power, especially apparent today when it comes to pharmaceuticals snd the fact that capitalism needs this intellectual property monopoly as an added incentive for R&D is an issue with capitalism's broken incentive structures, not cost in and of itself or science/technology.

Few people seem to understand the power of intellectual property, and various critics of corporate technology either omit mentioning or openly defend intellectual property, despite corporations having monopolies being the reason enshittification is such a phenomenon in the first place.

It seems like a lot of arguments about the role of technology in society instead boil down to more-stuffism vs. less-stuffism, usually based on emotionally charged preference for modern aesthetics or how much they believe the noble savage/appeal to nature fallacies.

When it comes to AI for instance, anyone reasonable can see that if it's open sourced for everyone to use then it's just a simple common good like a public library, use it (responsibly) and there's no issue.

Closed source private models in use by corporations suck up the environment (which belongs to everyone) and use the capital they steal from wage workers who actually produce the things they sell to give themselves leverage over said consumers/workers and other corporations, and this is not fair to the 99%.

Picture a world where AI is good enough to where it actually provides value to use it in a good chunk of jobs, and the best AI is corporate and closed source, and they just enshittified it and jacked up the prices, but if you want to get a job, you better know how to use it well. It would mean that corpo has an enormous power over your life now and you got little choice but to pony up, and they can raise prices whenever they want and snowball that capital into more and more.

I think the reason in this instance is that a lot of artists are bourgeoisie themselves and they understand that. They may be progressive as a personality trait/gimmick/style and talk about "empathy" but they understand the material reality of things.

They had the opportunities and the room for failure necessary to go into such a high risk field, and their ultimate form of commercial success is essentially using that privilege to create intellectual property they could make money from, hence the "concerns" over "style theft" and moralist fearmongering over vaguely defined concepts like "soulless", which is usually as arbitrary as "white" for racists (not implying equivalence here).

I find generally that a lot of the anti-AI viewpoints are simple self-serving veils of bourgeoisie who's capital is threatened, no different from the culture war fearmongering about vaping, a dying grasp of the tobacco companies of old threatened by shenzen gadget slop factories.

The material reality is that digital goods are effectively infinite, copying an image isn't a crime nevermind copying a style or some such, it is transparently absurd to imply otherwise.

Heh. It's a very software-centric view. Open source trivializes things that can run as software on readily available hardware, but if there's a linear relationship between cost of hardware/manufacture and results you aren't solving much of the gatekeeping. There's plenty of open source availability for a lot of stuff, from email to LLMs, that nobody self-hosts. The problem isn't the underlying reproduction rights.

I will say this, I don't care about what the author or anybody else "supports". If we should have learned something from the last decade or two is that "support" means jack shit.

I care about regulation. And just like I think education, transportation, medical patents, health care and other key resources should be fundamentally public by law, the same is true of other technologies.

but it the thinking behind it is very utopian

I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Things don’t have to be realistic to be aspirational. It’s a bigger problem when people give up because improvement isn’t realistic or deemed necessary by comparison to some other factor.

Saw it a lot here. People would be all “sure our healthcare isn’t great but at least we’re not like the U.S.” as the rightwingers bit by bit enshittified the entire system.

A utopia is what we should aim for. What’s the point of anything less?

"I only eat food that's free."

I fully support open source software, but it's not feasible under the current economic system to expect everyone to exclusively contribute to open source projects.

It's not a perfect metaphor.

What are your thoughts? Any counter-counter points to the author's response to most concerns regarding open source?

"I only eat food that's free."

I fully support open source software, but it's not feasible under the current economic system to expect everyone to exclusively contribute to open source projects.

Damn, why?

You are allowed to charge money for open source.

Its the recipe that makes the food you're eating that would need to be publicly available and free to redistribute.

You’re allowed, but as long as anyone else can do it for free, you can’t build a business model on selling it. At most you can sell something else (support, cloud compute, some solution that makes using it easier etc.).

Yep, you sure are. You also can’t stop someone from forking it and giving it away for free. See: Red Hat Enterprise Linux and AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, etc.

Money in open source is one of the biggest hurdles to it becoming the norm. IMHO, governments should fund more open source projects and fund them at higher levels. We have art grants because art improves society, and we should have an equal or higher amount of open source grants because open source improves society too.

Bitwarden and Cryptpad. Both open source and self hostable, yet I pay for both. paying for open source is possible.

Bitwarden and Cryptpad. Both open source and self hostable, yet I pay for both. paying for open source is possible.

I’m an open source developer who’s put thousands of hours of work into my open source projects.

• Amount of money I’ve made from writing and maintaining open source projects: $0
• Amount of money I’ve made from writing and maintaining closed source projects: idk exactly, but probably close to $1,000,000 (over ten years of working in big tech)

I get wanting to use open source software. I want to use open source software. I want to write open source software. I do write open source software. But please understand that I only do that because I enjoy it. I also need to pay the bills, and there’s not much money in writing open source software.

If you value an open source project, especially if it’s just a small development team that doesn’t sell anything, please donate to them.

Right now, I run an email service, https://port87.com/, and it is technically closed source. But it’s built on my open source projects, Svelte Material UI, Nymph.js, and Nephele. Probably about 70% of the code that makes up Port87 is open source, and if you use Port87, you’re helping me continue to develop those open source projects. So even if you don’t donate to open source projects, there are other ways to contribute. Support companies who support open source projects.

Technically, according to the GPLv3 you don’t need to make the source code publically available. If you sell software with binaries then their source code must be included with it. If you’re Red Hat you can also add an additional ToS to the website that states if you buy the software you can’t freely distribute the source code you download from the website or you will be sued to oblivion.

I don't mind paying for software.

I want free as in freedom, not free as in beer. Though a free beer might not be the worst thing in the world

You’re allowed, but as long as anyone else can do it for free, you can’t build a business model on selling it. At most you can sell something else (support, cloud compute, some solution that makes using it easier etc.).

I’m an open source developer who’s put thousands of hours of work into my open source projects.

• Amount of money I’ve made from writing and maintaining open source projects: $0
• Amount of money I’ve made from writing and maintaining closed source projects: idk exactly, but probably close to $1,000,000 (over ten years of working in big tech)

I get wanting to use open source software. I want to use open source software. I want to write open source software. I do write open source software. But please understand that I only do that because I enjoy it. I also need to pay the bills, and there’s not much money in writing open source software.

If you value an open source project, especially if it’s just a small development team that doesn’t sell anything, please donate to them.

Right now, I run an email service, https://port87.com/, and it is technically closed source. But it’s built on my open source projects, Svelte Material UI, Nymph.js, and Nephele. Probably about 70% of the code that makes up Port87 is open source, and if you use Port87, you’re helping me continue to develop those open source projects. So even if you don’t donate to open source projects, there are other ways to contribute. Support companies who support open source projects.

What are your thoughts? Any counter-counter points to the author's response to most concerns regarding open source?