At the same time we have companies like pine, who seem to support FOSS through relatively open hardware, but which to me seem increasingly more about a way to make a profit of the FOSS trend by using volunteer work without any investment from their end. I question if they are actually interested in their devices actually being functional for regular use. See also this article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32330043
Finally we have distributions like Manjaro who seem more interested in growing their slice of the pie at the cost of other distributions instead of growing the whole Linux ecosystem. https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/hxpj87/change_in_man...
>> It seems the large corporations like FANGs are largely pushing OSS to use volunteer work to make software a commodity
Why would you expect them to do anything different? Companies are driven by profit, not some sense of morality. OSS licenses allow them, even encourage them, to trade volunteer (aka free) labor in return for source code availability.
>> which to me seem increasingly more about a way to make a profit of the FOSS trend by using volunteer work without any investment from their end.
There's often serious investment from their end, but that's irrelevant. They absolutely want to leverage FOSS to make a profit. And that's explicitly allowed by OSS licenses.
To put it another way, your disillusionment is because of a "bug" on your end, not on theirs. They are behaving exactly as OSS is designed. Your _expectation_ of their behavior is inaccurate, and so does not match reality. Not surpisingly this makes you sad :(
> >> It seems the large corporations like FANGs are largely pushing OSS to use volunteer work to make software a commodity
> Why would you expect them to do anything different? Companies are driven by profit, not some sense of morality. OSS licenses allow them, even encourage them, to trade volunteer (aka free) labor in return for source code availability.
Apart from the fact that companies and corporations can act ethically despite driven by profits, I did not say I'm desillusioned with the corporations, but the FOSS community. Essentially it is us as users&developers who let this happen.
> >> which to me seem increasingly more about a way to make a profit of the FOSS trend by using volunteer work without any investment from their end.
> There's often serious investment from their end, but that's irrelevant. They absolutely want to leverage FOSS to make a profit. And that's explicitly allowed by OSS licenses.
Again I don't say that companies shouldn't make a profit, but when OSS started to become more mainstream many (including myself) believed that it would be a way to break the stranglehold of large monopolistic corporations on the software world and create an ecosystem of relatively small software companies that would customise OSS software for specific needs on a relatively even playing field. Instead what happened is that OSS might have accelerated the concentration of the software world, by making small jobs essentially unviable.
Regarding investment, I expect that FANGs still very much come out on top, just imagine what they had to pay in licencing cost for their datacentres if no oss operating systems existed. Also much of these investments are towards use cases with very little benefit for normal users.
> To put it another way, your disillusionment is because of a "bug" on your end, not on theirs. They are behaving exactly as OSS is designed. Your _expectation_ of their behavior is inaccurate, and so does not match reality. Not surpisingly this makes you sad :(
I think you misunderstand me, my disillusionment is with the idea what FOSS could have achieved (and people imagined) but didn't. I sometimes wonder if FOSS has made the world a better place, like many hoped it would. You might not care about it but I do.
Also, everyone wants to see "their struggle" as being "good for humanity" - but it's demonstrably false when it comes to FOSS software. All it's done has enabled our current tech monopolies to be built on the backs of free labor, enabled negative social effects, and led to our current digital panopticon. It's also skewed the labor market terribly because of network effects - there are comments on here where people left developing medical software to go sling javascript. Basically that's enabled by cheap, ubiquitous computing enabled by FOSS software.
Also, FOSS eases not only our current dystopian digital panopticon (adtech, tracking, biometric feature tracing) and it's meant to look like "fun work I do for free!" but what it really is, is Palantir getting an infinite supply of labor and code for nothing (and all other tech monopolists). Basically the entire FOSS movement plays into it and doesn't seem to recognize it. "Good for humanity"? The opposite.
In the long and the short, FOSS is not only not "good for humanity" - it's objectively bad for humanity, imo.