A harsh truth by @Sandra for all the free software friends out there: "I’m not sure our lives would be that much better if the stick that is beating the people came in a tar.gz with a makefile." Politics is important.
https://idiomdrottning.org/foss-dystopia
@alex @Sandra I guess the #FSF reacted, but late, to "Tivoization" (does anyone remember!) and network effects. The most effective control I have heard of is the #4opens criteria, that can flag silos (AGPL can't).
Free cloud and services were the killers. All the AGPL'd 4opens code in the world can't obviate the non-volunteer-time expenses of having to run a non-siloed service (self-hosting isn't mainstream).
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If you zoom out, maybe cloning existing tech was the mistake. Why did #GNU need to clone anything beyond cc, ld and libc? Instead of creating e.g. an Eiffel clone in Sather, they could have doubled down on, say, 1 Lisp (GCL, Emacs Lisp, Guile, whatever) and got to building applications on top.
In this smartphone and webapp age, we still have lots of F/OSS clones of commercial services.
Maybe we need(ed) many more well-thought-out projects like #GNUNet / #GNUTaler.
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