[api]

The Commons Clause might be clunky, but its an attempt to address the changes that have happened in the world since the late 1990s.

For those who don't know, the FOSS revolution came about in the late 1990s and as a popular movement was largely fueled by concern over the extent to which Microsoft was dominating the PC and (then) PC-based server industries. MS was moving to embrace-extend-extinguish the web at the time too. The Free part of FOSS was critical to competing with Microsoft in the late 1990s, since MS's Achilles heel in the market was its costly and cumbersome licensing schemes.

Times have changed quite a bit since then. Today's behemoths are not based in software but in services with network effects. The bad behavior of those behemoths revolves more around exploitation of network effects to lock people into services (not software), and of course the mass surveillance and manipulation of public discourse that becomes possible when everyone is working in a closed silo.

FOSS is utterly worthless as a strategy to resist network effect oligopolies and surveillance capitalism. In fact it might be worse than worthless, since many of these surveillance honeypots run on open source software. If you write and release FOSS today you're likely giving free labor to people who will use your tools to spy on you and manipulate you.

The difficulty we face now is finding a viable alternative to surveillance capitalism as a way to fund software. The Commons Clause is an experiment in that direction. It may not work, but experiments are welcome.

[boomboomsubban]

This version of events is so incredibly wrong.

Free software started in the eighties over concerns about how proprietary software was being used. Embrace-extend-exstinquish was Microsoft's attack on a growing free software market, it had nothing to do with the web.

The "free" in "free software" never referred to the price, and is not business strategy. It's used like in "free speech," and it refers to the free modification and redistribution of the code.

Free software has a huge presence across computing. Honeypots use free software because everyone uses free software, free software enables bad actors like building roads enables drunk drivers.

Looking at your profile, either this is an elaborate troll or I am genuinely amazed in how long you've managed to misunderstand "free software." You use the GPL for your business.

[TimJYoung]

Actually, he's 100% correct. The way that open source is used by very large tech companies today is way, way worse than anything MS ever did. MS never got a stranglehold on the network in the way that companies like Google have been able to do.

Back in the 90s, if you wanted to run Novell, UNIX, or Linux instead of WinNT Server, there was nobody stopping you and there were a lot of options. The same with Office suites: there were actual competitors to MS Office through most of the 90s. There is much less competition in many areas of commercial software today, and one of the primary reasons is that open source software has become a vehicle that large software companies use to drive competitors out of markets and solidify their positions in complementary markets. Yes, consumers benefit in the short term, but it allows these companies to build moats that make it very hard, or impossible, for future startup competitors to overcome. We all want to point our fingers at Oracle, MS, IBM, and say that they are the issue, but when every major player in the industry does the same thing, it starts to become more and more obvious that the problem may not be with the individual companies involved.

Also, public roads are a bad metaphor for software: there isn't a market for public roads, and software can always be innovated upon (as an aside, it drives me nuts when people declare something "solved", especially when the reason for doing so is ideological or political).

[boomboomsubban]

>Actually, he's 100% correct.

No. You agree with their end point. How they got there is not factual.

I don't understand your second paragraph. Why should I care about proprietary software competition? And how are they building these free software moats that stop other people?

>Also, public roads are a bad metaphor for software: there isn't a market for public roads, and software can always be innovated upon

My use was very narrow, the ability for bad actors to use infrastructure doesn't put the infrastructure at fault. That said, roads have a market and allow innovation.

[TimJYoung]

"Why should I care about proprietary software competition?"

Because without it we all pay much higher prices than we normally would, and we get sub-par quality/innovation. Unless you're somehow intimating that proprietary software can be completely eliminated, but I don't think that's the case. I don't think that such views are grounded in reality.

"And how are they building these free software moats that stop other people?"

I think this has been demonstrated pretty clearly over the last 10-15 years: they use open source to direct the industry in ways that are beneficial to them, regardless of whether they are good for everyone else. And, it is often the case that there are serious issues for anyone that would want to compete against them in a specific area of software because they're now competing against "free". It forces companies to diversify into areas where they have little expertise, just to be able to compete. So, instead of a company being a developer tools company, they're now something else that also happens to give away developer tools. In the end, it favors large corporations over smaller enterprises in an industry that has traditionally been one with very low startup costs and lots of opportunity.

[boomboomsubban]

>Because without it we all pay much higher prices than we normally would, and we get sub-par quality/innovation. Unless you're somehow intimating that proprietary software can be completely eliminated, but I don't think that's the case. I don't think that such views are grounded in reality.

There has been no shortage of quality and innovative free software. I see no reason that restrictions on a users rights would encourage innovation or a quality product.

Reading the rest of your post, you also seem to view free software as primarily about price. The picture you paint sounds more like what Internet Explorer did to browsers than any free software I can think of.

> So, instead of a company being a developer tools company, they're now something else that also happens to give away developer tools

Or you can take the existing developer tools and improve and extend them. Having access to a large amount of your competitors resources allows you to more easily compete on an even field.

[icebraining]

I don't think you're really in disagreement. api didn't actually say FOSS started in the 90s, but that the "FOSS revolution" (which I read as the widespread use of FOSS licenses) did. And that statement still works if you read Free as "in speech".

[boomboomsubban]

I could be wrong, buy they seem to talk about how the "free" part was important to combat Microsoft's costly licence, and how that isn't an issue anymore.

[kazagistar]

The problem solved by FOSS licenses is nonfree software that users cannot fully control and redistribute. The adjusted solution for the cloud era is not Commons Clause, which removes freedoms from users, it's AGPL. But no one wants to hear that because they just see FOSS as a way to make a quick buck on the backs of others.