[groovybits]

I am generally a fan of Linux and FOSS on my personal gear. However, I'm still not sure where this article is coming from, or who it addresses.

The author seems to be mixing the use of FOSS in the professional world with the use of FOSS in their personal world.

In a professional environment, there is no room for "modeling your values". It sounds harsh, but that is the way it is. You use what works. Yes, Linux OSs do some things better than Windows OSs, and vice versa.

[dreamcompiler]

I think part of what the author is addressing is the ignorance exhibited in your comment. I don't mean to be rude; it's easy not to see the big picture when you're busy just making a living.

To me, Searls' point is that an overwhelming pressure to monetize everything has corrupted the health of the open source community. This is not just holier-than-thou moralizing; there will be real financial consequences if the creators of open source products don't start eating a lot more of their own dogfood.

[skyfaller]

Exactly. It's about solidarity, I think. If you make FOSS and you want people to use it, you need to make an effort to use other FOSS projects. Otherwise, don't be surprised if the community is gone someday, you don't get help developing and promoting your FOSS project, and everyone abandons your software for some better-funded proprietary cloud startup that gets bought out by Facebook.

[groovybits]

> To me, Searls' point is that an overwhelming pressure to monetize everything has corrupted the health of the open source community.

I agree, and perhaps my parent comment itself was harsh and looking at this from the wrong point of view.

I think I perceived this article written in a more romanticized way than necessary. If there is a concrete, financial detriment to FOSS developers, then I would advise to make that point upfront.

If the problem is "There is too much monetization within the open source community", then many of the points in this article sound like symptoms or variants of the problem, rather than isolated problems themselves.

[lotyrin]

Are you sure he's the ignorant one?

As a young adult who had a roof over their head by default, I was 100% FOSS and installed Gentoo on anything I owned that could even limp its way along that path (and discarded devices that couldn't), I refused to use proprietary messaging tools and social networks, and I accepted that I had limited myself to the social and economic opportunities that these things allowed me, as a sort of altruistic techno-hippie.

Now I am on LinkedIn, Slack, on a Mac and an iPhone, backing up to a proprietary NAS, operating most things in Amazon's or Microsoft's clouds using managed services that lock me and my clients in to their ecosystems, running default OS on most of everything. The technology choices in my day job are made by whoever has the power to make them, for whatever reasons those people may have -- and "freedom" or even "sustainability" for that matter are pretty low on their list of priorities. The technology decision in my home life come down to "what do I have time and energy to put up with?" and "is there a risk that I'll have to fuss with this in order to make sure it's operational when my wife wants to use it, late at night on some weekend when I'd rather be relaxing?".

Maybe when and if I return to a survival-by-default - when the mortgage is paid and health risks are (well enough) accounted for I'll be able to "model my values", but probably not before then. Even that might require a divorce, in adult life one's motivations and their consequences are not solely one's own to keep.

Aside from that, given the experience I've had with FOSS, at this point I doubt even if I were 100% financially independent and early retired if I'd go back to participating except to go to low effort to upstream fixes to my own problems (here's a patch/pull request, if you don't like how it's indented or documented, that's your problem to solve, not mine). The incentives are all awful with so many volunteers trying to create software for users or use cases that are fantasies, bike shed arguments, corporate interests trying to get their way and take advantage of free labor, corporate leech organizations saving millions in license fees for proprietary software and contributing nothing but sassy bug reports, the folks who are militant and awful to each other about inclusion/exclusion topics, well-meaning but ignorant people who refuse to understand their behaviors and words cause others grief, projects with lack of vision, leaders who are reluctant to lead.

Further aside still, there's a reason normal human beings don't use free software or decentralized whatever and it's because the developers of those things don't have the resources or vision to build software for normal human beings: people who won't edit a config file, won't author content in Markdown, don't want to read a man page of flags to understand the permissions in their chat channel, don't want to have to have a tower PC whirring and heating up a corner somewhere in order to solve what seem to them like simple problems, etc. etc. etc.

[dreamcompiler]

I don't disagree. You point out that there are no incentives for FOSS developers to cater to the muggles. Fine, so how do we fix that? I really want to know. I have to believe it's possible.

[Drdrdrq]

I do believe it is possible, but it is a compromise. Let go of one of the freedoms so that other freedoms (like "right to repair") have a chance. In other words: Commons Clause.

[yarrel]

Compromise sounds nice but when the "compromise" is a one-sided capitulation it's not really compromise.

[Drdrdrq]

Do read the license, it's really short and to the point. At least for me I don't think I'm giving up much (as a user) by using Commons Clause software. I just can't sell the app or services without obtaining permission from authors. Which seems fair to me - if I earn money, they should get a piece of the value.

[mavrc]

I'm also a huge FOSS nerd and it makes my personal AND professional life a lot easier, and I totally agree with you.

If the problem is that the ruthless winner-take-all nature of professional environments is destroying open source, then you need to fix both problems, not one of them. Trying to fix only one won't help.