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0 pointseeZah7Ux5y ago0 comments

> We are not obligated to play along every time a company says “open source.”

This is the point.

People easily confuse "open source" with "free software" and "community driven".

A lot of corporate-driven open source greenwashed the dark patterns of closed source: centralized development, user lock-in, walled gardens, poor backward compatibility, forced software and hardware upgrades.

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Abishek_Muthian5y ago

>"community driven"

This concern has been raised time again with every major Google open-source project e.g. Android, Chromium, Golang etc. and that concerns have helped improve certain aspects of the project.

But, I wonder whether a huge corporate like Google can build such large scale projects without such criticism, if the the project needs to be successful they to gain from it after-all they are investing their employees and other resources in it. And them being invested in it, is a major reason for adoption by other parties and resulting in a successful open-source project.

More over, such large projects have helped overall SW ecosystem and even startups economically. I for one would say, without such large open-source projects I wouldn't have even been able to build products from a village in India and compete with products from valley.

All I'm saying is, them being open-source at least helps us raise concerns and make them take actions; being a complete walled garden and just asking to 'trust us' is much worse.

eeZah7UxOP5y ago

> But, I wonder whether a huge corporate like Google can build such large scale projects without such criticism

Yes: they could at least develop large projects in a foundation with many other companies

> And them being invested in it, is a major reason for adoption by other parties and resulting in a successful open-source project.

...and the main source of pain when the projects are "pivoted" or just dropped due to a single company business needs, as it happened many times.

> such large projects have helped overall SW ecosystem and even startups economically.

They hugely harmed competing projects and competing companies including Mozilla, many phone OSes, many grassroots programming languages.

It's well known that google developed various projects to kill competitors or buy startups cheaply and drop the project afterwards.

There isn't an infinite pool of open source developers - far from it!

Any large corporation that drains the pool to create a competitor to already existing FLOSS projects is actively harming the ecosystem.

> being a complete walled garden and just asking to 'trust us' is much worse.

Closed source can be less harmful that fake-open source. A lot of people actively avoid closed source and fall for the latter.

Abishek_Muthian5y ago

>They hugely harmed competing projects and competing companies including Mozilla, many phone OSes, many grassroots programming languages.

IMO, we're the reason it failed. We as a consumer didn't buy FirefoxOS phone over Android, iOS. We haven't adopted Firefox browser enough for it to become have the major market share. The same argument can levelled against any proprietary product VS open-source product.

That proves my point, being 'completely community driven' open-source project isn't the only criteria for the success of a project.

eeZah7UxOP5y ago

Funny how I get bunches of downvotes on this account but never on other accounts. Time to switch.

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