Just to clarify, this post is not meant to glorify startups! Startups also have CEO and it’s same as first line in the meme.
This post is meant to start a discussion and to highlight the effects big tech having on FOSS.
It’s aginst big tech not aginst FOSS!
I have been thinking about this recently. In a course I took on US economic history we studied the Silicon Valley during the first half of the 20th century. There was a major boom in technological innovation, and a major reason why was the open sharing of ideas among the local tinkerers. The invention of television as it exists was not a product of Farnsworth’s singular genius but of an entire community of inventors freely collaborating out of personal interest. Very different from Silicon Valley today except for one element: the FOSS movement. FOSS is where the experimenting and innovation is happening because the ideas can’t be locked down as they are in the proprietary area where innovation is stifled. It makes sense for corporations to pour money into FOSS because FOSS makes possible what is to them impossible. Also, investments like that are probably a small fraction of what an R&D department working from scratch could cost.
It is amusing though that since the FOSS people are often under no obligations they don’t have to do what big companies want them to do.
Company: You made this?
Open Source Dev: Yes
Company: …
Company: I made this.
he forgot to commit and push license.txt
Well, not having any license means that you still retain full copyright for it. (In the US)
Pushes Apache License
Lucy, essplain
🫤
Maybe some examples would be in order.
Counterexamples might include Firefox, Blender, and Lemmy.
Maybe some examples would be in order.
I agree on that. I’m looking into writting about FOSS funding with examples and proposing solutions for this issue. Just that takes a long time and a meme is easier.
firefox is not that clear, they get funding by google for putting google as default search engine thus helping google. We have a problem with FOSS funding
It is the only way they can get as much funding so I would say that it’s more than in the clear, firefox is the only escape from google’s monopoly on web (chrominum)
While that’s true I think this meme is far from a fair characterization of that arrangement, given how Mozilla differs so starkly from Google on the direction of the open web. Case in point, their refusal to deprecate manifest v2 for browser extensions.
Does that mean that Big tech cant control it or that it does?
That it does
