I agree with all your points except this one. Considering the implications of the tools you create is a huge deal.
I mean, we literally just had a blockbuster movie this summer that was ostensibly heavily about the regret Oppenheimer felt over how his invention would be used, how he didn’t foresee how damaging the mass casualties would be on his conscience. The back-half of the movie is about how his stance became anti-nuclear weapons after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
You raise really great points, but you’re being dismissive of a huge personal issue for a lot of people: will they actually feel comfortable with the way the tool they’ve designed is being used? If they’re anything like J. Robert Oppenheimer, they may struggle with their feelings on it if they don’t do enough consideration of it beforehand. I think rumination on things like this is very important, and definitely not fear, uncertainty, and death.
Also, frankly, it seems short sighted attributing cheaper modern software only to FOSS and not to the explosion in sizes of tech companies (economics of scale) as well as documented examples of tech companies colluding to keep engineer pay low and globalization allowing companies to pawn off labor to third-world countries where they can pay people less (Google doesn’t even use foreign labor, their janitors and bus drivers are contract labor, because that’s cheaper than having them directly on staff). Or has dumping US workers and replacing them with cheaper workers overseas not been happening steadily since 1988?
The fact is, when those supports crumble… so will everything else.
Just look at COVID and how during it there was an explosion of States hiring COBOL programmers because they were trying to update their fucking Unemployment systems that were coded in COBOL. You might say “life comes at you fast.”
This is a conversation that needs to be happening, and not just around whether you are okay with the government using your work to kill people.
Are you also okay with giant corporations that have enough money to develop their own tools use your volunteer labor to profit wildly and harm the public? (Also, private companies make tools to kill people as well. Just look at Palmer Luckey’s Anduril, which produces military-grade drones and such. Or hell, any company that makes Tasers.)
Because the story of Free Open Source Software is also the story of the biggest accidental transfer of wealth from the working class to the capital class in world history.
Amazon Web Services wouldn’t exist without Linux. Sure, they run their own flavor of Linux, but they’ve put in a bunch of their own proprietary bullshit and AWS is a fucking juggernaut. A big reason they’re able to do this is because they use off-the-shelf Linux as a starting base and work from there. It cuts out a massive amount of labor to just lean on the labor of volunteers.
Now, not all companies are like this, I’ll admit. Valve pays people to improve Steam in Linux and has wildly benefited the WINe team.
However, the vast majority of private companies lean on the labor of FOSS volunteers to make money without investing the same labor themselves.
It’s honestly kind of a fucking travesty.
EDIT: Also, it’s a bit ironic that RMS always claimed that his plans with GNU/Linux was to free people from proprietary gardens, yet FOSS has actually been one of the biggest creators of such gardens. I always had a soft spot for RMS, but he’s wrong as much as he is right.
I agree with all your points except this one. Considering the implications of the tools you create is a huge deal.
I mean, we literally just had a blockbuster movie this summer that was ostensibly heavily about the regret Oppenheimer felt over how his invention would be used, how he didn’t foresee how damaging the mass casualties would be on his conscience. The back-half of the movie is about how his stance became anti-nuclear weapons after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
You raise really great points, but you’re being dismissive of a huge personal issue for a lot of people: will they actually feel comfortable with the way the tool they’ve designed is being used? If they’re anything like J. Robert Oppenheimer, they may struggle with their feelings on it if they don’t do enough consideration of it beforehand. I think rumination on things like this is very important, and definitely not fear, uncertainty, and death.
Also, frankly, it seems short sighted attributing cheaper modern software only to FOSS and not to the explosion in sizes of tech companies (economics of scale) as well as documented examples of tech companies colluding to keep engineer pay low and globalization allowing companies to pawn off labor to third-world countries where they can pay people less (Google doesn’t even use foreign labor, their janitors and bus drivers are contract labor, because that’s cheaper than having them directly on staff). Or has dumping US workers and replacing them with cheaper workers overseas not been happening steadily since 1988?