Do you think opensource + Fediverse will develop into some kind of political force/movement in the next years? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by blue_berry@lemmy.world to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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I thought about this already for a while and with Lemmy and Mastodon the opensource community has a place to really try itself out and coordinate. Then even things like open-source planning-systems (like at Amazon) and AIs are possible.

At least in Germany there is currently no really political movement that could be described as left-libertarian at least seriously. Maybe the Fediverse could be the root for something like that.

Or will the Fediverse will become more like the new landscape of the internet, which encompasses everything and in which every party will need to move and have a certain stance to somehow?

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[-] fubo@lemmy.world 40 points 1 year ago

Free Software started as a political movement about the rights of computer users to learn, share, and improve the systems we use. Open Source was the business-friendly depoliticized version.

[-] blue_berry@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Right but I wouldn't say its seen as such in the general discourse of society (at least not yet). Maybe that could change more in the next years?

[-] fubo@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

In the tech biz, this has already happened. You're living in the aftermath of it.

The Open Source movement created a strong shared infrastructure for the modern tech industry, all derived from Free Software components like Linux, gcc, and Python.

Linux caught on. It took over huge swaths of the tech world in the late '90s and early 2000s; displacing not only Windows servers but also SGI, Solaris, and most of the rest of proprietary Unix.

Companies learned how to build proprietary systems on top of a common open-source core; contributing certain elements back to that core while developing other components privately.

This is what almost all modern datacenters are built out of. Most servers providing most well-known Internet services are running Linux.

In consumer devices, it's what Android, Chromebook, and Steam Deck are built out of. The modern Mac is a cousin: the Darwin core inherits from BSD. Your wifi router probably runs a Linux or BSD kernel.

You've seen the jokes about "the year of Linux on the desktop". Thing is, Linux on the desktop has been an easily available option for decades. The joke is that most people don't choose that option; they choose proprietary systems because that's slightly easier at first ... and then they normalize enduring all sorts of bullshit from those systems' proprietors. (I mean, seriously! Windows XP didn't run ads on your desktop, but today's Windows does. Why? Because they know you'll put up with it.)