Jason Antic

1/ My unpopular take: Free and Open Source Software culture often goes way past the point of absurdity in its idealism. It often winds up doing to software what file sharing did to music: It devalues the work and the creators behind it, and it breeds an entitlement culture.

2/ It'd be one thing if we had basic income or lived in a Star Trek future. But what FOSS winds up being in the current climate is yet another way for the rich to get richer (free labor!) and a hindrance to making an honest living for creators.

3/ I'm not saying it's all bad. It's really nice to have all this stuff for free. And to have transparency on certain key plumbing of the world's code. In the case of DeOldify, it's great free advertising and on the whole I've probably benefited way more than lost.

4/ But the appetite for everything being free- including the labor- is weirdly unquestioned and ubiquitous. And I suspect (but can't prove) that that sort of culture drives inequality more than solves it.

5/ It also drives evil business models. You've heard the saying- "If you're not paying for it, then you're the product." Facebook and Cambridge Analytica come to mind. I'm not the only one saying this of course. Jaron Lanier has been talking about this for years.

Open source solves many more problems than it creates. I remember the world when it was windows-only with shareware that worked for 14 days and then costed 29.90. That was not the way. Software needs a lot of software to be developed and both need to be open and free to be >