I'm going to replicate one of my recent replies ([4] which unsurprisingly got me downvoted, but I regret nothing) here because it seems relevant. Specifically, Marak seems to grok the exploitatitive nature of the current setup (chosen in part by themselves) but lacks real negotiation leverage because they have no organization behind them (besides people cheering them on in the comments). With this in mind, I think it's okay for me to get the big scary words out here again. :)

The problem (okay, "a" problem) here is that it is indeed OSS, and not FOSS, that is being used.

It might be worth re-visiting "Post-Open Source" by Melody Horn (boringcactus) [1] on this. You might want to copy/paste that link instead of clicking. :) It has been discussed here before [2] and (unsurprisingly, IMHO) gotten quite a bit of blow-back from the HN crowd.

The General Intellect Unit podcast recently had an episode on the piece [3] and I think they made the point clearer (well... also they roll the piece out to 1h 40min) by more openly posing it in a class struggle context. (Side note: please don't post replies attacking this as communist. The podcast has "marxists" in the name, you wouldn't be insulting them, and I'm merely engaging with their content, so if you're gonna try to attack their/my positions, please do the same and don't just throw scary words.)

The bottom-line is that Open Source Software has nothing to do with the freedoms of the developers. It is...

* a corporate entrenchment scheme: enlarging your hiring pool by establishing your in-house solution as the industry standard, giving you full hiring pipelines and stronger negotiation position against current and prospective employees.

* a capitalist commons: by tending to one industry standard, the companies (not their devs, who will still have full work days) save on duplication of effort.

At the same time FOSS (which does focus on the freedoms of the devs to read, modify, learn...) kind of misses the point by being...

* too obvious a trap, and thus ineffective. No sane capitalist company will go anywhere near AGPL code (and we just had an example on HN of someone trying. it wasn't pretty)

* ultimately not even clear on how this will make anyone's lives materially better, even if it were effective. It's not gonna raise your salary, nor give you more paid vacation, health insurance. As a dev, you'll still be producing surplus value (okay, in a hopefully less alienated way) that will then not be paid to you (that's the definition of profit) so from this perspective the "F" in FOSS doesn't really bring much to the table.

The GIU podcast concludes that yeah, working in IT was nice for a while, because it posed some fundamental problems to capital and as a dev you were in a much better negotiation position. However, those times are over. Capital has found a way to make IT labour just as fungible as manual labor, at least to the extent that we should expect those "rock star" benefits to dwindle soon. Up to us to realize that and take action.

Again: relaying analysis here. Not sure I buy all of it. But even if, please keep your replies centered on the content, not the vocabulary it's presented with.

[1]: https://www.boringcactus.com/2020/08/13/post-open-source.htm...

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24397552

[3]: http://generalintellectunit.net/e/066-post-open-source/

[4]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24977616