>>23041linux is the flagship FOSS project and has for a long time been increasingly exploited by tech companies who not only get to profit of the labor of FOSS development but also force themselves into positions of influence within projects like linux so that they can secure positions of entrenched authority. as much as people meme about this for the wrong reasons, systemd is a good example of this: it's become increasingly difficult for linux distributions to work without systemd because so much of the linux desktop has become reliant on it, and this is a project that is explicitly controlled by vested corporate interests. I don't like systemd very much personally, but I understand the value it can provide, but the problem is that there are corporate entities who get involved in FOSS projects and astroturf it by "giving" them "free" development with the intent of sliding projects towards being dependent on their technologies.
it doesn't matter what software is licensed under, corporations will find a way to subvert these licenses and retain control over things they're using and have a financial incentive to have control over. it's otherwise pretty risky to take advantage of all this free labor but be at the whims of unpaid hobbyist developers just making cool shit for themselves. this is fundamentally a problem with the free software movement, especially under rms's leadership, is that the threat of corporate subversion has never been within its scope. as much as leftists want to cope about how FOSS is communism-esque, it's more like history repeating itself with the enclosure of the commons.
there is not, and never has been, any significantly radical politics behind the free software movement, and the blame for this can be placed squarely on rms's leadership, who is at best kind of a weird libertarian or Green Party guy with some demsoc sympathies. this is why, as I said, I don't have any ill-will towards him personally. it's not like he's a lolbert or a nazi or something like a lot of tech people, but he's always been kind of misguided and naive about certain things because he has the autistic tunnel vision. which like, I get it, but it doesn't change the fact that the free software movement is failing to succeed at its own aims. it continues to work on its projects like linux, GCC, and the coreutils, and their labor is taken advantage of by
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