Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I think you're on to something. We might see a further bifurcation of open source and free software.

Open source will mostly be corporate developers developing OSS on the payroll, where the corporations deem that releasing (some, not all!) software as OSS is better for the bottom line.

Individual developers may release stuff as OSS if they think building an OSS portfolio makes them more employable. Otherwise I think we'll see more, say, "source-available free for non-commercial use" style licenses, because people don't want to be schmucks that are taken advantage of.

Free software will be more clearly focused around trying to drive social change, together with traditional political activism approaches. E.g. right to repair legislation, forcing opening of network protocols so users can access services with their own software and devices, anti-DRM work etc. And as you say, this will clearly be focused on individual computation devices, or small scale servers that individuals can and have a reason to run. That some huge corporation runs or doesn't run free software on their server fleet is irrelevant.



Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: