This has been brewing for a very long time, and he's by no means the only person or even the best person making these points.
Open source dates back to the 1980s but really took flight in the 1990s with Linux, Linux distributions, and the mainstreaming of the Internet. Back then it was mostly a movement for software freedom and openness in contrast to closed source software like Windows and macOS. While it obviously didn't displace closed source software, it definitely played a huge role in preventing the Internet from being "embraced, extended, and extinguished" by Microsoft among others.
Without the open source movement we might be using the Microsoft Enterprise Internet with IIS as the only viable web server and NT as the only viable server OS. Imagine that hellscape. We also wouldn't have modern cloud, single board computers with reasonably open software, and loads of other things.
Yet the world has changed radically since the 1990s. Today the major form of closed software is cloud SaaS. SaaS usually runs on top of open source software but in terms of openness and freedom it's a profoundly more closed model than old-school closed source. SaaS is the ultimate in closed. You get to understand and control nothing, not even your own data in most cases.
Against this model open source software is offering zero resistance. In fact it's helping facilitate this ultimate lock-down of compute by providing free labor to SaaS companies. That's its primary role now.
I've seen this situation developing for going on fifteen years, but it seems like it's difficult to get the open source community to even consider the issue. The mentality is completely stuck in the 1990s.
> Against this model open source software is offering zero resistance.
Pushover licenses like MIT offer zero resistance to it, but that's just a reason to use better licenses like AGPLv3 instead, not to abandon open source entirely.
The structural economy we're creating is one where privacy, autonomy, and software freedom are only for nerds. Everyone else uses services and surrenders all privacy and usually control of their own data.
That's because making software usable is extremely difficult and expensive. If software must be free but services are paid, all the funding goes to make services usable and not software. This results in an ecosystem where only highly technical people can own their own compute.
Is that what we want?
You have to think in a whole-systems way not in terms of single isolated issues. We're making free bricks to build a prison and reasoning that this is fine because bricks should be free and people should be free to build prisons with them.
It might come down to the question of what open source is about. If it's about creating a software ecosystem for nerds to have freedom, I'd argue that it's been successful in that endeavor. If there is any goal of freedom for the rest of humanity, it has been a failure.
Are we a guild that cares only for ourselves and our profession?
Open source dates back to the 1980s but really took flight in the 1990s with Linux, Linux distributions, and the mainstreaming of the Internet. Back then it was mostly a movement for software freedom and openness in contrast to closed source software like Windows and macOS. While it obviously didn't displace closed source software, it definitely played a huge role in preventing the Internet from being "embraced, extended, and extinguished" by Microsoft among others.
Without the open source movement we might be using the Microsoft Enterprise Internet with IIS as the only viable web server and NT as the only viable server OS. Imagine that hellscape. We also wouldn't have modern cloud, single board computers with reasonably open software, and loads of other things.
Yet the world has changed radically since the 1990s. Today the major form of closed software is cloud SaaS. SaaS usually runs on top of open source software but in terms of openness and freedom it's a profoundly more closed model than old-school closed source. SaaS is the ultimate in closed. You get to understand and control nothing, not even your own data in most cases.
Against this model open source software is offering zero resistance. In fact it's helping facilitate this ultimate lock-down of compute by providing free labor to SaaS companies. That's its primary role now.
I've seen this situation developing for going on fifteen years, but it seems like it's difficult to get the open source community to even consider the issue. The mentality is completely stuck in the 1990s.