this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
188 points (97.0% liked)
Asklemmy
43755 readers
1251 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Here are a few nice ones, I can't really pick:
“Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work together for the benefit of all.” - John Maynard Keynes
(You can also apply this one to proprietary software vs. Free software (don't say open source in my presence))
“The tyrants are only great because we are on our knees.” - Étienne de La Boétie
“Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.” - Rosa Luxemburg
Will I regret asking why?
Free software tells you "do whatever you want, you're free" but open source completely misses the point: it means you can read the code, but not necessarily recompile, modify and redistribute. Plus the term was invented for the confusion that would come from it. For example, a lot of AI models like LLM's claim they are "open-source", which basically means nothing: it's far easier to say that than to claim it's a free model, because that would imply freedoms to modify, reuse, redistribute the training data, weight etc. (no AI model allows that for now, and there will probably never be one that does).
Not OP, but I personally heavily dislike the confusion surrounding those terms - that is IMHO entirely self-inflicted. "Open-source" referring to FOSS as a whole, and what open-source sounds like actually being called "source available", is needlessly confusing.
I usually write FOSS since I like acronyms, but when I speak I'd say open-source. I don't see how open-source is any more confusing than free software, considering most people would immediately think "free as in beer".
If only the term "free software" itself wasn't just as confusing lol
In a similar vein "the greatest weapon in the hand of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed" .. Steve Biko