Article goes over the embrace, extend, and extinguish strategy that Microsoft and Google have used against open document and chat formats. There is speculation that Meta could do something similar by joining the Fediverse.
It’s weird that this strategy is well documented (like the phrase literally originates from the 2001 antitrust suit against M$), but techbros and hackernewses still think that open standards can be trusted in the hands of megacorps.
I thought open source software usually have a license that state any modifications to the source code must be open source as well?
:jefferson jacksonsorryigetthesecrackersmixedup: “Now let them enforce it.”
EDIT: reading the wiki link to “embrace extend extinguish”, it seems like Microsoft and other such companies basically just hid the additional developments they were making until it was too late.
The linked article also makes it sound like they would purposely gum up the implementation of the open source standard which would slow down its development as to iron out the issues with the big players’ implementations. Which dovetails, slow down the open source standards development, then release your own with the bells and whistles that the open source standard couldn’t get around to implementing because it was too busy cleaning up your messes.
Depends on the specific license.
BSD license is just about being credited somewhere, not really about keeping stuff open.
GPL is about keeping stuff open, but has workaround in companies deploying stuff as software-as-service and closing off stuff that way, because technically they’re not providing end users with the actual executable.
There’s other types too, but it’s hard to get an easy comprehensive overview of this stuff.
that’s why google has an internal memo to never use AGPL code.
A lot of the tech people who are the types to aspire to work at a FAANG think AGPL is stupid because companies never want to use it so it’s pointless to license code that way if you actually want it to be used. I think that’s the mentality for people who keep code portfolios to get hired, instead of the type of open-source contributer who is passionate about FOSS and works as a bus driver or something.
Possibly, I’ve worked on a few totally distributed ones but I guess the userbase was small enough and they’re basically immune to commercialization. I worry about federated versions for different reasons, just the usability and accessibility. I’ve worked on Freenet for nearly 15 years now, which someone slapped a social network called Sone on top of it years and years ago. There’s also forum functionality in Freenet Messaging System and an older one that emulates the newsgroups/NNTP experience very faithfully.
I think the jump to smartphones made this kind of network less feasible, basically everyone using it just has a web server running on localhost and the daemon interacts with the P2P network underlying the data exchange. Identities are cryptographic and not tied to an instance as such, so the forums are truly global & decentralized. You have to build small world networks amongst yourselves though, anti-DDOS/spam is based on a web of trust and client-side filtering. In my opinion the entire Web needed to work this way from the beginning, but early networking technology really pushed people to the client-server model we ended up with.
The beehaw admins are trying to kill it for the sake of fighting the “tankies”
