I've come to the realization that Microsoft's strategy of Embrace Extend Extinguish is literally a 1-for-1 textbook implementation of the process of recuperation, specifically it's a recuperation of the radical FOSS counterculture. I'm suspecting that some Microsoft executive read Marxist theory as a guide on how to do a better capitalism.
capital subsumes cultural movements by embracing that culture, extending it in ways that dilute the radical roots, and thereby extinguishes all but the aesthetic elements of the original movement. the claim is then that microsoft successfully performed this, basically explicitly, to radical free software culture, which was politically fixated on an idealistic libertarian view of intellectual property that was perfectly willing to bake its own exploitation and demise into its very tenets.
I'd argue that the original philosophy of FOSS is moreso anarchist than libertarian (though certainly idealistic).
The original movement made an important mistake that was only fixed with GPLv3 that allowed it's exploitation, but most of the radical free/libre software people recognize it was a mistake. The more libertarian brained people that are fine with being exploited have mostly divested from the GNU/FSF folk.
Fair enough, I didn't want to call them anarchists while criticizing them, to avoid being sectarian.
I see. To be clear, I was criticizing their original mistake in the method (which of course the movement admits), not at all the goal (being in efrect the decommodization of software) which in 100% in favour of.
Cool, I agree wholeheartedly, intellectual property rights in general kill people on a daily basis, and technocapital literally can't function without having a general repository of freeuse software.
The original idea of capitalist recuperation is that capitalism would take a radical movement or idea, twists them in a way to remove their radical character while preserving the aesthetics, and then commodify them into a profitable aesthetic.
The analogy I'm drawing is that that the EEE movement by Microsoft towards free/libre software (and generally communal software movements) is essentially a practical, step by step implementation of this phenomenon. They first embraced free/libre software so as to make the community more vulnerable to diversion, then by extending it Microsoft creates products which allow it to have an effective impact on the movement, and then slowly this impact is used to defuse and commodify the movement, leading to extinction.
Could you tell me when did microsoft do this? Recently or that's how they became Microsoft?
As memory serves me, supposedly Bill Gates wrote an article for a college computer magazine where he pointed out that you could make a successful computer company by taking all the code being shared between universities and repackaging it as a product to be sold. A year latter, he dropped out of college.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
maybe i don't understand what i just read about AGPL, but it seems like a relevant improvement on GPL for the current internet?
AGPL and GPLv3 have anti-tivoization clauses which make them almost impossible to commodify and exploit.
Isn't the whole purpose of GPLv3/AGPL to make sure the software is free in perpetuity?
Like if Microsoft wanted to use some open source library licensed under MIT or something, then all they'd need to do is provide a link to the original source and they could keep all their changes private. With GPLv3 though, they'd have to publish all their modifications to the code as well.
Isn’t the whole purpose of GPLv3/AGPL to make sure the software is free in perpetuity?
Yes, it is. But the AGPL goes one step further in making networked resources available as source code as well. With GPLv3 there is still the option that you could put the GPLv3 software on a network-accessible host (a server). You're not distributing the software, and therefore GPLv3 can remain exploited by companies/whoever without having to share the changes to the source code.
AGPL says if you host it as a web service, you have to offer the source code to the users. This is considered so toxic by businesses that you'll see pages like this https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl-policy
Like if Microsoft wanted to use some open source library licensed under MIT or something, then all they’d need to do is provide a link to the original source and they could keep all their changes private.
What you described is beyond the requirements of the MIT license. They simply must include the copyright provision as attribution. That's it.
