software as a commodity is really whack to me in my head. it used to be that almost everything was open source and everyone contributed communally to a product to make it better, in whatever way they could. its distribution is also on such a level that it could almost be described as a post scarcity market. so charging a fuckton for software is just weird to me. and everyone does it. especially now with video games and other software packages released early with essentially zero QA testing, forcing users to do labor to make the software work.
if the users have to do labor on the product, you are just subverting the communal open source way of how software should be for personal gain. its one thing to care about your labor being valued, but its a whole different thing when you ignore the user’s labor as well (all the while devaluing the project members labor for profit). if you have a near flawless product created by a handful of people, sure, charge a premium. but dont act like we should highly value your product when QA testing by users enters in the 10s of thousands of hours.
and dont let me get started on how awesome it is to work on an open source project of a highly used free utility. even if you do only a small part of it, it makes you feel like you made something better for hundreds of people, and well, you did! and the fact that its instantaneous, with no real scarcity involved in its distribution, it makes your impact felt. and sure, the dudes that crank hundreds of hours into the utility should get paid, but its just weird as hell to me to charge the end user for a communal project. it just aint right in my head from years of just doing open source communism.
Its not even commodity - these days its msotly software as rent, a lot of products that companies and so on use are cloud based, and given out for a subscription, which is basically rent. And to add on top of that, it is all built on top of a common open source base, and the biggest open source projects often have some big corp dumping money in them.
So you use something that is available for free, something that you maybe even contibute labour to for free, to use as a tool to sell your labour, so that someone can charge rent on the fruits of your labour. Its like absolutely next level exploitation. At least when you produce a linen coat, that coat is sold and belongs to the new person. Now your own labour will continue generating profits for your employer probably long after youve moved on to something new.
oof, let's not give stallman too much credit. he singlehandedly creeped out almost every woman who was big in computing for like 20 years.
yeah, his behavior has been addressed with him for a long time and he generally refuses to back down on his shit. dude was friends with epstein and constantly defended child sexual abuse
https://geekfeminism.wikia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman
yeah, he finally admitted that child sexual abuse is bad last year; it was a kinda big deal because of how long people have been trying to get him to stop constantly saying horrible shit. but he still does the sexist stuff in his talks and refuses to stop and it's been called out regularly for decades.
Counterpoint: having seven versions of the same word processor is actually good because reasons
Counter-counterpoint, aka point: open source has created like 100 word processors; vim, emacs, leafpad, mousepad, gedit, pluma, atom, open office, libreoffice, wps office, kate, etc.
Haha of course I wouldn’t use emacs... unless? :soviet-bashful:
Vim is so good that I use autohotkey to recreate Vim keybinds in Windows
I like the vim defaults except I prefer jkl; for directions. I'm not sure why they decided not to make it that way from the start.
I think it's because most people (or at least I do) find it easier to reach over to the "h" key with their index finger, than to hit the ";" key with their pinky. Idk maybe I'm doing it wrong but I almost never use my right pinky finger when typing.
sure, i understand that. the issue is a lot of mainstream developers are going for transient qa stuff now (e.g. just hiring for a temp contract at a certain stage of development for pennies) and instead release the game as early access or a buggy, rushed mess to force the users to do the labor on the QA stuff to save cash. and it really makes sense from a capitalist's standpoint. after all, just look at cyberpunk and witcher 3's releases, that stuff was a nightmare but in the end? huge profits
i mean sure, i dont necessarily think what they were doing with QA back in the 90s was good either. capitalism ruins everything etc. etc.
As someone who works with computer technology, the thing that bothers me the most about this industry is how you'll have a dozen or two companies researching, developing, marketing and producing products that do the exact same fucking things. So now you've got ten different potential solutions that can get your job done. Great. Now you've gotta spend time researching and navigating compatibility, pricing, subscriptions, licensing, and other countless layers of obfuscation to make sure you're getting the correct tool. There has to be a better way.
In my dreams I imagine an open-source hub and server hosting platform funded by tax dollars where you can load free software for anything. From audio production, to accounting, to CAD and office software, to web security. Supported, quality software that is compatible and available to all. Standardize everything. Now anyone can leverage technology and turn it into wealth.
The raw power computing has provided to the ruling class is staggering. It has nothing to do with their intelligence or cunning. It's all because they've had the resources to fund and develop these tools and exploit them to the max. Providing a means for all people to use to this technology at will would bring about a revolution or Renaissance, of that I have no doubt.
Yeah, they saw that coming in the 80s, it's why rich hippies were the early tech bros.
Yeah, fuck all those assholes. Every tech billionaire should have all their assets seized. In minecraft.
There was such this cyber commune hyperspace techno highway dream shit coming from the same people that would then basically do 21st century enclosure acts in the 70s-80s. Reading old tech shit is fucking weird that way.
Yeah what people forget is back in the old days that free software would fall out of someone’s hands and not get updated, remaining abandoned unless someone wants to pick it up.
Now though, with companies selling software, they can tell you worthless piggies that the software is being deliberately tanked so you have to buy another version of it. And if you try to do anything with it you’re violating IP laws.
Checkmate, liberals.
true. writing as a commodity (especially journalism) doesn't really make any sense either
at least with writing you can do it all in one go as one person. with software you call many libraries into effect (and a multiple layers of abstraction with your programming language) any time you do anything. its a communal project even for small things
the disparity between philosophical thought about software in 1990 vs now is really fucking disheartening.
also, I think it's funny that photoshop is just a series of interrelated very large numbers expressed in binary. it's just funny how so many numbers are illegal now.
