Daniel Lombraña on Farcaster

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Daniel Lombraña

Deep question: lately I have felt that I don't belong anymore to anyplace in the sense of a movement. For me it has been always hip-hop and open source, my two crews where I actually see a fit in. However, years are passing and hip-hop has changed losing its roots (probably, because I'm getting older) and open-source stills important but it is not the same as it was in the beginning. This feeling could be because when I was younger I loved hip-hop because its deep roots with the streets and fight with the status quo. It was political, it said truths. Nowadays we don't pass from Drake and Kendrick fighting like two little kids. Don't get me wrong, it has been legendary, but I guess you get my point. The same goes with OSS. In the beginning it was fighting against the status quo of Microsoft and Apple. Nowadays, people embrace non-GPL licenses and we will never see the light of the Mach micro-kernel :D What do you think? Do you feel the same?

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shazow pfp

Permissive OSS > Copyleft, I will die on this hill! :P Declarative procedural OS (like NixOS) is more important than a micro-kernel. Come join the cause!

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Daniel Lombraña

You know that the mach micro kernel was an inside jock 😂 And I get what you say, but then companies ruin everything with permissive oss. It always reminds me of this xkcd strip. What has happened to resist, terra form, etc. it is not good for the oss movement.

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shazow pfp

Nope, that's backwards. Companies contribute upstream when it's permissive (cheaper to do this, no one wants to maintain a fork if they don't have to) but they redo the work internally to make a proprietary competitor when it's not permissive. In one scenario money flows back to OSS (via contributions upstream), in the other scenario the money is put into proprietary duplicated effort. This happens again and again, a project grows by leveraging permissive OSS, then gets upset that people are profiting from permissive code (as they should!), relicenses, and the community (which includes companies!) abandons them, then they come crawling back years later. Most recently, Redis. And you can see what will happen, the original BSD valkey fork will continue to thrive while the new AGPL license will stagnate because it's too toxic.

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Daniel Lombraña

I'm not against earning money. My main issue is that big companies like AWS do not contribute as much as they could. One example is PostgreSQL and Aurora. They are the same, but in order to compete, they don't allow you to install some OS extensions so you can access their lock. Yes, we can run our own EC2 PostgreSQL and do everything, but it is not the same. I think big corps, in general, squeeze OSS returning too little to the projects.

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Daniel Lombraña

Also, small companies or even developers use OSS without contributing anything back, not even documentation. One example is the poor guy migrating the Linux kernel to M chips from Apple. He couldn't accommodate everyone's requests, which was unfair because he was doing it for the greater good. Also, all the drama with the Linux kernel gives us enough drama to comment on 😆

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shazow pfp

"As much as they could" is not one of the options of reality. Your options are: 1. As much as makes economic sense against the alternative 2. Nothing, and duplicate work internally without publishing it at all Unless you're claiming that Amazon employees have never contributed OSS code to the PosgteSQL ecosystem? Clearly that's untrue.

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