Red Hat used to be one of the champions of FOSS. The last years, after being acquired by IBM, they bought and castrated CentOS and now restrict public access to “their” code.
Reddit used to be the healthiest commercial social network (and probably still remains in that place) but chose to severe the ability of third party developers to use their API, thus closing their ecosystem.
Many IT companies have fired staff the last year and appear to be more assertive in regard to the working conditions of their remaining employees.
I wouldn’t say that the above is an indication that the IT sector, which relies on highly educated people, keeps moving in the right direction…
I’d say that both Red Hat and Reddit maintain their position on the “ethical pedestal” but surely, these actions indicate their tension to step down in order to improve their balances. I am not an economist but it seems that they are likely to achieve short term profit (and Reddit may not achieve this either) and develop long term weaknesses.
Perhaps it’s time to stop relying on commercial entities for our activities and strengthen community projects, which will remain open for companies to contribute and thrive but will never control.
While these thoughts extend well beyond the GNU/Linux ecosystem, I cannot think of a better community to sympathise with these thoughts.
Agreed with your closing thoughts. It’s never been more obvious that we can’t rely on commercial entities.
The fruits of years of organic growth within subs squandered in the name of corporate profits should be the wake-up call the average person needs.
Often when things like this happen (see:dig, twitter) the question gets asked “what can be done?” Well, let me tell you about FOSS…
I am sure that most people here adopt the principles of FOSS. I wouldn’t miss at all the various “mainstream” subs with poor content but some of the best subs could be encouraged to migrate to the fediverse. I have really high hopes for this project.
I spent a lot of time on the niche tech/maker/cooking subs. Seems a lot of the fediverse did as well, because the ones I’ve found here are almost as active!
I have the same feeling too. The communities here keep growing. The first weeks here felt a bit… lonely. But now it feels like the fediverse is starting to thive!