Capital interests certainly oppose the public domain, but I don’t think it’s a pipe dream, I think it’s a policy change. Everything has swung in favor of private capital for long enough that it’s time for the pendulum to swing back toward the public interest. I think the iron is hot, and right now is the time to start imaging and building better institutions.
I disagree, those consultants and lobbyists are working for proprietary vendors. If, instead, public grant money & public purchasing contracts were mandated to go towards free and open source technology, then the nation’s technology infrastructure would eventually become free and open. Such a mandate would reduce the opportunity for corrupt contracts in the first place, because it would be substantially more expensive to start a project from scratch if there are already viable solutions in the public domain assuming wasteful & bloated contracts will be underbid by contracts that fork or add features to existing projects.
Public money for public code can dramatically reduce the waste caused by corrupt grants & contracts. If a project falls through, then at least the technology would be in the public domain for another organization to pick-up development. Currently, when a project falls through, it is usually a total loss because the technology remains intellectual property that can not be reused.
Just like with the Linux kernel, if a free and open source solution exists, it can be adapted to meet countless needs with far less effort and cost than starting from scratch with a proprietary solution.
Absolutely, and I’m glad someone else has thought the exact same thing! “Public money == public code”.
Thank you! Lemmy is a tremendous contribution to the wider Fediverse, and no amount of “thank yous” is ever enough for people like you writing free software and giving freely to the public domain.
I have been on Lemmy, and around the Fediverse on various accounts since ~2021, and a suggestion I have seen promoted countless times is for communities which federate across instances. e.g. posts to Linux@lemmy.ml will show on Linux@lemmy.world as long as lemmy.ml and lemmy.world federate with one another. If I remember correctly, each of you have previously opposed this idea for multiple reasons. If you do still oppose such a feature, will you please reiterate why you think this is the wrong direction for Lemmy? Also, have you considered adding a multi-community feature similar to Reddit’s multi-reddit feature which allows end-users to combine multiple federated communities into a single page just for them?
I haven’t played in over a year, but I really spent some hours in Veloren the last time I picked it up!
It’s good that this discussion keeps coming up; federated instances are not meant to get so large. Once communities become too large they lose cohesion and culture, invariably they eventually sacrifice users’ well-being for practical purposes like funding, and at that point they become no better than the platforms they replaced. The cycle of exploitation continues.
There are communities online that have preserved their community culture and have not resorted to unethical practices to maintain themselves for more than 20 years, they are always smaller more intentional communities that value quality interactions over quantity of users. Given all the evidence showing how mentally and socially harmful large centralized platforms are - should we really aspire to recreate those unhealthy spaces in the fediverse?
The fediverse is an opportunity to take things a different direction, a direction in which smaller more cohesive communities share with each other without any one community dominating and suffocating the others. Federation is a fundamentally different model that challenges the centralizing paradigm “growth is good”.
Ah, I see how what I wrote before didn’t clearly express what I was thinking, and didn’t address the issue of private contractors intentionally pushing for bloated contracts.
If public money for public code is mandated at the federal level, then private contractors would be bidding for work that ends up in the public domain. I am assuming that wasteful & bloated contracts will be underbid by contracts that fork or add features to existing projects. Either way, if the end result is in the public domain, then the project is still reusable.
I definitely don’t believe that such a mandate would be easy to implement, or separate from a wider policy platform. I see private capital influencing government decisions as the crux of the problem with passing such a mandate. However, private capital influencing government decisions is an issue that unites many activists, organizations, and social movements. If FLOSS can be integrated into organizations and social movements pushing for institutional reform, then that might be a viable pathway toward meaningful policy change.