2y ago

If everyone moved to open source non-profit solutions, the tech industry would lose billions

I'm a FOSS (free and open source software) contributor and enthusiast. So I prefer to use such products (Lemmy instead of Reddit, Linux instead of Windows, Firefox instead of Chrome, Signal instead of WhatsApp, you get the idea). Was just thinking that if everyone moved to such solutions, the tech and ad industry would lose billions of dollars. That would translate to governments losing billions of dollars in tax revenue. Would such a move ever be encouraged then by the governments?

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I don't know the solution but I do know that we're losing what the internet was suppose to be.
I remember in the early days how we all thought it was insane and unethical to create scarcity in data.
We all knew data could be copied and shared almost limitlessly and so the internet was headed towards this new post information scarcity world were we could all collaborate and share information and knowledge and culture.
It seems like now we're putting up walls everywhere and charging for access to every bit of data we can. I think as an online culture that we lost a lot of that early 00s mentality of what the net would be.
I feel like we dropped that baton and the newer generation is almost pro data scarcity.
- I remember the general feeling you talked about, and the insanity of the idea when DRM was introduced.
  It seems we vastly underestimated the ideas corporations can produce and implement.
  For a short while it seemed as if with AI the field would be leveled again, but then I was astonished how quickly the EU moved with regulations first and foremost to protect copyright.

Just because software is Free as in libre doesn't mean it's free as in beer. Running those services costs huge amount of money. Running enough instances of lemmy to replace reddit would cost collectively much more than the one optimized centralized service. So I guess that would translate to governments making billions of dollars in tax revenue.
- If that is the case then how is Lemmy/the Fediverse going to be financially sustainable in the long run?
  
  Donations, people always give Wikipedia as an example. You need to chip in every now and then. Wouldn't that be better than "free" but your every click, scroll and interaction being tracked and you having an advertising profile being built in the background?
  
  Smaller communities taking care and paying for themselves and just using federation to talk to everyone else. But yeah, I don't think anyone has a really good answer for that yet. Everyone is against advertisement here and any other way of financing other than donations. Donations work well as long as the admins have fun with their work and are willing to do it for free.
- Infra cost isn't as high. A company reaping a billion in profit yearly would be spending around 10-20M only on infra (my previous company had 100M users and this is the estimate from that). So a nonprofit would just seek funds for infra and dev cost. Of course, it all depends on the kind of platform. But how about people embracing FOSS? Switching to Linux from Windows, to LibreOffice from O365, to GrapheneOS/LineageOS from Android, to Firefox from Chrome, that sort of thing. It'd be a drastic blow to the revenue of these companies. What people used to pay for earlier, they'd not be paying anymore. Maybe this would translate to other things like the cost of laptops and mobile phones rising because manufacturers will no longer be incentivised from software companies.

I work in tech. Some would lose, but others would win. We spend more and more every year on services. The software isn't entirely FOSS, but the licensing cost is often trivial compared to the costs to implement and maintain. For instance, we use WordPress for our website. We give thousands every year to our web designers while spending 0 on the software. The big software we use, that we spend hundreds of thousands yearly on, is moving in the same direction. I suspect they will go FOSS in the next decade, and focus on hosting/professional services.

Great, so even on Lemmy 'Shower Thoughts' are just statements.

Open Office etc. have been tried by governments with varying degrees of success. I think Germany is the best known example.
One issue that isn't really about the software is the accountability. If it breaks, or it breaks something else, who's is responsible? Governments can either pay a lot of money to fix it themselves or wait and hope for someone else to do it eventually. With paid software it's a lot easier to confront the tech company because they were already paid for it to work, so the responsibility of it working is very clear. Also using "industry standards" ensures that someone else has he same problem, so there are many others who also want it fixed.
The days where every company had an IT-department is long gone. Today software needs to work without individual customization. Thankfully there are also better standards for everything like documents, file exchanges, APIs etc., so technically open source ought to be able to do it just as well as commercial software. It's just that we also know that software is never really finished or complete. It has to be updated continuously because things keeps evolving. That is more difficult when not using the de facto standard.

Depends on what you mean by “tech industry”. If FOSS projects are outside the realm of “tech industry”, then yes. The users and money would just go to FOSS instead of large well known companies, but the money would still go somewhere and development would happen somewhere.

Governments pay huge amounts of money for software licenses, mainly to Microsoft. So it would save them a lot of money too.
- That is quite true. Though there's another con if everyone moved to FOSS, the governments will then have less control and access to user data. Right now they can just ask Microsoft, Meta and Google and they readily give minute by minute account of a person and hordes of data. Signal, linux distros, etc don't collect anything in the first place.
  
  How is that a con? Seems like a pretty big "pro" to me.

The cost is hardly in the software. It’s for the support and setup. Even if governments switch to Linux, they’d need some sort of support contract in place with a vendor.

Well, it won't be supported by governments -- the tax dollars they lose are nothing compared to the communication they no longer control.
That aside, most regular folks want something easy and established before they'll use it. I think that's the main issue to entry of FOSS stuff for people who aren't otherwise engaged in the ecosystem. Lemmy got an unusual leg up from the implosion of reddit.

Lolol that's absurdly optimistic and completely ignores commercial contributions. No licences hardly means less expensive.

Lolol that's absurdly optimistic and completely ignores commercial contributions. No licences hardly means less expensive.

Lolol that's absurdly optimistic and completely ignores commercial contributions. No licences hardly means less expensive.

Lolol that's absurdly optimistic and completely ignores commercial contributions. No licences hardly means less expensive.

27 comments