Re: Corporate Conspiracy Open-Source Theory

On Wed, 2 Jul 2025 11:35:21 -0000 (UTC), Borax Man wrote:

"Cui bono?" presumes that other people are motivated by the same things
you are.  Not everythign is about money, not when ideology is involved.

You really think amoral megacorporates are motivated by anything other
than money? What agenda do you think they have? Are they just secretly
wishing for the ordinary public to set up fan clubs in their honour? Run
screaming after their executives, demanding their autographs? Maybe they
just want to appear in fashion-magazine spreads alongside the beautiful
people? What?

The software licence only covers the distribution and modification of
the software.

Free software explicitly spells out the Four Freedoms:

  0) The freedom to use the software as you wish
  1) The freedom to look at the source, figure it out and make changes
  2) The freedom to redistribute copies
  3) The freedom to redistribute your changes.

<https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html>

But freedom has more levels than simply the freedom to
copy.  It is also what the software allows you to do, how it
inter-operates with ther software.

Yup. All covered.

The software licence says nothing though, about how much agency it gives
the user, when they are using the software.  Developers rarely look past
the code, and look at the software itself.

Not sure I understand this. You are saying “code” is not “software”?? What
is it, then?

Does this software give the user agency in their ability to configure
it?

A core part of the *nix philosophy is “mechanism, not policy”. Free
software is not supposed to impose particular ways of doing things on you,
instead it provides a toolkit you can use to do a whole range of things in
whatever ways you find best.

It link it with other pieces of software?

Open interoperability standards are a key feature of Free software, yes.
There is a strong preference for open and interoperable protocols/
standards over proprietary ones.

To use it with other software to make their own workflows?

This is one area where command-line/scriptability-based tools often have
an edge over GUI-centric ones.

A piece of software can be GPL licenced, but offer no
configuration, no real means of placing it in a pipeline, no
extensibility, whereas another, which could be proprietary could offer
vast configuratin options, allow extensions.

I would be curious where you can find examples of both of these things. Do
tell.