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.
Guessing that the whole “data scraping AI” thing also kick-started a bit of a panic with them
Possibly. I’m not entirely sure how to interpret that part.
One plausible scenario is that they brought in a consultant, who said their data would be worth $XXXX on the open market. A common element of MBA thinking is that any potential profits are something you are entitled to, regardless of the consequences. It’s also pretty clear they don’t have a mature management team, or a viable path to realize those profits. But they had to stop someone else from getting it, so there was a rushed decision. I don’t quite know how it coincided with killing 3rd party apps, though, unless it was just more really incompetent management.
Yeah for a lot of companies they don’t seem to separate blood-from-a-stone unrealized profits from losses, even when aggressively persuing the former may well result in loss.
I could definitely see FB, Reddit, etc going “company X is making money from AI using our data, we need to stop that and do so instead” while completely overlooking the costs inherent in building the AI system or user-impact.
Kinda like when all the ISP’s decided Netflix owed them money because users were accessing it through their networks (and completely disregarding that the users already paid for that access), because corps are greedy fucks that way.
It makes me think that the third party thing was the original intent and the data scraping was the cover. Also u/spez kinda said as much with his Elon love fest.