Yeah, but there’s also the term “freeware”, which means closed source but free to use.

I’ll edit my comment for clarity, thanks for the heads up.

Projects leaching on the work of companies like that, “freeing the code”.

You mean it the other way, right? Because these companies you defend use the free labor of voluntary developers from the community, which spend hours and hours developing features, fixing bugs and what not, directly or indirectly. That’s how open source works.

When these companies change the project license to a closed source one, they’re basically saying a big “f*** you” to the community. Forking the latest open source version of the repository is nothing more than an effort to keep things the way they were.

huge companies will not pay a cent for Linux in the future

Linux is FOSS, you can do whatever you want with it as long as you redistribute it without modifying the license. Android does that; every GNU/Linux distribution does that. That’s how it works.

if a license says “you can use it for free, but need to share profits over x$”

What you’re describing is “freeware”, what this post is discussing is " open source software". There’s a giant gap between the two.

Yeah, sure. Totally different from having backdoors to the NSA or collecting massive amounts of personal data for targeted ads.

EDIT: You can’t trust ANY company if your concern is privacy; your data is just too profitable (for them) to sit there untouched.

And a really good song

He’s a billionaire, probably thinks he pays us peasants too much for what we deliver, and would absolutely replace us for slaves if he could

If there’s a shell, there’s a way

I’d love to see PeerTube grow just like these platforms, but I think it’s a lot more complicated to get people to use it than mastodon/lemmy.

Twitter/Reddit weren’t used as a major income source like YouTube and Instagram (I am saying this based on famous people in my country, I don’t know how it goes on other places), and so are easier to replace. The people posting and discussing topics don’t do that for the money, they do because they like it.

YT and its monetization system made possible for people to make a living from the content they produce, and many wouldn’t like or simply couldn’t sacrifice this income source just to go to a more ethical and private platform like PeerTube.

Genuine question: what’s the real problem? As a non-american, I can’t get it.

I mean, it’s not like they’re smuggling these chips to China, but doing a legitimate acquisition. Don’t want them to get access to U.S. tech? Simply don’t sell it to any other country that buys/sells to China, since they could trade or resell those chips to them. Also, AFAIK most international trades are done using U.S. dollars, so limiting U.S. companies from trading won’t solve the problem.

I’m not an economist, so feel free to correct me

Well, I guess we’ll have to follow Norway’s steps if we want to get somewhere. But yeah, I highly doubt anything beyond asking big tech to behave will be done

You have good points, and yeah, I too want data privacy and everything, but the Fediverse in general always was a niche place. I mean, people only got to know this because the mainstream social media fucked up badly this time (and keeps doing it very well). Now we have thousands of new instances, users and everything, but no one was prepared for it.

My point is: your proposals are totally valid, but there was no need for this level of security until yesterday, since this was just a niche place with a couple hundreds of users. Give it a few months and we might get some updates on instance infrastructure and the ActivityPub protocol itself to make it safer.