this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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I'm receptive to the arguments that the Fediverse should be open even to Meta, but we've seen this play out too many times before - you simply can't trust a big company like Meta not to try to take over + destroy the Fediverse, when there are tremendous financial incentives to their doing so and no meaningful negative consequences if they do.
Yup, you know they'll use the good ole MS triple-E tactic: embrace, extend, and extinguish.
Which ultimately didn't work for Microsoft, at least not anywhere near the extent that people feared.
It's good to be wary and watchful, but let's also not become paranoid chicken-littles. Sometimes it's the open standards that end up "embracing" the closed shops and forcing them at least somewhat open.
You're right, it worked even better.
Anyway, IBM is following their steps and RHEL is going down first.
No, it really didn't.
The main thing people feared would be "embraced, extended, and extinguished" back in the day was open web standards. That's what the big anti-trust suit was about, Microsoft was forcing Internet Explorer on users and giving it proprietary standards. Nowadays Internet Explorer is fully dead and Edge is Chromium-based.
People also feared that Microsoft was going to try to destroy the GPL and other copyleft licenses somehow. Now Microsoft releases many things under copyleft licenses, Dot Net's runtime is MIT-licensed, and Microsoft runs GitHub, one of the largest repositories of open source software there is (a lot of people freaked out when that happened but I've yet to hear of them "extinguishing" anything).
Microsoft is far from the most open software company but it's much more open than it was back in the day.
how many years of lost productivity and set backs in open web standards because of their internet explorer nonsense and you're saying it wasn't a successful execution of this strategy? i think they won and set back the open web by years.
one point about the mit license is that it's not copyleft because mit license does not protect derivative works. that is why they fought so hard against gpl licensed works and even forbade the gpl3 license on codeplex. mit license is no threat because it can be incorporated into closed source products.
with github, i don't think they are going to pull a musk or a spez, they are going to wield their influence carefully to frame the conversation and tools around open software to work in their favor as they have always tried to do. i do agree that they seem less outwardly aggressive than back in the day, though.
as far as facebook in the fediverse, they will have the ability to inflict significant, if not fatal, damage, just like ms did to open web with ie and just like google did with xmpp with gchat. that's something worth discussing.
It didn't work because thousands of people put in lots of work to make sure it wouldn't work. The fear was justified, we just managed to band together and stop that.
It's like with Y2K or the ozone layer issues. It's not that they weren't important, it's that many many people put in the work to fix them before they got a point where we were fucked.
Yep, RHEL is gonna sink really fast. They just really don't know what they're doing or don't actually know how things work in open source.
The fediverse is open to Meta. They're welcome to do what they want. I will simply choose to not federate with and actively block every iota of content or instances they create or touch. Zuck is an ugly cancer on the internet.