As another Lame Cherry exclusive in matter anti matter.
When I mentioned to Richard the Gemini AI steering me to Libre as the alternative to the no longer updated Apache Open Office, he provided some background on this situation which is most informative. It reminds me of the early days of Netscape as a browser which disappeared as part of the weeding process of the free internet. I will get to more of that after the quote.
LibreOffice is what’s called a “fork” of OpenOffice, meaning that someone took the source code and decided to build a different project from it, going a different direction. OpenOffice meanwhile is built on the ruins of another company. You may recall the days of competing suites of what we call “Office” software, like WordPerfect? There was a suite called StarOffice made by a small company. Sun Microsystems bought it, realized they couldn’t compete with MS Office, and effectively shelved it by releasing it as open source. Sun Microsystems was what we called a “big iron” company, meaning they sold extremely expensive servers and sort-of desktops, running their flavor of Unix (I can write you an entire lecture series on this piece of trash) called Solaris. Slowlaris as we called it was horrible even by Unix standards, largely because Sun only cared about selling their big iron, software as an afterthought. They bought StarOffice just to have an office suite that ran on their crap. That expensive hardware strategy saw them go down in flames, bought out by Oracle in 2010. Oracle largely wanted some of their few interesting projects and gutted their new acquisition slowly.
There never was really anything free. Everything that was the internet was directed by the NSA. You probably know the real history of Microsoft in "competition with Apple, in Bill Gates stole what IBM had and cobbled together that thing which was called Windows. Any place else in the world and Gates would have been in jail, but this was the big transitional push and it was all kosher.
Below is the explanation of what "Free" really is on the internet, and none of this was helped in that Bill Gates with his NSA backdoors, deliberately built systems which degraded and which in the other C word in predator Capitalism made programs obsolete as much as it made computers obsolete as they could not handle the massive load of these new programs.
I just had an experience in a back up computer at Grandpas which stays over there. I wanted to grab a game program off of there. Just like that, Brave browser wiped and would not update as it stated it would as "another Brave was running" which it was not, and with that the download files which were in a Windows temp folder, got deleted and what automatically popped up..........Microsoft Edge updating.
Meet you on the other side.
There used to be a slogan “When you install Open Source, you’re installing Communism”. While it was derided and ultimately dropped, it was effectively true. Exactly like Communism’s goal of no private property, free and open source advocates assert that there is no such thing as intellectual property. You had an idea? You worked for years to develop it? Thank you, comrade, no one owns ideas, that product belongs to everyone, and your reward is warm fuzzies. Good luck putting food on the table, by the way. In any other field, the idea that your hard work should be free would be considered ludicrous. The idea that you should develop specialized skills that in no way are rewarded is equally nonsensical. No other profession faces a deliberately crafted philosophy that it should work for free, that being compensated is immoral. These ideas have, by design of those behind it, completely destroyed the computing industry, leaving us with mediocrity and no real advances, only marketing lies.
This is of course due to the sheer power that IT can wield. As a straightforward example, the dawn of the internet was heralded as a breakthrough moment for humanity. People would be able to exchange knowledge in an unprecedented manner, understanding would bloom, and similar glowing phrases were the headlines of the time. That is of course a direct threat to those in power, and as such must be destroyed or controlled. The internet is the example with which most will be familiar, but the threat to power posed by computing was understood in the field’s infancy and so the movement already described was also born in that time. Much like the Communist political system, it preys on ignorance with seemingly lofty goals and high-sounding ideals, until you stop and critically examine them. It twists the normal human inclination towards charity and compassion into mandating that generosity rather than it being freely given.
Consider the following quote, published in 1986 by the Free Software Foundation:
“The word "free" in our name does not refer to price; it refers to freedom. First, the freedom to copy a program and redistribute it to your neighbors, so that they can use it as well as you. Second, the freedom to change a program, so that you can control it instead of it controlling you; for this, the source code must be made available to you.”
Let’s examine this. While paying lip service to the idea of payment for work in the first sentence, it immediately attacks that concept in the second. If you can simply redistribute software, the author is not paid for those copies. This is no different than any other theft of property or labor. It then goes even further by a demand that amounts to giving away not only the product but the very means to create it. Were such demands made for a physical product made by a skilled craftsman, such demands would be considered ludicrous and quite correctly slave labor and theft. In essence, the demand is that the programmer develops the skills necessary to create the software, has an idea, works to develop that idea, and then is somehow immoral for expecting compensation in return for the use of his product. We do not hear that the artisan carpenter is immoral for selling his cabinets and tables, why then is this the case for the programmer? Simple, because it is designed to devalue the profession in order to control it.
In the earlier days of the field, there were “rock star” programmers, geniuses who were lauded for their efforts and well rewarded. That is no longer the case. The modern industry is soulless corporations in which business decisions take precedence, where the profits matter more than craftsmanship. On the surface, this would seem to confirm the ideas of free software, but most people are shocked to learn that enormous amounts of money are provided by those very corporations to support free software. Why would they seemingly compete against themselves? Simple, you can sell far more cheap pressboard “furniture” than you can hand-carved, lovingly crafted true furniture. You can pay line workers far less than artisans. When you push the idea that compensation for software development is immoral, you convince the developers themselves to accept not being paid for their work.
The corporations can claim that they are competing with free alternatives to their products in order to justify lowering their quality to just superior to those alternatives. There are vast amounts of free software available, yet only a tiny minority of those projects are successful and high quality enough to have widespread adoption. In every field, hobby work rarely excels professional, and this is very true in software. Free software is often harder to install, harder to use, has little or no support, has fewer and/or inferior features, and can be abandoned at any time without any hint of an announcement. After all, no one is being paid for the time. Meanwhile, paid software may be slop when compared to earlier times, but it will still be more polished, support is available, and there is a high probability that it will continue being developed. This is entirely due to ensuring that it is profitable. In this situation then, the suits are free to accept “good enough” work and vastly lower the standards to which programmers are held. This then allows them to drastically cut their expenses in terms of salaries, benefits, and so on. Further, with those lowered expectations and “passing the savings on to you”, which only a fool believes, they cause other crises such as outsourcing to low priced foreign workers. After all, charging for software is already “immoral”, how can they justify raising their prices enough to pay domestic workers?
Innovation has slowed to a crawl, and instead of true breakthroughs, the suits behind Silicon Valley keeping pushing new fads that ultimately lead nowhere, but not before those at top have made a fortune. For example, remember “big data,” the older brother of so-called “AI”? Proponents swore to us that having huge datasets would somehow lead to insights and patterns, creating unprecedented new business opportunities and prosperity. Today, most companies that heavily invested in that scam have paid dearly, with many no longer existing. This sort of phenomenon causes disbelief and distrust misdirected towards the technically-minded (who thus made victims of the scam), rather than the perpetrators. This of course only further locks in lower salaries and standards and is seen as justified by the public who fails to realize the only winners are the business scam artists abusing all of this. Any truly innovative idea is almost certain to be published for free, as the nearly religious dogma of free software will cause most such creators to do so either believing they are doing good, or feeling pressured to do so. The corporations have thus also saved themselves the expense of a research department.
Some reading this will argue that there are free software licenses that prevent such from happening, and what a pleasant delusion that is. Such licenses hypothetically prevent theft of code, true, but they also effectively prevent the creator from profiting from them. If a corporation does directly steal code, an individual has precious little chance of proving it or claiming damages. Even if such licenses are respected, the free software ideas make possible the idea of selling servicing, which is an old scam given new life. Release the software for free, but charge for providing support or fixes, justifying such to the brainwashed programmers that the customers are free to fix problems themselves. The suits are fully aware that few individual customers possess the expertise necessary to do so and will rely on paid official support. In the case of a business customer, simply ensure that prices are seemingly less expensive than that client employing their own staff to support the software. Thus, the software is deliberately released buggy at best, incomplete at worst, forcing customers to seek support.
While this discussion has primarily focused on corporations, do not make the mistake of thinking that governments are not equally involved in pushing these twisted ideals for similar reasoning. They’re simply more subtle about doing so. If a new idea comes out that could challenge the status quo, again it will very likely be published openly, making it trivial to gain control. These ideas are taught and encouraged all throughout the educational system, and particularly at the university level, contributing to fewer and fewer students in the field as they realize they won’t be able to support themselves in this way. This again leads to foreign workers, which are only possible with government approval and cooperation. Foreign workers are controlled under thinly veiled threats at all times, such as revocation of visas or job loss in countries where abject poverty is normal. What happens when all the domestic workers are gone?
To review then, software quality is artificially lowered, clients are deliberately given bad products to sell support, programmer wages are artificially lowered, true innovation is suppressed, scams on a truly global scale are somehow normal, intellectual theft is also normal, and unsustainable unemployment is created. If you think things are bad now, they’re only going to get worse, all due to ideas that are the antithesis of Western thought. All because “ideas and software should be free”. Da, comrade.
This is as old as the predators who designed both ideologies of pure capitalism and pure communism. They both exploit and serve the same masters at the top and it was designed that way.
Due to the complexities of the platforms now established, there will never again be wonderful little 800 KB programs running in games and office ware. It is all 60 megabytes and up, and when the demand is there for those old 16 and 32 bit features, well Microsoft gives you a download from it's page to "fix" all of this, where the explanation I was provided on the Gates page was that I could partition and then I could decide to start my computer in that mode, which of course is not going to run the rest of the programs which are running on 64. So I can sit there playing a dork game or I can work. Work is the choice as I do not have time to play games. Games are diversions so my mind can think through what I'm actually engaged in.
Nuff Said
agtG
