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.
There was a Sunday Perspective episode of The Cloudcast a few weeks ago about interest rates and VC funding and their effects on companies that was really interesting. Essentially, there is less “free money” these days and execs have more and more pressure to increase profitability of projects.
This explains a lot. Execs are not engineers, they don’t understand software, nor how the community contributes value to the project. They just need to find an income stream and are willing to break everything they don’t understand to achieve it. Even the company they work for.