this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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No it isn't. A company can be formed to be the steward of either or both the Lemmy source code or popular instances, which would be run by a CEO. I bet anything these corporate structures naturally form as people try to monetize the community and seek investment to gain control over the ecosystem.
The hurdle to that is much greater here since there's a common protocol adopted by multiple open source projects (of which Lemmy) which allows interoperability. If a profit-driven group would try to capture it, people could move instances/use a fork/use a different but similar activitypub project like kbin, etc.
At least I think that's correct? It seems to me there are multiple lines of defense which each have a good amount of redundancy.
That's not entirely true. Plenty of FLOSS software exist that are also run by corporations.
The secret is that corporate FLOSS maintainers are "service providers" and make their living that way, but the code is a public-access creative output that allows others to render that service.
It's a somewhat implicit contract of saying "Live and let live, since I'm technically have more power strictly because I designed the darn thing." Sorta scratches the ego and also allows freedom for everyone else at the same time.