Just because software is Free as in libre doesn't mean it's free as in beer. Running those services costs huge amount of money. Running enough instances of lemmy to replace reddit would cost collectively much more than the one optimized centralized service. So I guess that would translate to governments making billions of dollars in tax revenue.

I don't know the solution but I do know that we're losing what the internet was suppose to be.

I remember in the early days how we all thought it was insane and unethical to create scarcity in data.

We all knew data could be copied and shared almost limitlessly and so the internet was headed towards this new post information scarcity world were we could all collaborate and share information and knowledge and culture.

It seems like now we're putting up walls everywhere and charging for access to every bit of data we can. I think as an online culture that we lost a lot of that early 00s mentality of what the net would be.

I feel like we dropped that baton and the newer generation is almost pro data scarcity.

The cost is hardly in the software. It’s for the support and setup. Even if governments switch to Linux, they’d need some sort of support contract in place with a vendor.

Open Office etc. have been tried by governments with varying degrees of success. I think Germany is the best known example.

One issue that isn't really about the software is the accountability. If it breaks, or it breaks something else, who's is responsible? Governments can either pay a lot of money to fix it themselves or wait and hope for someone else to do it eventually. With paid software it's a lot easier to confront the tech company because they were already paid for it to work, so the responsibility of it working is very clear. Also using "industry standards" ensures that someone else has he same problem, so there are many others who also want it fixed.

The days where every company had an IT-department is long gone. Today software needs to work without individual customization. Thankfully there are also better standards for everything like documents, file exchanges, APIs etc., so technically open source ought to be able to do it just as well as commercial software. It's just that we also know that software is never really finished or complete. It has to be updated continuously because things keeps evolving. That is more difficult when not using the de facto standard.

The biggest problem is, nobody from the tech industry is going to fund an application specifically designed to be non-commercial unless they're legally forced to. Which means that reach and development power are always going to stay behind the proprietary alternatives

Governments pay huge amounts of money for software licenses, mainly to Microsoft. So it would save them a lot of money too.

It's a "parable of the broken window". We're wasting time and effort on proprietary software. You (OP) are now spending that time and effort on other stuff that you otherwise wouldn't have been able to. So somebody is still getting paid, it's just not the ad industry.

Great, so even on Lemmy 'Shower Thoughts' are just statements.

I work in tech. Some would lose, but others would win. We spend more and more every year on services. The software isn't entirely FOSS, but the licensing cost is often trivial compared to the costs to implement and maintain. For instance, we use WordPress for our website. We give thousands every year to our web designers while spending 0 on the software. The big software we use, that we spend hundreds of thousands yearly on, is moving in the same direction. I suspect they will go FOSS in the next decade, and focus on hosting/professional services.

Reminds me of this I've seen in lemmy: https://ploum.net/2023-06-19-more-rms.html

And I feel like I agree. Let's spend our time coding more strong copyleft. Not because it's cheaper but because it's better.

You'd be surprised how much of the tech industry even cares about FOSS. Many are just there for a paycheck and check out for the day, and have little to no personal opinion on how it should be.

Depends on what you mean by “tech industry”. If FOSS projects are outside the realm of “tech industry”, then yes. The users and money would just go to FOSS instead of large well known companies, but the money would still go somewhere and development would happen somewhere.

Well, it won't be supported by governments -- the tax dollars they lose are nothing compared to the communication they no longer control.

That aside, most regular folks want something easy and established before they'll use it. I think that's the main issue to entry of FOSS stuff for people who aren't otherwise engaged in the ecosystem. Lemmy got an unusual leg up from the implosion of reddit.

As we have seen from the social media companies over the decades, they are making billions of ads, so it goes without saying platform like lemmy does drive the economy, the problem is that it needs a way to cover its cost.

I have read that people in lemmy dont like ads, if lemmy (instance) is run for profit, it may cast shitstorm like misinformation, bad moderation and agendas bc of profits and capitalism. It's a very good reason not to be for-profit, but it doesn't mean it's impossible to generate business if the profits could go to nobody.

We maybe able to sell ads, if the ads is run by the government and the profit doesn't go to anyone but the government savings.

Lets say we forbid ads anyway just bc we hate. The government could still do the host of an instance and ideally makes goddamn clear that it only does moderation over the safety of the community(anti-spam) and illegal content, no agenda, no politics. Do so by raising taxes, or ideally sponsorship and donations. If we can do that, the inefficiency in Fediverse compare to a centralized platform is an non-issue, bc the state-run instance, as supported by the public, should be fast and stable. I mean, c'mon its just texts and images.

Lolol that's absurdly optimistic and completely ignores commercial contributions. No licences hardly means less expensive.

Lolol that's absurdly optimistic and completely ignores commercial contributions. No licences hardly means less expensive.

Lolol that's absurdly optimistic and completely ignores commercial contributions. No licences hardly means less expensive.