I almost can't believe I need to repeat this, but: the "nice" companies are the *most dangerous* ones.
@joepie91 This is also why NGOs are able to get away with a lot of the exploitation and abuses they do. The veneer of niceness helps enable it and makes it so much easier to overlook how awful they can be.
@whatanerd Yep. And even just within tech, there are multiple obvious examples:
- Cloudflare can now intercept and spy on half the traffic on the internet because they got popular by being a "nice, nerd-friendly" company
- npm Inc., the notoriously irresponsible and unaccountable steward of the npm registry, now part of Microsoft, gained their power over the ecosystem by being a "nice, community-oriented" company
- GitHub, which made the entire FOSS world dependent on a completely proprietary and centralized system by being a "nice, FOSS-friendly" company
- Plus all the many other unethical tech companies and startups that have been trying to lure in nerds and FOSS folks with shiny blog posts to convince them they're "one of them"
- ... and, in fact, Tailscale (which is now on Hachyderm) is doing the exact same thing, rapidly embedding its proprietary system into the infrastructure of many FOSS projects by being a "nice company"
@joepie91 @whatanerd i dont think tailscale is really comparable to the others
their client is open-source, they employ someone to work on an independent open-source server implementation, and there isn't really a network effect like for npm and github
@leo @whatanerd That doesn't really change my concerns, though. The *core service* is proprietary, as is their infrastructure, which is the actual thing that constitutes their company. A separate open-source server implementation is a side project, one that may be axed at any moment, that doesn't necessarily have the same featureset, and so on.
*All* of the companies I've mentioned had similar things. High-profile FOSS projects meant to demonstrate that they were "a friend of the open-source community", except they actually weren't, and it was just marketing.
In fact, npm was at one point even entirely open-source! But later closed up their registry implementation.
Ultimately, it is about power dynamics. The exact shape of those power dynamics varies from company to company, but "for the 'real first-party' experience you are dependent on Tailscale the company and their proprietary system" is absolutely one such power imbalance.
And ultimately, no company will do *exactly* the same thing as the ones that came before it. It's never exactly identical, it's always "different". That makes it all the more important to recognize the underlying *patterns* instead.
@joepie91 @whatanerd i mean, i'm not disagreeing with your overall point, i just think the lack of network effect means that github and npm are on very different footing than tailscale and arguably cloudflare
@leo @whatanerd That I can agree with. But I also don't feel that the *exact* failure mode is terribly relevant for whether we should want to avoid it...
@joepie91 @leo @whatanerd
>except they actually weren't, and it was just marketing.
Being friends of OSS could even be the former intention of beings who are in charge, which makes the whole corporation world even scarier. Good intentions get twisted by need to be profitable.
In threads about corporations on Fedi, I see lot of posts about "There are good beings in there". No one is questioning that. I for example like what those working at Oxide computer do, and if I had to decide where to go next, working with them would be amazing.
But corporation itself is a separate entity from those who work there. Entity with its own motives that sometimes align, but only as long as it pays off.
@leo @whatanerd (Also: the reason they seem out-of-place in this list is because they're being listed at the *start* of their marketing process instead of at the end, when all the consequences have already played out, like for the others. They're included specifically because of the conversation about Hachyderm right now.)