this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2025
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I think it was, almost since mid-nineties. It's very notable how the whole initial visibility of FOSS came from universities and companies. Before that FOSS projects were not particularly visible compared to the scene in its various forms. (I was born in 1996, so talking about what I didn't see.)
GNU, for comparison, was considered that strange group of hackers somewhere out there.
I think it's when in popular culture hackers became some sort of anarchist heroes, - from movies to Star Wars EU etc, - then that culture also became something that had to be dealt with. Doesn't even matter if it really had such potential.
The threat was that personal computing and the scene combined are similar to the printing press, but multi-dimensional, - software, music, other art, exchange of it, - and the solution was to find the least potent branch. The branch that only aimed for exchange of gifts, public and legal and with no ideology attached (except for quasi-leftist activism somewhere around, but not too thick). And the branch that had the least amount of decentralization, obscurity and invisibility.
As a vaccine.
Can you more succinctly express your point, it got a bit muddy at the end. Are you saying they stole the least potent bit? And if you have the spoons could you elaborate?
Not "stole", rather supported. Like authoritarian governments might support the least potent youth political group of those existing, as a spoiler.
There's pluralism of respect and values, one might notice that FOSS doesn't really have much of that. It's pretty authoritarian. Just people think it's meritocracy and shouldn't be otherwise.
The longer I live, the more I think today's tech is a dead end.