i wonder what to make of this (correct) observation that we in the hacker community are just making clones of capitalist computer products
we're all aware of this weird cultural shadow microsoft, google, apple, ..., are all casting over us but cannot seem to do anything
i think we need a deeper understanding of this paradox where we are racing to copy capitalist products, and we know it isn't changing anything, but we just keep doing it anyway.
how can we be fully aware of our behaviour, knowing it is fruitless, and yet unable to change it? what is this sort of thing?
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@vidak I'm not aware of a mainstream commercial software that one would want a version of. I guess having repairable open hardware would be nice.
@vidak Most "open source" projects are just kids imitating the software they see, so you get junk like OpenOffice or GNOME, and every graduating class gets a job and quits, so the next generation rip out half the functionality and start over, which is why none of it even works.
You can't fix that, because there's no incentive to do anything else.
@vidak
> observation that we in the hacker community are just making clones of capitalist computer products
This is ideology not observation. Capitalists never invent anything. They make shiny clones of products and services co-created by communities or invented by social entrepreneurs (the people *actually* trying to use business to make the world better).
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Then they spend millions on reputation laundering to convince the world they invented it, eg Titter claiming to have invented micro-blogging, when it was invented by Indymedia geeks. Or they do it with legal action, eg Melon Husk suing to be called "co-founder" of Tesla (he wasn't).