Because of hardware standardization Linux has become a pre-competitive layer, a commodity we have decided not to compete on. And it turns out that such a commodity by definition is private, because we don't want any one party to reap all the benefits of a commodity project (we'd rip it out before using it anyway), in the same sense that we don't want want 1 company sitting on all our water consumption data for example.

So, how do we get to a commodity layer for Mobile devices? It looked like it was going to be Linux (Android), and that was Google's intention. But now they are just using their significant resources to corrupt that original idea, using their trojan horse called "play services".

The public at large only cares about convenience, not about privacy. Why don't we? How much enshitification is enough to draw that line in the sand?

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ajb 2 days ago | parent [-]

The Android stack, right back to the pre-aquisition "Danger" stack, ripped out everything GPL'd above the kernel, and Google has been investing in their "fuschia" project to make a non-GPL'dv kernel as well. Gradually making more and more of it proprietary was the plan.

Google is a big company and there may have been some factions pushing to make android an open ecosystem, but I don't see that that was ever the companies intent overall.

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teekert 2 days ago | parent [-]

So the real question is: Why are people so social and pleasant, and why are companies so egoistic (and I mean egoistic in the cancer/parasitic/enshitifying way, not in the Ayn-Rand/social/We-are-all-equal way).

Is it the lack of deep, DNA encoded morality? What are we going to do about this? What is the DNA of an organization anyway?

How, as a society can we take away these stimuli that make it so natural to consume individual freedoms when we grow our tribe-size?

Maybe we need more freedom, more freedom to say: "F-this I'm out of here, I just like the set of rule of this other society better." Maybe we are still too constrained. By our ways of generating income, by our countries, continents and ultimately our planet. We have 1 lifetime, we have to make do with what we find.

	▲	ajb 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		There are mechanisms which make firms more social: cooperatives. In another world, public infrastructure such as android would be owned by a cooperative of it's users. Instead, users are tenants of infrastructure owned by others, always vulnerable to the owners changing the deal The problem is that it's difficult for cooperatives to raise capital: they can issue debt, but not equity (because the definition of a co-op is that it is owned by members (usually customers and employees )-and no-one else). But debt is not really risk capital in the same way as equity and doesn't enable bold initiatives and innovation.
	▲	AnthonyMouse 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> Why are people so social and pleasant, and why are companies so egoistic (and I mean egoistic in the cancer/parasitic/enshitifying way, not in the Ayn-Rand/social/We-are-all-equal way). It's specifically publicly-traded companies, because they cease to be controlled by real people who can make a human decision when there is a trade off between a marginal increase in profits and not being schmuck.