Comment on Why the US government’s overreliance on Microsoft is a big problem
shortwavesurfer@monero.town 8 months agoIs it just me or does the world at least appear to be going more open source? Take a look at social media, for example. We had MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter. And now, while those still exist, we also have the choice of Mastodon, Lemmy, Nostr, BlueSky, etc. To the best of my knowledge, all of these are open source. Linux has taken 4% of (an admittedly shrinking) desktop market, Something like 70% of smartphone users are on Android. Which, while definitely not mostly open source, is open source at its very base (AOSP). From what I heard, you can now open ODF files in Microsoft Office, which implies that it is big enough that Microsoft feels they must add it, at least for compatibility.
BrikoX@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
With social media, we are kind of moving back to the forum era with added federation. Where everyone can host their own niche of the internet and be interconnected via Fediverse. But unless the abusive players get punished, the normies will continue using the platform with the least resistance, even if their experience there is horrendous. They see more value is shouting into the void than looking for a potential solution.
Linux got a boost with Valve releasing Steam Deck and by them investing into Proton layer, but even then most people are not even aware their Steam Deck runs on Linux, and they see no need to go into desktop mode. Linux still has a big usability issue, and they don’t seem to be willing to solve it. Linux “fans” also doesn’t help the situation with their distro flaming wars. Or whenever someone asks for help, they get different answers due to a number of distros doing the same thing differently (inherent pro and con of open source development). Linux adoption is basically nonexistent on the government level.
Android Open Source Project is a joke. It’s not open source, it’s source available. And that is as useless, as Chromium. Technically, someone can create a fork, but without resources they won’t be able to develop it, and we all know people are not willing to support open source projects as they are willing to pay for proprietary stuff. So in the end Google has full and complete power over it since they decide what gets merged into the project, and they get the advantage of other people fixing bugs for them for free.
I don’t know the reason native ODF support was added, but if I had to guess, it was probably due to anticompetitive laws instead of them considering ODF “big enough”.
So while there are some small moves, in totality they are not significant. The people’s mentality is still the same. Just look how many billions were invested in the last year into “AI” hype, and how half of those companies are already in bankruptcy. And compare that with open source projects/libraries developers that the same for profit companies rely on still being maintained by single devs who can’t even get average salary.
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