Posted by lhoff 11 hours ago
More news at 11.
Try to mimicking them is a waste of time and can't work, pushing the society toward ownership and freedom might work, because in a way or another we will end up there being technically the sole solution.
The big tech model where trust is in the company, not the person. Business love the big tech model because it's easier to let a few credit card companies deal with the trust issue than establish a trust relationship with everyone directly (or deal with cash), because surveillance capitalism is more profitable, and because it's more profitable to rent than to sell.
The big tech model can profit first on that cost difference, and later on switching costs which would otherwise inhibit abuse.
It has essentially nothing to do with the internet, as mainframes were networked long before personal computers. Even back in the 1980s, POS terminals used dial-up to verify credit card transactions.
The trust problem is easy to solve, with an open society: as long as payments got processed with open APIs and the government takes care of the frauds there is no trust problem. I do not need to trust a third party with eCash, I only need to trust my State protections.
The idea is already tempted, see not only the historic eCash, witch are the modern GNU Taler chosen (it seems) by the EU for the digital Euro https://www.ngi.eu/ngi-projects/ngi-taler/ and https://social.network.europa.eu/@EC_NGI/111499172838284606 but also https://openfisca.org and https://github.com/CatalaLang/catala or few others alike.
That's still embrional but in FLOSS terms we have already more than enough, we just miss the law enforcing it and the schools teaching it to the masses.
The centralized trust model does not require mainframes connected-to by dumb terminals. We need only look at how Visa in its first few decades used carbon copy devices and signatures, along with eventual consistency across a network of mainframes, to gain market power.
"The trust problem is easy to solve" is laughable, as you well understand by the need for "the law enforcing it and the schools teaching it to the masses."
It's the same kind of political denial as with being "concerned" about climate change, but still trading with China (even worse when this allows for fake self-congratulations about decreasing greenhouse gas emissions, when it mostly comes from most of the industry having been exported).
The USA is enjoying the wealth they gained in both world wars and they also kept their defacto colonies in the South America and Pacific.
Europeans destroyed their wealth in the world wars and they lost their colonies. Of course the end of the colonialism has ended some of the human suffering but it has a cold-hearted economic impact.
The American venture capitalists are all coming from the industries that got stronger at and after the world wars. They invested silicon and then the tech industries that built the wealth exponentially. The Europeans had to rebuild their countries until 70s and the investments they made are smaller. Similarly the US spent its government money to nuclear and space programs that further strengthened the economy. EU spent its surplus to improve post-Soviet countries which may or may not pay dividends in the future.
It may require significant reallocation of resources from certain places to tech. It may require diverting the resources spent on old pensioners who are the biggest voting block. It is not a simple lack of political will. It requires reshaping a century of decisions.
Open source software is the building blocks used by large rent (service fee) seeking corporations. They will extract large profits from any of these contracts and that is a demonstrable fact, they are also nearly all from the USA and so those profits will flow in one particular direction. It is also a historical fact that governments have run successful large scale infrastructure. Make your choice.
This logic doesn’t really hold when it comes to large governments. Their needs are large enough that they can justify employing specialists. At that point, the profit margin the service business is capturing is just inefficiency. Internal services should be more common in large governments.
In practice, Microsoft isn't going anywhere. You're just paying for an external inhouse.
imho the question should be if the country continues to function if the project goes bankrupt. If it is so essential that it needs to be saved by the government (even in theory) then it lives outside the domain of capitalism.
When I sit down at my mac, I have a working and very polished calendar, mail client, todo list, contacts, note taking app, music player, browser, photo editing and library management tools, video call and conferencing software etc. And all of it syncs with my phone and my tablet out of the box.
When I sit down at a Linux machine, I have a calendar that breaks every 5 minutes and I can't share anything with anyone without futzing with iCal feeds and hiring another provider, a mail client that is ugly as sin and doesn't integrate with the calendaring or contact management stuff at all, a job and a half to find a note taking app that actually works properly, a todo list app that syncs with nothing, a spreadsheet package that crashes whenever I try and print something and oh hell I give up by then. And the answer to this? Roll out nextcloud on a VPS. Kill me, with a spoon. This is not freedom, it's just slavery of another kind.
I just want to get shit done. Big tech covers that. Please take this as a recommendation to tidy up all this hell and just help people to get shit done and then it will be an alternative to big tech.
Now that I'm working on a proprietary version[2] (with a block editor I rewrote from scratch), I'm talking to these end users and understand their frustration in using my product. For example, many users had issues discovering the different features of the app, so I created a toolbar, which much helped. This is just one example.