this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2023
477 points (98.6% liked)
Technology
59605 readers
3438 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Like half of the internet (including lemmy's clients and server applications) run on open source code and infrastructure that Meta built and maintains.
The company obviously cares about making money, as all companies do, but the reality of our world is that most good usable software is written by for-profit corporations, that's not an argument against using it, that's an argument to develop other sources for funding software development.
Meta built and maintains a few web frameworks. That's great. They also build and maintain a propaganda network that's happy to work in accord with abusive governments, for profit. Which of these is a greater moral weight? I'm not gonna overlook the latter because react is comfy.
The irony of this being said on a Lemmy instance is amusing. Are you aware of the political leanings of the Lemmy devs and of some of the larger Lemmy instances' original communities of users? The Fediverse as a whole is managing to diversify away from that, but it just goes to show how good things can come from bad actors.
I am! and the difference is that lemmy doesn't seem designed to convert people to Marxist-Leninism, while Facebook seems designed to agitate and suppress meaningful discourse while simultaneously entrenching consumerism even more than ever. Mark Zuckerberg is one of those Roman Guys, you know, them, but I don't think that the propaganda I referred to was in service of convincing everyone that Julius Caesar was rad. Mostly, these things are larger than their founders. And Facebook is still a propaganda network designed to convince people that if they leave, they'll lose touch with all their friends.
Meta has React, RocksDB and pytorch, and a few other "niche" frameworks and tools. "Half of the internet [...] run[ning] on open source code and infrastructure that Meta built and maintains" is a big, big exaggeration. Also maintainance is done by the OSS community for big parts, and I'm really curious what open source infrastructure Meta is running.
I'm not saying Meta has no relevance in OSS, but I can hardly think of an open source org that does open source purely for its own benefit. React helps them shape the web in the way Meta wants it, their ML stuff is important for their own internal needs (ads, BI, and the whole social networking, etc.), their AR/VR/XR contributions are for the Quest, and KI/LLM since they need it themselves instead of relying/partnering with OpenAI. Meta (the company) absolutely does not stand by the principles of open source, no matter how much you want to sugarcoat it.