Beyond that, we're beholden to nothing. Try to enclose a browser, fine, we'll all jump to a fork and you'll be left with a ghost town.

But in that migration, some more fundamental questions get stirred up. "Maybe browsers and the internet itself could be different, at a deeper level?" "Why do we tacitly accept the superstructure that's largely dictated to us by the likes of Google?"

Those are the questions that really excite me. That's where the real innovation happens.

4/4

One of the greatest strengths of OSS is that it can capture funding and resources from the business world, but it can't effectively be captured *by* the business world. Sure, it can be influenced by money, but there's a built-in regulatory mechanism from the freedom to fork, and one that voids all the typical MBA extraction and lock-in tactics.

Freedom to fork also caps the power of aspiring tiny tyrants like this new CEO.

3/..

I have long believed that OSS represents something that cannot be properly characterized in terms of the cold war era capitalist vs anticapitalist dichotomy. I've debated this with both business and leftie types.

The freedom to fork fundamentally changes what power dynamics are even possible. What you get from that and the downstream effects are something altogether beyond that dichotomy.

2/..