there is a reason why Purism makes a big deal of the SPC status … at least in written form but so far the opposite has not been demonstrated …
with BIG TECH commercial companies financial profits tend to have the priority (because they have INVESTORS)
the GPL license is the ONLY thing keeping EXISTING code FREE … and if THIS license does NOT change then it ALSO guarantees the fact that FUTURE code contributions will remain in the PUBLIC pool code base … this ALSO protects from code duplication across different ecosystems and thus WASTE … it keeps the code efficient and lean although GNOME is largely just BLOAT (for the so called NORMIES)
I’m afraid it doesn’t matter if big companies will use fsf/open source software for profit.
Some reasons for this:
vote by money, as long as you buying products which will respect your freedom big companies loosing that money and it forces them to change the strategy
fsf/os community can develop products much faster and make them more advance than big tech (example dotnet core from MS. Community now is contributing much more than MS simply they don’t have that many resources)
technological growth gives much more benefits than money (Steve could be alive if he invest his resources into cancer research). And money is just an instrument of choosing evolutionary direction. It’s like everyday election of future.
most difficult to build/change human behavior (why do you think mac for kids exists?). For example big companies can use overton window or other interesting ways to influence people decisions. (why do you think yt influencers getting crazy payments for ridiculous things?)
Even if they use fsf/os we still have a lot of leverage.
I believe point #4 is what fsf/os community is lacking for. And advert and brain washing kinda contradicts with os/fsf ideology itself. So the only way here is to educate people so they can better understand what’s going on and make their own decisions.
Purism is doing great job by pushing fsf/os over media and advertisement. Eventually it should lead to more people using fsf/os means more investing in fsf/os and less to big tech.
Is Risc-V or another open source solution even required for a phone to be FSF compliant? Even with Risc-V, you still need a chip manufacturer to build an SOC around the Risc-V core. Couldn’t any chip manufacturer build a FSF compliant SOC around a proprietary core? As I understand it, as long as there is no secret firmware nor features of the core running or available on the device, the SOC manufacturer’s datasheet should be all that is necessary while staying FSF compliant. The datasheet needs to disclose everything. But many MCU manufacturers openly publish everything by default anyway.
It appears to be at the SOC stage and not at the core level, where most of the privacy violations occur and where secrecy are built in to the device. Theoretically, anyone should be able to pay the standard licensing fees to use use the ARM core and then build the rest of an FSF compliant SOC around that ARM core. All of the needed peripherals for the SOC would need to be FSF compliant too. I think this is where things get difficult. Every little proprietor who builds any kind of peripheral wants to maintain secrecy while cashing-in on their peripheral at the same time. Someone needs to break that paradigm by publishing everything on good peripherals they sell in to the market, to force the rest of the industry to follow or be left behind. No one needs to worry about losing their IP in the process, any more than someone could successfully steal the ARM core. Patent and import laws protect markets. Mask sets are still not generally available to would-be pirates. Generally, theives are too lazy to reverse-engineer the insides of an SOC. It would probably be easier to just develop their own SOC than to steal someone else’s SOC and maintain pirate status afterward.
So this brings us back to the SOC peripherals. We need phone chip manufacturers to release SOCs to market that contain peripherals that come unencumbered by only certain kinds of intellectual property rights, while allowing the manufacturers to maintain some kinds of secrets of a kind that we don’t care about. Any unencumbered core (there are several to choose from available) will do. And I don’t think we really care to know what the manufacturer’s secrets are, that are locked inside of the chip below the architectural level. All we need to have is full access to understand the architecture (with no secrets there) and to know exactly what the chip does and does not do, and how to program the device to access the peripherals, without any of that being a secret. When it comes to how the chip achieves those means, the SOC manufacturer can keep those secrets. Most of those secrets involve how they put so many transistors in such a small space, and exactly how the manufacturing process works (things that we don’t care about). We shouldn’t care about everything. Conspiracy theories can abound anywhere. But the big chip manufacturers are like banks. They don’t try to steal your money because they have too much to lose, if caught. The SOC datasheet should claim full architectual and operational disclosure of the device and that should suffice.
When you buy a car, all you need is the owner’s manual. You don’t need to know what is going on inside of its computer, although you have a right to know if it is spying on you. The same should be true with SOC chips. To obtain such a core is easy in today’s market. When the SOC manufacturers add in peripherals and keep that code secret, that is where the SOC starts violating your privacy. So we need to find a way to make the SOC manufacturers operate the same way that most MCU manufacturers operate already now. I can’t think of a good reason to focus on the core which is already at commodity status now.
We need good 4G and 5G modems to come with access information that resides in the public domain. We don’t care about most of their secrets. We just need enough information to be able to write our own drivers and to see that they’re not spying on us.
Interesting you say this. In the US at least, for-profit corporations are legally obligated to maximize profits, so what you say is a gross understatement.
That’s not exactly accurate. It’s actually quite inaccurate. First you have to distinguish between publicly traded companies and privately/untraded companies.
Privately held corporations have no legal obligation to maximize profit, or anything else in terms of goals.
Publicly traded companies (or more specifically, the board and executives of such a company) have a fiduciary duty to the shareholders, to pursue the long-term interests of the shareholders. This generally means a duty to pursue profit, but there is no obligation to maximize profit. Instead, they have an obligation to balance expected profit with acceptable risk, and also balance short and long term performance.
The one legal absolute is that they must be honest in what their goals are. If they are trying to be “safe”, minimize risks of losses, that’s fine, but they can’t say they are trying to maximize short-term revenue in that case. Likewise, if they are engaging in high-risk R&D, they must disclose that.
Maybe I do, maybe I don’t, but either way I should be able look and modify at will because it is openly documented and unencumbered by license. It’s why I’ll never buy a Tesla, as much as I admire them.
On a tangent, I drove a Model S the other day. I don’t know if it had “ludicrous” mode or whatever it is called, but it was AWD and had the extra range battery. I pulled out of the supermarket parking lot (that’s where the SuperCharger station was), accelerating vigorously onto a 2-lane highway. Let me say that I am NOT prone to any sort of motion sickness – car, sea, air or violent roller-coasters . Let me also say that my inner ears immediately told my brain that I was in complete freefall as I pulled out. The acceleration was… quite substantial. I have never experienced that sensation except maybe jumping off a cliff into the water, the difference being this was horizontal, not vertical. Fortunately, my hands on the wheel and my eyes out the windscreen told my brain the truth and I kept the car pointed in the right direction. It could not have been much more than 3 seconds before I looked down and saw that I was doing 85 MPH. Still, my wife wrenched her neck and the other passenger ended up wearing her drink. I would love to be able to do that at will, but I’ll never own one, due to the privacy implications of the system.
That was my thinking when I first heard about the Chevy Volt. Where I live, a pure EV is incredibly impractical. The co-axial hybrid drive train, on the other hand, is an engineering marvel. Only problem is I can’t audit the code.
Heck, on something like a car, I don’t even care to be able to change the code, as I just want it to work, and requiring signed firmware and so on can help with security. But I do insist on being able to read the code, and compile it myself (which means a reproducible build).
not exactly. EV vehicles and most of the technologies that have been held back by the petrol industry giants have been possible for quite some time … how i miss Atlas Shrugged
So does John Galt drive a Tesla? That’s a set-up question. Next, someone who hasn’t read the book or seen the movie is supposed to ask the logical question… and then all hell breaks loose and civilization starts crashing.
I think Richard Stallman had it right. Free as in freedom of speech, not free beer. Hang on to that Warranty Canary. You’re going to need it.
I doubt most mushbrain Samsung customers and apple respectively would even know what to do with GNU linux.
Its doesnt have all the spyware like facebook , instagram , whatsapp , snapchat and all the backdoored android apps they need to have in their lives.
Samsung wouldnt even bother. They know their consumer base are the sheeple that love being spied on and have all their data stolen and sold to the highest bidder .
Craigslist, a private company, got sued by its shareholder eBay, because it was doing philanthropy instead of maximizing profits. Here is what the judge wrote in his judgement finding in favor of eBay:
The corporate form in which craigslist operates, however, is not an appropriate vehicle for purely philanthropic ends, at least not when there are other stockholders interested in realizing a return on their investment. Jim and Craig opted to form craigslist, Inc. as a for-profit Delaware corporation and voluntarily accepted millions of dollars from eBay as part of a transaction whereby eBay became a stockholder. Having chosen a for-profit corporate form, the craigslist directors are bound by the fiduciary duties and standards that accompany that form. Those standards include acting to promote the value of the corporation for the benefit of its stockholders. The “Inc.” after the company name has to mean at least that. Thus, I cannot accept as valid for the purposes of implementing the Rights Plan a corporate policy that specifically, clearly, and admittedly seeks not to maximize the economic value of a for-profit Delaware corporation for the benefit of its stockholders
So, there’s a fair bit to unpack here, so let’s see what we can tease out here. Observations, then analysis.
First, note that the judge limits this finding to “when there are other stockholders interested in realizing a return on their investment”.
Second, “promote the value of the corporation” != “maximize profits”.
Third, the action to which Ebay objected was “for purely philanthropic ends”.
Fourth, while not publicly traded, Craigslist was traded, which means that the way the sellers presented the company for the purpose of making that sale matters.
The first and last point are rather closely related. If I am the sole owner of a corporation, then the position the company takes is what I want it to be. Likewise, if there are a small handful of us, and we agree on the company position, there is no issue. Where it gets muddy is when one of the stockholders disagrees, either on what the purpose of the company is, or on some particular of how that purpose is pursued. The judge only precluded the case where a company is doing something particularly damaging to its value, with an acknowledgement that it is doing so. This says nothing about companies electing to forego risky ventures, even when the expected return on the risky venture is positive (even the most positive option on the table).
Anyway, it is good to note that just because a company isn’t listed on an exchange doesn’t mean the board has no fiduciary duty to the stockholders, but that’s really as far as that goes.
am i mistaken in assuming that in the USA (a country with strong capitalist beliefs) this “position” is, most of the time, one that holds that CAPITAL must necessarily mean “maximizing profits for it’s shareholders at any cost” ? is this influenced by atheist beliefs in any-way ?
One interpretation holds that court cases in the 1950s and 1960s overturned the idea that a corporation has to maximize profits for the benefit of shareholders. The other interpretation is that “corporate officers and directors have a duty to manage the corporation for the purpose of maximizing profits for the benefit of shareholders”, but in practice corporations can’t be sued by shareholders because boards of directors and executives can always claim that they believed that what they were doing was increasing the value of the company.
If Craigslist had simply claimed that its philanthropic activity was good publicity that helped grow its market share and helped create more loyal Craiglist users, then it probably would have won its case against eBay.
However, you want to interpret the case law, it seems to me that the de facto reality is that executives and boards of directors face pressure from shareholders to maximize profits, and the incentive structure also pushes them to maximize profits. Executives do have to worry that they will be fired if they decide to run a company in a way that benefits society more than the shareholders.
Forbes claims that this attitude is now changing in the business world, but I have to see more evidence before I’m convinced that business practices are truly changing, and this isn’t simply a PR exercise.
When you form a new corporation, you need to compose articles of incorporation. Those articles contain a lot of legal mumbo-jumbo to comply with state requirements and to create a legal shell under which everything else can be built. After that, you get to set the rules under which the authority structure of the corporation is governed, and what the purpose of the company is. Every company is or should be unique. Any attorney that uses an unchanged rubber stamp or template that fits all companies that he helps to define, does a dis-service to his clients. So if your leadership of the company fits its charter, and is legal per state law too, then no one can stop you or control how you lead the company. Point your angry stock holders back to the charter and tell them to get lost. The courts will side with you. Just make sure that you and the others who like you and what you are doing, hold a majority of the stock. Otherwise they can vote to fire you.
But then, there is that legal mumbo-jumbo that also went in to the articles of incorporation because the state required it. You are bound by those things. Some of them might have clauses to protect the stock holders and you can’t escape those unless perhaps, by filing under a different type of corporation. Maybe instead of a being a typical C-Corp, you file as a charity or as a social purpose corporation. Theoretically, there are ways that a corporation could convert from one type to another. That might be as easy as a few friends agreeing, if the company is very small. I don’t know how one would convince all of the owners of Microsoft stock to give up their equity and convert the company to become a charity. Legall, it could be done. But for practical purposes, it’ll never happen.
You are mistaken, sorta. Small businesses account for roughly 80% of the US economy (or at least did before March, but that’s another issue). With a single owner (or often a single family), there is a great deal of flexibility in company priorities. Most of them started because the founders enjoy the work, so it’s pretty common if you talk to them to hear some variation of “I’ll never get rich doing this, but that’s ok”. That said, they do need to keep “the bottom line” in mind, as they certainly won’t want to lose money (and will generally have a required return, more on that below).
As for atheism being a factor, it seems likely. There’s a concept in economics called “time preference”, essentially, how much greater a future reward must be in order to forego something now. Given that (this) life is finite, any gratification sufficiently delayed is lost, so we would expect atheists to have a fairly high time preference. That said, the importance of this factor is difficult to measure. Atheists still, by and large, seek to provide for their children and grandchildren, and generally are decent toward their friends. So it’s not generally the case that personal power and riches are their sole driving motivation.
There are two different things at work here. What Forbes is saying, and what you doubt, is that businesses are starting to pursue the interests of people other than their shareholders. This is visible in “business ethics” classes, which recently have started talking about “stakeholders” instead of “shareholders”, meaning anyone affected by the business. Note that the arguments used for the “stakeholder” model do not make the “rising tide” argument (and in fact are generally nonsense).
I was going to bring up articles of incorporation before, but I forgot. Your explanation of them is quite good. This is related to the second “thing” from above. As a (potential) shareholder of a company, what I can reasonably expect from the executives is for them to respect the corporate charter. If they violate that charter, even if it’s for the sake of making larger profits now, I have every right to be angry (and to sue, or to fire them if I’m the majority owner).
Before I continue, I need to explain (as simply as I can) required returns. Basically, a required return is how much money an investment needs to make for the person making the investment to be happy with it. It doesn’t matter if an investment turned a profit, if it would have made more sitting in a savings account at the local bank (or a government bond or similar). In fact, it must exceed the return I’d get from the bank by enough to offset the increased risk that goes with the type of investment.
Another important concept is marginal utility. The important thing to note in this case is that marginal utility of a thing generally decreases as the amount of that thing available increases. To see it in the extreme, consider the value of a glass of potable water to a man in the desert vs a man in a rainstorm.
So far, I think there’s been an assumption that “not seeking to maximize profit” means seeking some other goal, such as societal reform, “social justice”, environmentalism, or similar. While that could be something mentioned in a corporate charter, it is not what I had in mind when I first said corporations don’t have to maximize profit.
Let’s consider a concrete scenario, as I think it’ll highlight the point I’m trying to make. Let’s say you have saved up $300 000 for retirement. You have purchased stock in a holding company, using say $50 000. That company’s charter says it’s supposed to seek low risk investments, with a goal of capital preservation (in short, while you likely won’t make much, you should notlose value). Now, let’s say that company’s managers get a chance to invest 90% of the company’s assets in a venture which has a 90% chance to return 300% in 1y and a 10% chance to lose it all. The expected return is (0.9 * 300 + 0.1 * 0)%, or 270%. That is a higher return than anything else the company is considering. Should they go for it?
I hope the answer is obvious. It’s no. The reason is quite simple. The company’s required return is whatever the inflation rate happens to be, taking a high risk investment to exceed that required return is extremely irresponsible. This is where marginal utility comes in. The $45 000 of your money they are risking is more valuable to you than the $120 000 you’d get back at the end of the year. You weren’t planning to get $120 000, you were planning on still having that $50 000. The upshot amount here doesn’t matter, it could be an expected return of $1M+, but rolling the dice on it is not acceptable for this company.
I definitely agree with the concept of the stakeholders having an interest in the corporation. Stock holders are just one form of many different forms of stake holdership. An honest charter will acknowledge that and if not, state laws apply.
The state gives the company officers and executives, the right to be personally indemnified from the risks taken by the corporation, in exchange for certain accountability by the corporation to the state who at least in theory, should represent the interests of the public. For company founders, this is a huge benefit. Their personal financial empires can be amassed using the financial leverage made possible by the assets of the corporation, while at the same time these same individuals experience no personal risk. People often forget that in exchange, the company has a fiduciary duty to the public. The exact duty is mostly decided subjectively. The company creates jobs for the community. That is good. But what if the company harms the community in a way where there are no regulations to stop them? Who decides if there are no laws nor provisions found in the charter to cover a given situation, what is fair? Sometimes, there is a lot of wiggle room for the company. At the same time, Capitalism is somewhat sacred in the American economy. Unless the company is belching out toxic fumes in to the Mayor’s home, no one sees what the big deal is about, and they look the other way. I saw a news story on TV about a large pig farm in a rural community. The smell of pig feces permitted the surrounding air for several miles in all directions on a permanent and on-going basis. Several people who lived in the area complained vigorously. The owners of the pig farm just laughed while on the news cameras and said “smells like money to me”.
Anyone who wants to promote a social purpose should start a social purpose corporation as opposed to a traditional corporation. If financing social purposes becomes the norm, then better ethics are likely to apply.
As an historical note, prior to about 1900 (in the U.S.), the remedy for those living near that farm (or down-wind of a railway or factory) was to sue for an injunction and compensation from the offending party. Factories and railways actually spent a fair amount of R&D on mitigating emissions to avoid these costly suits.
Unfortunately, the industrialists of the time (mostly the railroads, but others too) successfully lobbied the courts that the process of industrialization was too important to be stopped by individuals filing for injunctions. Instead, the politicians (mostly in the pockets, directly or otherwise, of the industrialists) would decide on “acceptable” levels of pollution. Funny how that turns into more pollution than most of us would like. Also funny how that more pollution gets blamed on “capitalism”.
