Stagnation of the Economy and What Free Software Can (or Could) Do For It
This article won't talk about politics or attempt to explain what sinks the economy; few would challenge the premise, however, that the global economy isn't well. Some countries are worse off than others, but everything is connected.
Hours ago someone published a provocative piece which refers to Free software as a "militant utopia of the 1980s." Pacifists sharing software is common sense; there's nothing "militant" about that...
The main thesis of that rant is that "Open Source" is controlled by large corporations, mostly GAFAM, i.e. the US. We too are dismissive of that kind of "Open Source", but we always get back to discussing the principles of Software Freedom - something that today's Firefox (or by extension, GAFAMozilla) does not get.
At the moment, many establishments around the world use GAFAM or some disservices managed from the US, e.g. Salesforce, Oracle, and Red Hat (IBM). The alleged "market value" of those is fake* and many people's savings or pensions are tied to this 'fakery' (or 'fakeness'). That is very dangerous, but the 'fake Nobel' people don't want us to believe the simple and correct explanation.
Now, consider Free software (we don't mean "Open Source"; that's separate in the era of openwashing). Free software isn't a company and pertinent bits of software don't have shares in Wall Street. The "ups and downs" of some casino-like market - with the "pump and dump" or "Ponzi scheme" manoeuvres - do not impact the code, its development, and the sharing. There's no "sales" or "licensing" aspect though in the case of copyleft there's enforcement to ensure the social contract is preserved (sharing defended, licensing information preserved).
Has the economy been built on Free software and users of software freely shared their work, a lot of the current bubble would not "happen". We'd not come to assume that enterprises whose sole "product" is some binary file with machine code (source code kept secret) are worth trillions. Because they're not worth that, not even if they refer to their "product" as something "hey hi" (AI).
Artificial inflation (AI) of "market values" is what the current market gravitates towards; if we then pour the remaining capital into those artificially-inflated "market values", what have we got? We've got a broken economy just kicking the can down the road, hoping to delay the inevitable reality check.
Many software companies will collapse, not just those that choose a domain with the ".ai" suffix. IBM can go all day long talking about "hey hi" and "quantum", but at the end of the day, IBM sinks in debt, cannot pay its workers, lays of tens of thousands of workers ("RAs"), and mostly recruits in places where the salary is very low.
If the economy wasn't built on proprietary software, this downward spiral would not happen. If your economic model is based on a pyramid of lies, it won't last very long. █
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* This is discussed in relation to IBM right now: (saving as is in case they delete some more comments, like they did yesterday)
IBM's "market value" is based on a bubble of slop.