My hope is that all these "independent of US technologies" actually end up being "independent of for-profit companies" rather than about the specific technologies and companies involved, as what countries are "the good countries" change all the time, but non-profit/for-profit choices seem to last a lot longer than the status of any country.
I don't think profit is the core problem here. It's control. A non-profit Microsoft is just as susceptible to cooptation by a hostile foreign government as a for-profit organization.
Rather the key thing is having the source code, control of the deployment, and control of the infrastructure. There are plenty of places in there where profit is completely compatible with achieving full control.
> A non-profit Microsoft is just as susceptible to cooptation by a hostile foreign government as a for-profit organization.
Why did Microsoft follow the orders of the president, if it wasn't because they're afraid of payback in terms of "something that leads to us loosing money"?
Money perverse the actions of the for-profit companies, as suddenly you have someone like Tim Cook giving gifts to the president, as the survival of his company depends on a specific person having a good view of them personally.
If neither of these companies were so hellbent on doing everything they can for profit, and instead focused on providing reliable, trustworthy and user-focused services, they wouldn't have that worry anymore. But of course, this is a pipe-dream and not at all realistic in the current climate.
As someone who previously was part of the management of a small non-profit, we absolutely cared about things that lead to us losing money...
Now, we might have had good reason to pursue a plan that cost us money, but in general, threats to our funding are effectively threats to our existence.
> Why did Microsoft follow the orders of the president, if it wasn't because they're afraid of payback in terms of "something that leads to us loosing money"?
There exist other techniques to bring open source projects and their maintainers into line.
Non-profits follow the laws of the country where they are located. This means that if somebody like Trump decides to abuse their authority by placing sanctions on ICC prosecutors, the non-profit Microsoft will similarly follow local law, or be at risk of other enforcement actions against them.
Profit and money have nothing to do with what the ICC was reacting to. It's about power, law, and autocracy.
No man is an island. There must always be a dependency on the outside world. But you can reduce risk by using commodified products.
Agree, but non-profits can rely on other non-profits, foundations or similar entities, rather than for-profit entities, and you're still collaborating with the world at large, just avoiding one particular hairball that has a tendency to infect everything it comes into touch with.
Sure. But this is exactly why we'd be better off with open-source software, hardware, etc, managed and maintained in a distributed fashion by nonprofits in many different countries. (I have no idea if there's legally such a thing as a "multinational nonprofit", though certainly such things exist in practice—eg, Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders.)
Any for-profit company is highly incentivized to keep their products proprietary, locked behind copyright, obfuscation, etc, or even provided only as SaaS. They are also highly incentivized to avoid the negative attention of the governments of any of the countries they operate in, because their primary goal is to remain profitable.
Nonprofits do not have that requirement, and are much more likely to be able to attract people who are willing to defy oppressive, censorious, or outright fascist governments in order to continue to provide high-quality software & hardware to everyone without limitation or discrimination.
There's also the problem that "non-profit" is a weird, inconsistent designation that a lot of people get very rich on.
I think we need to stop centering capitalism entirely, and start concentrating specifically on the process of how decisions are made. Collective deliberation, and the rules around it, seem to just be waved off when they are the substance that democracy and collective ownership are made of.
Whether that group is profit-making or not, it's the decision-making that's important. Who gets a say, how is what has been said handled, and how does that affect the allocation of resources and the direction of movement?
edit: FOSS has a "benevolent dictator" problem and is obsessed with either praising them or tearing them down. A stable organization fluidly changes leadership without changing character: it should only change character when the membership changes, with the consent of the previous membership. The ability of FOSS to simply fork puts it in a blessed position to follow this strictly (and still maintain a friendly relationship between forks.)
What is capitalism if not a particular way of making decisions?
That’s kind of an interesting and profound question. I’m inclined to answer that it’s a way of efficiently allocating resources without making decisions in other words, there is no group voting about allocating resources. Of course, “efficiency” is probably in the eye of the beholder.
I would argue that the decisions are still made, first at the individual level choices, then as the larger behavior that emerges from them. The strange part is that you can't point to any specific entity making those larger choices (aside from "the economy" or whatever) but I'd say they're still being made. This ultimately comes down to how you want to define "decision" though.
Yep, I agree with this. No one is making macro scale resource allocation decisions and yet resources are allocated reasonably efficiently (for some value of “efficiency”). The collective “decision” is an emergent property of countless individual decisions, much like an ant colony exhibits complex and sophisticated decision making as an emergent property of simple individual decisions.
Or like a bunch of neurons doing their thing.
Capitalism is arrived at through two primary ways
One is utilitarianism. Capitalism, or possibly hybrid capitalism, depending on your viewpoint, has been correlated with the largest lift of people out of poverty in all of history.
The other is ethical. If you start with the tenant that each man owns himself, and therefore his labor, and therefore the fruits of his labor. And that he can mix his labor with unclaimed natural resources, and thereby claim that mixed labor. And also, consensually trade those fruits with others, unmolested by 3rd party violence. Then you will end up with an economic system based on private property and capital largely controlled by for profit enterprise, which should approximate capitalism.
I believe only in the utilitarian case might it be that it be intentionally arrived to as a method of making decisions, rather than the way decisions being made more as a byproduct.
Except that a person born has rights granted to them about land and property mostly decided on capital. Very few farmers can refuse to sell the a megacorp. If you think this has no impact, find some un-used land that you have not inherited or purchased using capital and see how long you can grow food on it before someone objects. They might say it is a park, or a front yard, or a military training ground, but realistically, all those concepts of ownership were originally tied to capital and without substantial capital, you are a serf. A lesser. There is no commonhold for you to use. There are no unclaimed natural resources.
Neither of these seem viable to me. You definitely can’t run an organization without doing business with for-profit companies. Probably the most feasible solution is diversifying dependencies so you can’t be extorted by any one country.
EDIT: downvoters, can you please share what you’re disagreeing with or objecting to? Is any of this particularly controversial?
I have not had much luck in the past in getting substantive discussion around "profit" centered critiques. Except for once, and that individual person didn't have a problem with smaller companies making profits, it was only big companies, and I wasn't quite sure that they cared about profit as much as too much centralized control. So I'm commenting here as a bookmark to hopefully learn more, should you get some thoughtful responses.
Yeah, looks like this one is no different. I’m not even sure what I said that was disagreeable!