TFA assumes that everyone can do code reversing with trivial ease using the new tools, and therefore we don’t need open source or “free software” anymore.
I submit that the people who can do code reversing may have recently increased significantly, thanks to the new tools. But a ten times a one-in-a-billion type person only gets you a few one-in-a-hundred-million people as a result.
And the goalposts are moving. The same tools that make code reversing easier today will also be used by the other side to make it more difficult to do code reversing in the future.
This is a race condition, which I don’t think we can win just by throwing away the entire open source/free code group of communities. The other side has way too much money and way too strong of an incentive to shut us down, so that they can now profit without restrictions via unlimited rent seeking.
The more things we see like this, the more we need to kick them back — and harder.
TFA assumes that everyone can do code reversing with trivial ease using the new tools, and therefore we don’t need open source or “free software” anymore.
I submit that the people who can do code reversing may have recently increased significantly, thanks to the new tools. But a ten times a one-in-a-billion type person only gets you a few one-in-a-hundred-million people as a result.
And the goalposts are moving. The same tools that make code reversing easier today will also be used by the other side to make it more difficult to do code reversing in the future.
This is a race condition, which I don’t think we can win just by throwing away the entire open source/free code group of communities. The other side has way too much money and way too strong of an incentive to shut us down, so that they can now profit without restrictions via unlimited rent seeking.
The more things we see like this, the more we need to kick them back — and harder.