Silicon Valley's original sin is Steve Jobs conning Steve Wozniak and a bunch of tech contractors into building his business empire. Every company in the Bay Area is a politically implausible liason of a very specific kind of Objectivist control freak CEO[0] and the hippie nerds that can actually build what they want to sell.
The hacker mindset of openness is very easy to confuse with Jobs-types that want openness for thee but not for me. It's very easy to complain about people currently abusing their power (remember Google's "Don't Be Evil" poking fun at Microsoft?) but hard to recognize incipient abuses of future power. The only way to unambiguously avoid this is to go full Stallman[1] and categorically distolerate any amount of control or ownership over one's work.
To make matters worse, this industry is one in which you really can't make money unless you're selling something that's closed off and locked down. The people who actually do play fair get bankrupted any time the government is looking the other way on antitrust.
[0] Yes, I am calling out YCombinator. You're part of the problem.
[1] To be clear, RMS very much has Jobs' personality, grafted onto Woz's morality and skill. He would have become just as awful as Jobs had he not insisted on Free Software early on.
I don't think it's fully impossible, but rather just very difficult, especially if operating in the software space. I'd call framework laptops an example of the exception to the rule. But yes, they're very rare.
"Always has been."
Silicon Valley's original sin is Steve Jobs conning Steve Wozniak and a bunch of tech contractors into building his business empire. Every company in the Bay Area is a politically implausible liason of a very specific kind of Objectivist control freak CEO[0] and the hippie nerds that can actually build what they want to sell.
The hacker mindset of openness is very easy to confuse with Jobs-types that want openness for thee but not for me. It's very easy to complain about people currently abusing their power (remember Google's "Don't Be Evil" poking fun at Microsoft?) but hard to recognize incipient abuses of future power. The only way to unambiguously avoid this is to go full Stallman[1] and categorically distolerate any amount of control or ownership over one's work.
To make matters worse, this industry is one in which you really can't make money unless you're selling something that's closed off and locked down. The people who actually do play fair get bankrupted any time the government is looking the other way on antitrust.
[0] Yes, I am calling out YCombinator. You're part of the problem.
[1] To be clear, RMS very much has Jobs' personality, grafted onto Woz's morality and skill. He would have become just as awful as Jobs had he not insisted on Free Software early on.