> What we need is not cloud desktops, or cloud storage. We need local desktops with a decent distributed filesystem, and vendor agnostic access to that filesystem from all our devices.
That's absolutely spot on. The problem is: who is going to pay for it?
No vendor will do this because it would break lock-in, and building something like this and making it polished enough for widespread adoption is far beyond what pure volunteer open source can reasonably accomplish.
The problem is economic, not technical. There is no business model for user-empowering software anymore.
Software is extremely costly to produce but we pretend it's free and won't pay for it directly, so instead the industry has deeply wrapped itself around business models in which we are the product or that use lock-in to force payment eventually.
If you dig deeply you’ll see that a large fraction of that is actually employees at big companies, universities, and governments. In other words it’s subsidized. Any on the clock OSS work is a subsidy. It’s not pure volunteer.
This tends to be done when there is a strong common interest, but it’s almost always for deep tech and dev tooling stuff. I have never seen an open source consumer product subsidized in this way because consumer lock in is where the money is.
You will never see an open Uber, Ring, or Alexa unless a way can be found to charge for it. As it stands free means “as in beer” more than freedom and nobody would pay for such a thing.
I have played with stuff like Home Assistant. It’s not bad if you are technical. A non-techie could never deploy it.
That's absolutely spot on. The problem is: who is going to pay for it?
No vendor will do this because it would break lock-in, and building something like this and making it polished enough for widespread adoption is far beyond what pure volunteer open source can reasonably accomplish.
The problem is economic, not technical. There is no business model for user-empowering software anymore.
Software is extremely costly to produce but we pretend it's free and won't pay for it directly, so instead the industry has deeply wrapped itself around business models in which we are the product or that use lock-in to force payment eventually.