this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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Showerthoughts

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If everyone moved to open source non-profit solutions, the tech industry would lose billions (programming.dev)
submitted 1 year ago by gogosempai@programming.dev to c/showerthoughts@lemmy.world
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I'm a FOSS (free and open source software) contributor and enthusiast. So I prefer to use such products (Lemmy instead of Reddit, Linux instead of Windows, Firefox instead of Chrome, Signal instead of WhatsApp, you get the idea). Was just thinking that if everyone moved to such solutions, the tech and ad industry would lose billions of dollars. That would translate to governments losing billions of dollars in tax revenue. Would such a move ever be encouraged then by the governments?

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[–] gogosempai@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago

Infra cost isn't as high. A company reaping a billion in profit yearly would be spending around 10-20M only on infra (my previous company had 100M users and this is the estimate from that). So a nonprofit would just seek funds for infra and dev cost. Of course, it all depends on the kind of platform. But how about people embracing FOSS? Switching to Linux from Windows, to LibreOffice from O365, to GrapheneOS/LineageOS from Android, to Firefox from Chrome, that sort of thing. It'd be a drastic blow to the revenue of these companies. What people used to pay for earlier, they'd not be paying anymore. Maybe this would translate to other things like the cost of laptops and mobile phones rising because manufacturers will no longer be incentivised from software companies.