That is an interesting idea I guess?

Maybe Google back in the "don't be evil" days, while they were apparently trying to hire a bunch of PhDs was making some sort of effort at it?

I knew one person there who worked on Google Wave and claimed that Google didn't actually innovate anything they just found ways to take existing research and make it available to end users for no monetary cost.

But, they, from my perspective, lost the path the moment they started AdWords and whatnot. Sure they became massively rich, and their CxOs and founders retired?

I can't imagine retiring, ever.

There is no end game to wealth redistribution, until every human is housed (I do not consider paying mortgage or rent housing, if anything, it's worse than being homeless, because you're paying some bank or landlord for the "privilege" of a roof?).

I watched what was it, "Dead Man's Wire" recently, and they had a bunch of Gil-Scott Heron "the revolution will not be televised" stuff; but where is the pop culture reprisal or "Whitey on the Moon"? NASA, and SpaceX and BlueOrigin, are all horrid still; and yet I heard gray beards as apologists for Musk and all, since SpaceX is "accomplishing" more than NASA as a private entity? I don't get it, there are a panoply of space programs and all of them, from my vantage: are a waste of resources until we get food scarcity, housing and health care solved for humans on Earth first.

But I used to work as a "Network Security Specialist" at a mining and construction company that had the "largest granite extraction facility West of the Mississippi" (aka the Aromas quarry) where many of the cars in the parking lots read: "EARTH FIRST, WE'LL MINE OTHER PLANETS LATER" and I just can't laugh at that BS anymore. It's so depressing. More people making hell on Earth than trying to undo the damage.

I agree that wealth redistribution is a more important problem to solve than anything else capitalism is presently faced with, but precisely none of those with money and power seem interested in it.

For profit publicly traded companies are legally liable to their shareholders to turn a profit, and risk being litigated against if they fail to deliver.

So, what are the alternatives? The warez scene with "share the wealth" paradigms were, for many decades, where the counter culture sorts toiled their skills (friends of mine were cracking copy protection in elementary school, by middle school we were training console games and more with tools and hardware most still barely know about). But eventually a lot of folks become adults and face more severe penalties or are "turned", becoming operatives for TLAs and the like. ;(

I don't see a lot of winning, I just see layers and layers of losing.

What is the line from that Dead Can Dance song: "How fortunate the man with none"?

Or the Daoists who admire the "uncarved block"?

FSF/GNU seem as if they're resplendent examples of failure to me, attempting to work "with" copyright as a poisoned pill copyleft? Sophomoric at best. Now RHEL is owned by IBM and certainly not moving the needle forward. It's become the very thing many strove against. Sun? Subsumed by Oracle. Micro$oft, owns GitHub and LinkedIn.

The scoundrels keep getting richer, but what is actually improving?

I couldn't give a shit how many FPS some video game renders on some NVIDIA GPU I can't afford that requires active cooling and generates noise pollution in the process, the engineering discipline seemingly died.

Decades ago, at that mining and construction company, I had to find fanless multi-head GPUs because fans and airflow: lead to hardware failures at mining sites which are filled with Prop 65 warning dust everywhere. I've built hardware for harsher environments (e.g. Burning Man interactive art projects) but those were not really important so much as ephemeral art in contrast.

I know some at NVIDIA, I knew some at SGI; but in general they were always the sorts who seemed to think that they could throw money at a problem and that was good "enough" for their limited needs.

The needs of the many are so much bigger than any problem SGI or NVIDIA ever seemed capable of dreaming about. I have zero faith that any meaningful solutions will come from them.

And when it comes to faith? z0mg, church attendance is so low that I'm amazed when a congregation survives at all. So many are closing due to low attendance.

This was all foreseen in Vedic scripture though. Things are prophesied to get a lot lot worse for a long long time (the current Kali Yuga cycle doesn't end until 428,899 CE) before there's real hope of any improvements. ;(

In theory, some of the rhetoric you mentioned reminds me a little bit of the FUTO funding. Some billionaire (Eron Wolf) I guess is giving funding to libre/free open source projects.

Eron Wolf, apparently made his billion(s) by "playing the game" in Silly Con Valley?

I've never met the guy. He apparently had an Amiga. I still have my Amiga 1200. Amigas were pretty groovy for their era.

I thought, years ago, maybe I would apply for a grant? I helped co-found Noisebridge (a 501c3 hacker space). I have been a contributing editor to undeadly.org (the OpenBSD Journal) from its inception (and I used to submit a lot of stories to deadly.org its predecessor). I have been contributing to various libre/free open source software projects for decades (the first BBS I was asked to Co-SysOp ran a Citadel variant, which thanks to Cynbe Ru Taren, had its source code in the public domain before the FSF even existed). Heck, my parents' church in Menlo Park, even today, still shares a parking lot with SRI (Stanford Research Institute) and I was blessed to befriend Doug Engelbart and Bill English and other luminaries before they passed away.

As a teen, I was repeatedly invited to toil on systems as nps.navy.mil (now nps.edu). Admittedly, not for pay (the "privilege" was getting to use some computer hardware that cost more than the mortgage on my parents' house); I wasn't credited either. One of my friends from that era, eventually got an M.S. from nps (he was in their VR lab); and I guess at some point was part of the team that helped give legs to the avatars at Meta? (Last time we hung out, he was working at Unity; and I guess helped with Unity support for Apple's Vision Pro. But he also worked at some other start up run by the guy who created Second Life.). I was a Co-SysOp of one of his BBSes too; but no money was exchanged, we were just friends. He wasn't charging folks for access, he wasn't making $ from that fun, why would he be paying anyone to help what was already a labor of love?

So I dunno, I never "played the game" like Eron Wolf. Neither did that friend from my teens, nor my other savvy friends from my teens and earlier. None of us are billionaires.

But I did email Louis Rossmann and inquired about maybe getting a grant somehow?

He asked for more clarification on what it is that I did, and I emailed back and never got a response.

So I dunno. I've applied to other grants and jobs and whatnot, but I can't shake the feeling that those with the $ aren't really sharing it too freely?

At least, not with me.

Louis seemed enthused that I knew Mitch Altman. But oblivious that I know Mitch, because he would do Circuit Hacking Mondays classes at Noisebridge. That I've known Mitch, probably longer than Louis has, by some margin.

I probably know a lot of other folks like Mitch, but Mitch also isn't a billionaire. I don't know how to phrase things in a meaningful way I guess.

When I worked on Syzygryd, that was funded in part by a grant from the Burning Man organization. That's probably the only project to which I have ever co-contributed which had some grant funding, but I didn't write the grant application for that one. Moreover, of all the funding it received? I still sank who knows how many unpaid hours and thousands of dollars of my own money into it, and I was just one of maybe 60 some odd contributors who were all probably doing the same. I don't think the grant covered more than a mere fraction of what it took to co-create that giant interactive fire art sculpture/grid sequencer.

But I guess Ladybird got a $250,000 grant from the FUTO organization?

IIRC, the BM org grant for Syzygryd was $60,000 and we delivered, in under a year.

Ladybird I don't know when they will have public builds available. I tried to build the code from source, and was unsuccessful. I encountered use of Homebrew and vcpkg, both of which are spyware by default (they call their spyware "telemetry" but it has to be explicitly configured to be turned off) and when I raised concerns about that on a YouTube video about Ladybird? That comment was deleted in fewer than 24 hours.

Call me crazy, but a "privacy" focused browser, IMHO, shouldn't be using tool chains which have spyware on by default. Alternative tool chains exist, which don't have such practices, but I am not a developer in the Ladybird project and based on my preliminary interactions with its codebase, it is a non trivial amount of effort to rejigger it into something that doesn't rely on such dependencies.

But it was eye opening as far as what was actually getting funding from one of those billionaires who "played the game".

Near as I can discern, they have a false perception of reality: over gamification. For many (most?) of us, life isn't a game and it isn't playful and it's really upsetting to see how they redistribute their wealth, while actively ignoring others who thought maybe there was a hope they weren't being disingenuous.

I guess I am accustomed to being let down and false promises? It still leaves an impression when encountering double speak though. As my divorce attorney once told me: "you are too honest for your own good."

Meanwhile, my perspective: truth and honesty are real goods, deviation from such precepts is a quick path to other hell realms.