Of course you can still be fired instantly for huge mistakes but it’s difficult to prove for them which is why I’ve never seen it used.

I have seen it a few times, but there have to be severe and generally repeated offenses, though you can get fired instantly for stuff like serious stealing from the company. But then again, there was once a dude who tried to start a fist fight with his bosses’ boss, which apparently wasn’t enough for him to get fired instantly.

As far as I know this is standard at least in western Europe, I believe it is required by law, but it could also be defined in general contracts.

And it’s not just for the employer, it’s mostly for the worker since if you get fired, the employer needs a good reason (repeated or severe breach or contract) to immediately end the contract. So unless you fuck up severely, they still have to pay you for 3 months while you are looking for a job.

And in practice, most are aware that during this time period, they effectively can’t really control you all that much. Sure, if you just don’t show up for work at all or obviously breache the contract, they don’t have to pay you, but otherwise, what are they gonna do, fire you?

In some jobs you can essentially get 3 additional months of paid vacation if they don’t need you to teach the new guy or if they are scared that you could be a pain in the ass, so they just send you home while they pay you for 3 months.

I mean those features are addictive, so it isn’t that odd that people want their fix.

I have been playing squad on linux without any issues for a while now, I don’t think I even had to do any tinkering.

When it comes to cutting expenses, government institutions are always very interested, so it makes sense to outsource all sorts of things.

On paper, sort of. Government IT projects are often seen as cash machines by private businesses where I’m from because there is often a generous budget and government institutions tend to want to use those budgets completely because if they don’t, some will start wondering if they really need that much budget or if it maybe can be shortened a bit… There have been notorious cases where there were huge projects that ended up being even more expensive than initially planned because the private contractors just milked it. And there is of course a lot of mutual masturbation between government institutions and big tech.

And government institutions tend to follow the private sector. The private sector has been pushing to the cloud for a long time now to the point where virtually nobody is suggesting or providing support for on-premise solutions. When every IT contractors says that moving everything to the google/microsoft cloud is the state of the art (and that there are 0 downsides to it and everything is 100% secure), most will not question it.

some countries have decided that all of mining industry, railways, electricity and water must be kept in government hands, no matter the cost. Same sort of things can happen with IT services once you burn your fingers badly enough.

Recently there has been somewhat of a push for open source solutions and big tech independent solutions for government institutions as they start to notice the downsides and potential security risks. And I mean it’s absolutely ridiculous, there are entire IT projects where entire systems and solutions were developed to provide a secure software solution for the military (costing hundreds of millions), but then they want to share those files with sharepoint online…

You don’t see governments or companies using gmail, now do you.

Many definitely do use it. But now that many have moved towards microsoft and/or google cloud services (mostly pushed by the private sector), people are indeed noticing that maybe, it’s not the best idea for public institutions to be dependent on foreign corporations.

Why should companies and governments use TweetBook or Snapstargram for official communication when they can host their own instance.

Well because “cloud is the future” and hosting your own instances is not “cost effective”.

For the time being, the problem has been that large majority of the people are using these unstable platforms, so companies decided to follow.

Big tech companies have been fighting for the dependency of the private sector for decades. Even before the cloud, there was a dependency on windows, Microsoft office and exchange. Now big tech is selling the promise that “they will take care of everything, you don’t need a ton of IT employees who administer everything, microsoft/google will take care of everything”.

I think you might have replied to the wrong person?

If you seriously compare socialism with opensource then I’m sorry for you.

This is how big tech saw free software until quite recently. Microsoft used to call linux communist.

FOSS basically goes against the concept of private property of software and embraced common ownership of software. Without private property, there is no capitalism. I wouldn’t call FOSS communism or socialism, but there are elements in it.

You wouldn’t have react.js without capitalism.

Ok, and what’s your point? If you read Marx, one essential point he claims is that without capitalism, there cannot be socialism.

They could have used different library for js. one made totally by volunteers, but they haven’t. Why?

Probably because they saw no use in reinventing the wheel? And why should they?

It’s as if you told a revolutionary during the French revolution “You used weapons that you looted from the Bastille, weapons that were produced by the king.”. What exactly would be the argument here?

the disastrous YouTube monetisation policy comes in part from a desire to keep the site “child friendly”

Sure, but the reason why they want to keep the site “child friendly” is because content for children is incredibly profitable and because advertisers don’t want their ads getting related to “controversial” content.

Even if YouTube was run by a worker co-op, or was a state enterprise those two factors would likely still lead to stringent monetisation rules.

This is the reason why I don’t like equating socialism with “workers owning the means of production”. Worker-cooperatives can exist in a capitalist economy, which means they have to follow capitalist rules (including the drive to generate profits).

When leftists say “workers”, they generally mean “the 99%” or “the working class”, not individual workers. When leftists say “the means of production”, they mean the economy/industry overall, not individual companies.

If youtube was owned and operated in common, it would not be bound to profitability, but to use.

We can also look at something like peertube, which is essentially a commonly owned version of youtube. Instead of being guided by profitability, it is used based on many different use-cases. There can be peertube instances that are completely private, there can be peertube instances that are used for a specific topic or community (for example kids) and there can be peertube instances which are not for children at all.

Yeah I’m not sure why it’s nowadays common to simplify socialism as “workers owning the means of production”. It’s not exactly wrong, but it is often misunderstood.

A company being owned by it’s employees is not necessarily “socialism”. In today’s global capitalist economy, there are worker-cooperatives as well, but they too exist within the capitalist economy and have to follow its rules, which is above all the profit motive. If you don’t orient yourself based on profit, you will be out-competed eventually.

Traditionally, when socialists talk about “workers owning/seizing the means of production”, they are not talking about individual workers or individual businesses.

Workers means “the working class”, which would be pretty much everyone (“the 99%”). Means of production means industry and the economy overall, not individual factories and businesses.

What makes FOSS special is that the software is not privately owned by anyone, not by the devs, not by a couple of programmers, not by a company. It is commonly owned, anyone can use, copy and alter the code however they want without any artificial barriers. This of course makes it a lot harder to extract money from users.

Hasn’t the French police (or law enforcment) been killing citizens since before America was colonised?