For a time, Silicon Valley was the epitome of a dream job. Imagine employees in plush offices with all the amenities you could possibly name while getting paid six figures for the occasional inconvenience of actually having to work. It was the ideal for pretty much every American college student choosing Computer Science as their major.

Then, one day, that was all down the toilet. Some placed the blame on AI. Some pointed to Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter in 2022, but I argue that was missing the forest for the trees. The tech industry had always wanted that Chinese-style "996" crunch. The problem was rather that no one wanted to make the first move in fear of bleeding talents. With the richest man on earth defying the status quo and AI looming over the horizon, what the industry saw was an opportunity to abandon the cosy adult playpens and replace them with the grindset. That would of course also come with enormous implications for "FOSS".

You can't claim labour violations if you aren't really doing work for the company

But what really was "FOSS"? From the industry perspective, it was overtime without the pay. In the book Bullshit Jobs - A Theory, anthropologist David Graeber via the pseudonymous "Pablo" identified a job type he dubbed the "duct-taper". To quote:

>"Pablo's main point is that with the growing reliance on free software (free ware), paid employment is increasingly reduced to duct taping. Coders are often happy to perform the interesting and rewarding work on core technologies for free at night but, since that means they have less and less incentive to think about how such creations will ultimately be made compatible, that means the same coders are reduced during the day to the tedious (but paid) work of making them fit together."

\"Bullshit Jobs - A Theory\" (2018, left) and Author David Graeber (right) (Picture credit: madeinchinajournal.com)

For a time, the "FOSS" model of labour was for the most part sustainable thanks to all the six-figures people in the San Francisco Bay Area getting paid to have fun. Officially, the bosses were not really paying anything for the core technologies, and their employees were not really complaining because, seriously, what else could they have asked for in material terms?

The "real" work, of course, was to bind all the core technologies together to form usable products. After all, someone had to hammer the Linux kernel into a firewall suite or turn Debian into a web-manageable hypervisor. Now, I had no doubt the six-figures hotshots also had to do some duct-taping every now and again, but, to me, it seemed far more likely that such a thankless task would have been left to immigrants on H1B visas or perhaps offshore contractors. It's a sub-hierarchy in the same sense the working class is divided between the middle class and the lower class.

Of course, nothing was meant to last forever. The American middle class faced the "crunch" circa 2010. Likewise, the Silicon Valley labour aristocracy would experience its own extinction event as development in core technologies began to slow and the tech industry at large could no longer justify paying a whole bunch of people an eye-watering sum of cash every year just to work on nothing in particular. Well, they were never really meant to work on anything in particular anyway, so it was only inevitable that their bosses would eventually be rid of them also over nothing in particular.

The slow death of ideologies, and systemd

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) lays out the "Four Essential Freedoms" as follows:

• The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose.
• The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others.
• The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others. By doing this, you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

To me, these 4 talking points serve no purpose other than to raise the inevitable question, namely, "Who on earth is meant to grant you the 'Freedoms'?" Simply put, they present the same conundrum as that by people telling you that their political cause "isn't a political issue but a rights issue".

A right has to be granted by someone with the tangible means to make good of it be that someone the government or supposedly God. With that in mind, it is not hard to see as to why the "Four Essential Freedoms" are apropos of nothing. Can I grant you the "Freedoms"? Can you grant yourself the "Freedoms"? Can FSF grant you the "Freedoms"? Such words as "you can help others" sound noble until you realise you cannot help other people when you can hardly even help yourself.

We have discussed the demise of cushy, high-paying Silicon Valley jobs and how those jobs had for the most part sustained the development of "FOSS". In case you have not understood already, the true granter of "Freedoms" has always been the tech industry itself. Heck, you could also be a granter of "Freedoms" if you could write me a fat cheque every month just so I could do nothing but experiment with "cool" stuff all day. In reality, of course, I am just someone working an often-tiring job for far below six figures, and, likely, so are you.

Remember the 28 workers at Google getting fired over striking for Palestine? Working at Google used to be the aforementioned "dream job". Now, Googlers are just as disposable as the rest of us, and broke, disposable people tend to dislike working for free. So, who will be working on core technologies now?

Well, look no further than systemd. Some people dislike systemd citing its "monolithic" nature. Well, the proper description for it is that it's tightly integrated with other system components, and this, I argue, has plenty to do with the industry no longer finding duct-taping as useful anymore as a way to exploit workers. This is not to say that the industry is being any less inclined to exploit as before. It is simply that they no longer feel the need to maintain the core technology/duct tape distinction and can just build everything in one piece all by disposable workers under a new set of (dis)incentives to produce useful tech on the cheap.

So, we have arrived at the juncture where people are disposable and ideals prove to be nothing but justifications for bottom lines. This should not be surprising to anyone, but if I had to pick the best line from the 1984 movie Ghostbusters, then it would have to be the one that got Winston Zeddemore hired. The tech industry, of course, has practically infinite money for cheques to make people believe in anything including the fairy tale that "FOSS" is really about ordinary people such as you and me helping each other or corporations giving away code out of the goodness of their heart.

Of course, there is no such thing in the real world as a ghost, and you have been lied to so someone already with more money than God can make himself 0.00001% richer without you asking too many questions about wealth inequality.

The new era of things that no one asks for

People often think of "free" software as charity and charity as morally good, but how often do people donate more than they have left over? FOSS in this sense is also societal leftovers. After all, the industry itself has engineered the entire movement in the first place in order to develop the core technologies they want at minimal cost on their part. The material impact of such activism on purely grassroots effort would have most certainly been negligible at best.

Sure, you may use what it has supposedly done "for the community" for your own purpose. No one is going to stop you from that. However, "contributions" from the industry are ultimately meant for just the industry itself. You as a working nobody are strictly an afterthought if one at all. This is the reason something will pretty much always break when you install Linux on your cheap-and-nasty consumer-grade machine. In this sense, FOSS is in reality less like a charity and more akin to the money-spinning exercise of a private foundation.

Liberal societies idealise the consumer, and the ideal consumer is all about having the choice. The problem with ideals of course is that they aren't the real world. No one chose to be born poor, and no one chose to not be a billionaire executive, and no one chose to be stuck at the mercy of someone else's kindness and generosity. Being a consumer is not really about the ability to choose but what you're allowed to choose. FOSS in turn is about accepting that you have no choice, and FOSS ideologues are nothing if not diligent at reminding new converts of the old adage that "beggars aren't choosers" at every turn.

So, as the AI circle of corporate incest is getting more and more obscene by the day, does it matter what the ordinary working person choose at this point? I don't think so. Microsoft is not going to care if you refuse to buy their retail-level software. Nvidia is not going to care if you refuse to buy their retail-level graphics cards. The global computer hardware shortage is conclusive proof of that reality. You are by all accounts irrelevant since the wealthy have already got each other, and it is up to you to recognise what you really have and what your priorities ought to be, FOSS or no FOSS.

This is the story I'm sure most people have already heard countless times.

Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS), as the narrative went, began with "An Open Letter to Hobbyists" in 1976 with Bill Gates lambasting the piracy of Altair BASIC by hobbyists, who then wrote their own version of BASIC and made Gates' software irrelevant. It had all the hallmarks of everyone's favourite David-versus-Goliath story, except rather than a future king with a sling and a handful of pebbles, this David was a bunch of nerds with computers.

In another version of the story, "FOSS" began as one Richard Stallman wanted to fix a bug in his office printer's firmware. He asked the manufacturer for the source code but was snubbed, so, in revenge, he came up with the "Four Essential Freedoms" and licensed his own software under those ideals. Again, the story had the same David-verse-Goliath structure, except that this time David was a scruffy-looking academic with an axe to grind.

Now, what if I tell you that these origin stories of FOSS are not only false but also the ones Goliath himself wants you to believe? Now, I'm sure a number of people are ready to scream at me for "spreading M$ lies" and ignore everything else I say. In that case, feel free to stay ignorant and send your vitriol my way.

However, if you aren't one of those people, read on.

So, when did "FOSS" really begin?

The true origin of "FOSS" could be traced to the first Macintosh when it debuted in 1984 - or, at least, when one company responded to it in a way no one else in the industry had seriously considered before.

The Macintosh marked the beginning of graphics desktop. Everyone recognised it as the future, and no one - especially not tech vendors - wanted to be left out of that future. If you were a company selling Unix at the time, you'd be scrambling to come up with a competing product. Unfortunately, the competition was not ready for the Macintosh, and one Unix vendor facing that predicament was Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC).

DEC was by no means a small player. It was the company responsible the machine Unix was written on, and, at the time, its PDP line was still selling in record numbers. DEC was by all measures an industry juggernaut.

To DEC, the embarrassment of not having a serviceable graphics desktop and therefore missing out further on the burgeoning microcomputer market simply could not stand. Fortunately for the executives at the time, an experimental piece of software called "Project Athena" was also being developed in the same year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It could run over a network at the cost of being comically resource-hungry, but since it was the only option with at least some semblance of being ready to ship, it was licensed, incorporated to Ultrix (DEC's own Unix) then released in the very next year.

"Project Athena" would then come to be known as the "X Window System" or "X".

DEC VAXstation 3100 featuring Ultrix (Picture credit: hampage.hu)

Then came the MIT License

The IEEE Annals of the History of Computing places the origin of the MIT License in 1984. Under the terms, the licencee was granted the right to distribute the code "for any purpose and without fee". Simply put, it gave whoever with the licence the permission to do whatever they saw fit with the code ostensibly without paying MIT a dime or even asking nicely first.

You knew napalm was originally a joint development by DuPont, ExxonMobil and Harvard University? Academic research cost money, and if you were to find yourself in the Reagan era where funding from the government was severely cut, you would likely also find cash from the private sector rather tempting. To MIT, this was not a particularly hard decision since Unix vendors wanted a product and MIT needed keep the lights on for their labs. What was DEC going to do with X anyway? Drop it on some hapless villagers in Vietnam?

So, in 1986, MIT released what was known as the second version of the MIT License along with Version 10, Release 3 of X. In it, language was added to clarify that X did not contain copyrighted code from AT&T's Unix System V or University of California's Berkeley Software Distribution. To proprietary Unix vendors at the time (DEC included), that was all the assurances needed to adopt and continue to use X as their graphics desktop system of choice, and, in return, MIT would get generous donations from all these giant corporations with a product to sell.

The \"second version\" of the MIT License (Picture credit: IEEE)

The silent divorce and the General Public prenup

At the time, this whole idea of X as "free" software worked fantastically for both MIT and the corporate world - the former would receive enormous funding it could not have found anywhere else, and the latter got to outsource software development to academia on a discount. The whole scheme would be a win-win if not for the slight problem that the terms of the MIT License invariably pegged the code to a particular entity (MIT), which was subject to legal liabilities and therefore would prevent or delay product delivery if it was ever to get sued.

The fear of legal liabilities about "free" software would materialise in 1992 when Unix System Laboratories filed a lawsuit against the University of California over alleged misuse of AT&T's code. The case ultimately proved meritless, but it was obvious to the industry that it would have to somehow loosen its ties with academic institutes if it was to avoid being roped in for any potentially real violation of copyrights. That meant the mere assurances afforded by the MIT License were no longer considered good enough.

Anyone having watched Blood Diamond would no doubt understand the corporate ideal for a supply chain. That was, you would want your raw materials sourced from the cheapest, dodgiest places possible then shuffle the deck somewhere along the way to your doorstep so no one would have the concrete-enough evidence to bother you with such pesky issues as child soldiers and forced labour.

Of course, the relationship between the tech industry and academia was never any more than a marriage of convenience, so it was inevitable that a divorce would be in order. Well, it just so happened that, in that same year, some guy named Linus Torvalds would release a Unix-like kernel under the General Public License (GPL). Think of GPL as the source code equivalent of supply-chain obfuscation - it inherently did not peg the source code to any particular person or entity, and if a copyright violation was to happen, no one would have any idea as to whom to sue and would most certainly not get a dime from anyone out of winning the case. That's the prenup the industry had been looking for, but who would be the new bride?

(To be continued in Part 2)

In case anyone is still in possession of a Linksys E8450 and hasn't tossed it out the window out of spite due to the setup interface repeatedly telling you "authentication required" despite having already entered the admin password correctly for the millionth time, here the fix.

If you are using Windows 10/11:

1. Open Edge. If you've uninstalled it for some reason, reinstall it because you won't be able to proceed to the next step until you do.

2. Go to "..." -> Settings -> Default Browser (URI: edge://settings/defaultBrowser).

3. Look for Internet Explorer mode pages, then click "Add a page".

4. In the dialogue box, type in "http://192.168.1.1" then click "Add".

5. Go to "http://192.168.1.1". You should see Edge indicating that it is showing the page in Internet Explorer mode. Enter your admin password, and you should be now able to access the setup without a hitch.

If you are still using Windows 7 or older:

1. Why?

2. Open Internet Explorer, then skip straight to Step #5 above.

If you are using a non-Windows system:

1. I'm sorry.

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Backstory:

It so happened that I had an E8450 landed on my desk today. Long story short, I was initially pretty stumped by the login loop. So, I came here hoping someone on Reddit would shed some light on the subject. That of course turned out to be a total bust.

Then I saw the copyright notice at the bottom of the login page and thought to myself, "'Belkin International', huh? No way that's the problem!"

Well, since my work computer was a Mac, I borrowed one of my colleague's Windows computer and tried my luck with it, and lo and behold, IE mode worked!

Now, what the heck did IE mode have to do with Belkin? In case some people here didn't know or didn't remember, Cisco sold the Linksys brand to Belkin in 2013, and rather than every Belkin router turning into a Linksys, the consequence of that acquisition was every Linksys turning into a Belkin. This is also where you'll have to excuse my bluntness because, in all honesty, Belkin routers are hot garbage.

Consider how long the world has already moved on from IE. The E8450 (a rebadged Belkin RT3200) is supposed to be a Wifi 6 router, yet, with Belkin, it is perfectly reasonable to expect the web interface to contain hacks and workarounds for old browsers from back when the dinosaurs roamed the earth. New browsers of course don't understand any of that nonsense, so, naturally, they crap out, refresh, and drop you back into the login page as soon as you move past it and reach the landing page (i.e. the "status" page). It's absolutely mind-blowing this is the quality of things Belkin deems acceptable for their latest up-to-date firmware since 2020, but that kind of insanity is also why I'm never too concerned with being out of a job.