We all know the "free software" vs. the corporate "open source" split. But if the last years showed something it is that only using "freedom" as a fundamental principle isn't doing enough, it's just too limited.
If we want our communities to build software for a "common good" we might need to start thinking about other fundamental values and reframe "FLOSS" into something more goal oriented.
We need to integrate ideas of inclusion and environmentalism, about harm reduction and overcoming internalized colonialism that have shaped so many projects and communities (including to a degree the fediverse).
"Freedom" always sounds good and useful but it's just not enough, it's not tangible enough, to open for being captured by right wing narratives.
@tante Predictably, everybody in the replies here is immediately arguing about license terms. I really wish we could move past that, acknowledge that the "four freedoms" framework from GNU is pretty good in the narrow, specific context of licensing, but a disastrously incomplete vision of a social movement. You can't hack your user's brains into being better people by using license terms and I wish we'd stop trying.
@chrisjrn@glyph 'cause what I tried to say is "Look, I agree with that, been repeating myself for at least three years, have you seen my post?"
Because neither of you said anything about it, now or before, and given how often people end up telling me "oh it's too long I don't have time to read this," it's a complete disheartening to try to make those points.
@flameeyes@chrisjrn I completely agree with this post, but your framing here is that it was a significant contribution to the relevant discourse that we all really ought to have seen and responded to before saying anything. No offense, but… it isn't? It admittedly doesn't have a call to action. So now that I've read it, I don't have much of a reaction beyond "yup! we should figure out how to do that!"
@flameeyes@chrisjrn Mastodon also didn't show me your reply at all, so I wasn't ignoring you. In fairness, I was imprecise; I should have said "most replies I can see" which is not the same as "everybody".
@glyph I really wasn't implying you had to read it for sure, I was more pointing at "hey, you're not alone" -- that I got pricklier about it was because @chrisjrn implied I intended it to be "okay" for anything.
And yes I think even just knowing that we're not alone with wanting this is important. The silence is disheartening too often, and as you said, Mastodon doesn't help.
I'll have a read of what you sent on my next flight!
@flameeyes
This is a brain fart that I can expand on, given time, but
it's not your post that's the problem, it's the foundational to the entire community. Most of non-corporate FOSS is underpinned by individualism (or RMS-style false collectivism), and so the solutions are individualistic.
So you end up with a bunch of individuals or very small groups making calls for FOSS to be more collective. And it's not just you, see e.g. https://techautonomy.org/
@chrisjrn yeah I agree. I have been saying (for other reasons) that we need more cooperatives, but at the same time I'm in a position where I don't really have the option to start myself, and my statements carry the shadow of big tech whether it's relevant or not.
@luis_in_brief@tante a somewhat less deferential exploration of the ways in which the FSF has screwed up you may be interested in my dad's writing https://r0ml.medium.com (which is considerably more discursive but hits on similar themes). I'm sure you'll disagree with a lot of his takes — they are deliberately provocative — but I think it's interesting to consider the "what if free software is actually a bad idea entirely" perspective.
and because I said it elsewhere: A whole bunch of individuals saying "what if FOSS were better for the collective good" is such a FOSS mindset response to the problem 🙃
@luis_in_brief@glyph@tante "Last time I was at Libre Planet, I was talking with someone in a hallway, and I mentioned that Libre Office had crashed several times while I was on the plane, losing some data and making me redo some slides. He insisted that it was better to have code freedom, even when things crashed in a program that I could not fix without reading C++ comments in German."
Experiencing this over the years has radicalized me so much to the point I'm starting to resent F/LOSS.
@astrojuanlu@glyph@tante Yeah, it's a very frustrating and narrow view of freedom (and of the world).
But I try to have some empathy for the (young) person who said it—if that's the only time anyone has ever discussed freedom with you, this perspective can be seductive and appealing.
@tante fully agree that the terms FLOSS or Open Source do not really describe what we try to deliver: An ethical approach to software production, distribution, deployments and hosting. Maybe we should just summarise those attributes and call it "Ethical Software / IT / Hosting". A good example how that could be measured and (self-)evuated is the economy for the common good movement https://www.ecogood.org/.
@tante well freedom is not limited, plus it is a collective endeavor that encompasses all you cited previously: My freedom begins where others freedom starts. Society needs to be a mean to respect and grow all our collective knowledges, this is freedom.
@tante The issue you'll likely run into is that there aren't a lot of goals that the FLOSS dev community has in common besides "software freedom".
There are developers from across the political spectrum, from Libertarians to no-shit tankie Communists. You've got Anarchist cypherpunks, diehard Free Speech advocates, Secular Humanist progressives, religious fundamentalists, Zionists, nationalists, anticolonialists, intelligence agencies…
@tante I agree with you entirely, but I think this comes down to how we use FLOSS, rather than how it’s licensed (not sure if you were advocating for that or not). My own view is that FLOSS is the obvious route to achieving those aims you outline because it can be owned and developed by communities that care about those things (myself included). A license won’t stop a right wing asshole - they’ll just find another way (see Twitter etc). But I agree fundamentally.
@tante I've spent the last 26+ yrs writing & making a living from libre software and thus have an actual financial indebtedness to a user community.
In general, libre s/w devs do not work for/on behalf of anyone/any community. Their work being useful for someone is fortunate but frequently incidental.
If there are communities that want s/w developed under a broader manifesto, they need to organize the resources required.
As a developer, I am not here to meet somebody else's agenda.
@tante also "free software" as an ideology suffers from a severe lack of class consciousness.
"if the user doesn't control the software, the software becomes an unjust means of control"—this is absolutely correct. but that's just because software is one instance of means of production. in general, it is unethical that means of production are controlled by a small class of owners. proprietary lands, proprietary buildings, proprietary factories, proprietary art, proprietary medicine and housing and natural resources—are all bad for the same reason that proprietary software is, only even more so, because much more far-reaching.
free software advocates often show a glaring lack of social perspective. you are not able to software anything at all if there weren't people making the microchips, the buildings you live in, the clothes you wear the food you eat; what about their tools and IP being all proprietary and used for unjust control? and how does that relate to "freedom 0" empowering said owners to coop the labour of free software hobbyists to tighten up social control even more?
@tante 💯 this is why I've been drawn more and more to the framing of community tech. It combines the value of freedom with that of care. I've got a half-baked blog post I need to finish about its difference from open-source but here are some good resources on the concept
@tante basically, i think the original free software movement focused exclusively on licenses as the point of leverage, when licenses are a fairly weak and indirect instrument of ideology, given that the legal system is merely just another weapon that under capitalism can be wielded by the rich against everyone else. that narrowness of focus set the stage for every one of the movement's failures (cultural, technical, political, etc) to date.
Reminds me of a thing David Graeber said in his talk at the c3 in 2019. He paired freedom with care – we take care of other people so they can be free, positively and negatively, and we need to be free to truly care for each other. Maybe that's what copyleft got right: Insisting on the commons makes for a more caring, less exploitative approach, albeit not perfect.
(The original context was that care/freedom could replace production/consumption as a more sensible economic paradigm.)
@tante I believe that discussions around values like inclusion, environmentalism, and colonialism are important, but I don't find them to be directly relevant to the field of science and technology. Focusing on the core principles of free and open source software keeps the focus on the fundamental aspects of software development without getting into unrelated areas. In my view, introducing these ideas might come across as virtue signaling and could distract from the technical goals of our projects.
@tante Open Source is sometimes a victim of its own making. Devs who do good work do need to be paid for their time and effort, there's just not enough cash flow in 'free' for them to get that. Result of that is some projects get abandoned.
Code forks are another issue as well, so many distros and forks it can be detrimental to the user base.
People already privately suffer from choice-paralysis (too many choices)..
@E_Nonymouse
The Nextcloud fork was very successful. Node.JS/Io.JS/Node.JS fork and reunion was a great thing. MariaDB is doing just fine. LibreOffice is so much better than OpenOffice. I fail to see a general problem with forks. @tante
@tante word of warning: by associating a generic X - which many people can agree on and work towards - with your specific set of political and cultural values, you turn it into X.63bdj7. You split. You divide. You paralyse. People who otherwise have different viewpoints and are made to communicate because of X, no longer seek consensus. This is true in so many fields, particularly climate change. It's the wrong way.
@brrbrr@tante I'm afraid one of the issues is that the Freedom angle does this more than the Open Source angle anyway, which is probably why I have always been more Open Source and the Free Software side irked me, without necessarily understanding why at the start. By now I understand more of the ugly sides of American libertarianism and it's a big red flag for me. Open Source at least by the founding documents focused on the value of community and it took a long time before some GNU projects started to adopt a community approach. Linus Torvalds was the important person for the community development side, which grew almost as an accident. We might need to develop this more though. What about rallying around "Community Code"? This steers away from the free for all idea that so much tainted the Open Source business friendliness thing, and it shows freedom as something that helps all instead of this personal freedom thing that keeps other people out of the picture.
@tante The (a) problem is that any departure from fully-free licensing is met with rejection from the FLOSS community. See e.g. the brouhaha around "source-available" licenses like SSPL, that insert conditions about not hosting the software in the cloud for profit, but are in all other respects open. Sure, in that case it's a commercial criterion rather than an ideological one, but the principle is the same.
@riotnrrd@tante The FLOSS community set a precise definition for what free software is.
Now, some projects want to essentially control software usage and profit by predatory cloud actors (fair enough), but they don't want to face the bad press of being banded as proprietary (which they became).
So they try to spin it as free-ish, source available, or "open-source in spirit", to keep a positive spin from just closing their previously open codebase.
@ghisvail@tante Well, that’s the part that I disagree about: I think it’s perfectly legitimate to have such a clause. The software remains free to use, including for large companies; they just can’t directly host it for money. Redistribution is still okay, which means the classic OSS business model of selling support, consulting, and perhaps add-ons remains valid.
Should it be the only choice? No.
Should it be a valid choice? I would argue yes.
Again, I don't disagree with adding the usage restriction clause. But if this clause restricts usage of the software, it breaks one the core freedoms. In this case, the project just stops referring itself as free software anymore, and everyone moves on.
This is totally fine.
Spinning it as still free "in spirit" is just a smoke screen for becoming proprietary. That's a waste of time and energy, and a lack of respect to the project's contributors who did not agree to this.
@ghisvail@tante To me, this is one of those situations where scale meaningfully changes the nature of what is being discussed. Hosting something at the scale of one company is a question of the freedom to use the software. Hosting it at the scale of AWS is a question of the viability of, and control over, the entire project. Maybe this should be a fifth freedom, along the lines of the Zeroth Law of robotics?
It's an interesting thought, but I fail to see how this can be defined as a freedom without being contradictory to "The freedom to use the program for any purpose" (freedom 0, emphasis is mine).
@ghisvail@riotnrrd I don't have a ready-made suggestion. I don't even think it's my place to create one. I just see what we got not working for what it needs to do
@tante Some licenses restrict the use for military applications. The JSON license makes it even simpler. „The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.“
@tanepiper@tante The Bible forbids eating the fruit of knowledge, supports slavery, calls for genocide several times, and even includes a mass extinction event.
@orkoden@tante Well that, yes. I'm thinking more the stuff they stole from Eastern philosophy and called their own, not the parochial little stories in-between.
@antipode77 Stealing in the sense they they claim original ownership, not that it's just a Neoplatonic re-editing of all the hand-me-downs going back to Zoroaster.
@tanepiper@orkoden@tante Despite the unhelpful discussion that followed, I agree with this point about the bible. Everyone knows the Jesus character expressed some very clear values and guidelines, yet Christians have perverted those in a way that allows them to violate the stated principles en masse. Attempts at enforcement (church organizations) went horribly in the wrong direction.
Add comment