I think we have to consider that the principles of the free software movement, revolutionary though they genuinely were, were also set in the same mindset that latterly saw its founder Richard Stallman spectacularly fall from grace. They are principles that deal in software development and licensing in strict isolation, outside of the social context of their use. They are code-centered, not human-centered.
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It’s worth considering whose freedom we value. Do we value the freedom of the people who use software, or do we also value the freedom of the people the software is used on? While the latter group doesn’t always exist, when they do, how we consider them says a lot about us and our priorities.
This is a conversation that needs to be happening, and not just around whether you are okay with the government using your work to kill people.
Are you also okay with giant corporations that have enough money to develop their own tools use your volunteer labor to profit wildly and harm the public? (Also, private companies make tools to kill people as well. Just look at Palmer Luckey’s Anduril, which produces military-grade drones and such. Or hell, any company that makes Tasers.)
Because the story of Free Open Source Software is also the story of the biggest accidental transfer of wealth from the working class to the capital class in world history.
Amazon Web Services wouldn’t exist without Linux. Sure, they run their own flavor of Linux, but they’ve put in a bunch of their own proprietary bullshit and AWS is a fucking juggernaut. A big reason they’re able to do this is because they use off-the-shelf Linux as a starting base and work from there. It cuts out a massive amount of labor to just lean on the labor of volunteers.
Now, not all companies are like this, I’ll admit. Valve pays people to improve Steam in Linux and has wildly benefited the WINe team.
However, the vast majority of private companies lean on the labor of FOSS volunteers to make money without investing the same labor themselves.
It’s honestly kind of a fucking travesty.
EDIT: Also, it’s a bit ironic that RMS always claimed that his plans with GNU/Linux was to free people from proprietary gardens, yet FOSS has actually been one of the biggest creators of such gardens. I always had a soft spot for RMS, but he’s wrong as much as he is right.
Linux runs the world at this point. Bad people and organization use it as well as good people and organization use it. I personally don’t think we can have it both ways without severely limiting the license that I think ultimately hurts the good people and organization more than it would hurt the bad.
Maybe I am wrong about this but if for profit companies aren’t allowed to use Linux I think Linux is basically dead. Or becomes so small no one will care about it.
Yes many for profit companies use the code without giving back. However it is my understanding the most big companies do give something back. I think Google is one of the top followed by Microsoft and I think Amazon has realized it is more work to not give back then to give back and has become like the 5th or 6th.
https://www.infoworld.com/article/3694090/amazon-s-quiet-open-source-revolution.html
Sure I would agree they are probably giving the bare minimum back, but at the very least they are giving something back. Even if they give nothing back i think the more use of Linux the better the world is.
If Linux didn’t exist or wasn’t available for Amazon they would either develop their own solution or just buy it from Microsoft, Apple, IBM etc… Now we have a more lockdown eco system and less people are incentivized to pick Linux as their platform of choice to develop software. Instead of using Apache or Nginx the world would be using Microsoft IIS or something similar.
Personally I am very guilty of taking advantage of open source. I have use open source projects all of my life and I can say I haven’t given nearly enough back that i have received. Sure I am not a for profit company so you could argue it is different. But even still I should give back more.
He did. Back then you forget you had all closed systems. I spent something like $10K on my first Mac, all the hardware and software and that was 1988 dollars. Now we have open systems, open browsers, lot of open protocols. I have not used much for closed stuff since 2000. Also software and hardware costs have plumetted. FOSS won.
It does not mean that there are not other challenges. Hardware has never been really open. Products have never been really open. The public or business for the most part has not chosen open. The service and server nature of most produces these days is another issues. Another is that tracking and advertising is the business model of most of it. AI is another challenge. Patents and other monopoly supporting laws are still acting too.
The article is frankly a bunch of FUD.
I agree with all your points except this one. Considering the implications of the tools you create is a huge deal.
I mean, we literally just had a blockbuster movie this summer that was ostensibly heavily about the regret Oppenheimer felt over how his invention would be used, how he didn’t foresee how damaging the mass casualties would be on his conscience. The back-half of the movie is about how his stance became anti-nuclear weapons after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
You raise really great points, but you’re being dismissive of a huge personal issue for a lot of people: will they actually feel comfortable with the way the tool they’ve designed is being used? If they’re anything like J. Robert Oppenheimer, they may struggle with their feelings on it if they don’t do enough consideration of it beforehand. I think rumination on things like this is very important, and definitely not fear, uncertainty, and death.
Also, frankly, it seems short sighted attributing cheaper modern software only to FOSS and not to the explosion in sizes of tech companies (economics of scale) as well as documented examples of tech companies colluding to keep engineer pay low and globalization allowing companies to pawn off labor to third-world countries where they can pay people less (Google doesn’t even use foreign labor, their janitors and bus drivers are contract labor, because that’s cheaper than having them directly on staff). Or has dumping US workers and replacing them with cheaper workers overseas not been happening steadily since 1988?
Without a free OS the walled garden could well have been maintained. Same without an open browser the web would be nothing. I do not think that was inevitable.
Really only Unix and Windows were there and a crap MacOS with a nice UI. BSD and Linux paved the way to the cloud, Android, most of our routers, the web. Everything.
As far as software compared to the atomic bomb. I do not think it really compares.
What’s a FUD?
fear, uncertainty, and doubt
Ok thanks
Fear, uncertainty, and doubt. The thing that put me over top was mentioning of some unrelated Stallman stuff that frankly was blown way out of proportion at the time. It was getting time for the FSF to bring in new people just as a sustainability thing. So not bad he stepped back.
This makes me think of last year’s update by Matrix saying that they are used by multinational corporations all over the place, but they themselves aren’t even sure they can afford to work on their own product anymore, financially, because these Megacorps don’t give them a cent.
It reminds me of that XKCD comic:
The fact is, when those supports crumble… so will everything else.
Just look at COVID and how during it there was an explosion of States hiring COBOL programmers because they were trying to update their fucking Unemployment systems that were coded in COBOL. You might say “life comes at you fast.”
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Forgive the nitpick, but FOSS is not creating walled gardens, companies are. (After all, software has no willpower… yet)