Poul-Henning Kamp: Why Freedom in 'FOSS' Matters

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 20, 2024

A few months ago Poul-Henning Kamp wrote this article in (or for) ACM. It's not suitable for the "advertiser-friendly" corporate/mainstream/tech media, but ACM published it.

It covers some important points. Towards the end he sounds more like RMS. BSDs have more or less the same goals, but their methods or the trajectory (and licence) vary somewhat. Openwashing is more widely recognised as a growing problem. █

Poul-Henning Kamp: 'In retrospect, it seems clear that open source was not so much the goal itself as a means to an end, which is freedom: freedom to fix broken things, freedom from people who thought they could clutch the source code tightly and wield our ignorance of it as a weapon to force us all to pay for and run Windows Vista.'

Other Recent Techrights' Posts

Links 19/11/2024: War on Cables?: Links for the day
The Free Software Foundation is Looking to Raise Nearly Half a Million Dollars by Year's End: And it really needs the money, unlike the EFF which sits on a humongous pile of oligarchs' and GAFAM cash
Gemini Links 20/11/2024: BeagleBone Black and Suicide Rates in Switzerland: Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...: GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, November 19, 2024: IRC logs for Tuesday, November 19, 2024
Gemini Links 19/11/2024: Private Journals Online and Spirituality: Links for the day
Drew's Development Mailing Lists and Patches to 'Refine' His Attack Pieces Against the FSF's Founder: Way to bury oneself in one's own grave...
What IBMers Say About IBM Causing IBMers to Resign (by Making Life Hard/Impossible) and Why Red Hat Was a Waste of Money to Buy: partnering with GAFAM
In Some Countries, Desktop/Laptop Usage Has Fallen to the Point Where Microsoft and Windows (and Intel) Barely Matter Anymore: Microsoft is the next Intel basically
[Meme] The Web Wasn't Always Proprietary Computer Programs Disguised as 'Web Pages': The Web is getting worse each year
Re-de-centralisation Should Be Our Goal: Put the users in charge, not governments and corporations in charge of users
Gemini Links 19/11/2024: Rain Music, ClockworkPi DevTerm, and More: Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...: GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, November 18, 2024: IRC logs for Monday, November 18, 2024
Links 18/11/2024: Science News and War Escalations in Ukraine: Links for the day
Gemini Links 18/11/2024: Degrowth and OpenBSD Fatigue: Links for the day
Technology: rights or responsibilities? - Part VII: By Dr. Andy Farnell
BetaNews is Still 'Shitposting' About Trump and Porn (Two Analysers Say This 'Shitposting' Comes From LLMs): Probably some SEO garbage, prompted with words like "porn" and "trump" to stitch together other people's words
Market Share of Vista 11 Said to be Going Down in Europe: one plausible explanation is that gs.statcounter.com is actually misreporting the share of Vista 11, claiming that it's higher than it really is
Fourth Estate or Missing Fourth Pillar: "The term Fourth Estate or fourth power refers to the press and news media in explicit capacity of reporting the News" -Wikipedia on Fourth Estate
Over at Tux Machines...: GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, November 17, 2024: IRC logs for Sunday, November 17, 2024
LLMs Are Not a Form of Intelligence (They Never Will Be): Butterflies are smarter than "chatGPT"
Business Software Alliance (BSA), Microsoft, and AstroTurfing Online (Also in the Trump Administration Groomed by BSA and Microsoft): Has Washington become openWashington? Where the emphasis is openwashing rather than Open(Source)Washington?
Windows at 1%: Quit throwing taxpayers' money at Microsoft, especially when it fails to fulfil basic needs and instead facilitates espionage by foreign and very hostile nations