The Cyber Show on the Importance of Software Freedom and Why GNU/Linux Could Not be Stopped
Yesterday evening we mentioned the "last (or latest) part in The Cyber Show's series"; we said "latest", hoping there might be further parts. This morning there is one:
Code as freedom in a hostile space
Why have freedom of speech? Wouldn't it be easier if everyone just shut up so nobody would ever be offended? But people like to talk. We share information and ideas. It keeps us mentally healthy. Challenged. Psychologists advise it. Language is what placed humans at the top of the food chain. We are almost unable to stop talking…
What about freedom of movement? Wouldn't it be easier if everybody just stayed in their house all the time? Like terrified cavemen? We could save money on roads, pavements and parks. The pandemic showed us it wasn't possible. People like walking around. It makes us healthy, Doctors advise it.
What about freedom of belief? Why not have everyone think the same and get rid of conflict and messy democracy? But people seek ways to be different. It's wired-in to our religions and social rituals, to balance identity as belonging with identity as uniqueness and individual expression. It's the seat of innovation and happiness (jouissance). Priests, psychotherapists, artists and teachers insist upon it.
Speech, movement, belief and expression… all natural qualities of life that keep people happy and healthy. To even question such fundaments seems a little bit insane.
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Software Freedom is a complex and subtle concept. It is the modern manifestation of forces like democracy or the ideas of founding constitutional philosophers like J. S Mill, Rousseau, or Hobbes. It lies at the heart of any workable dynamic that might assure the continuation of a technological networked society.
Software Freedom places the power and responsibility of digital participation squarely where it belongs, with the end "user" or "digital citizen".
Software Freedom is an engine of learning. The Free Software community (and it really is something of an actual international community) does more than schools and universities to bring up new talent and developers - a task that industry is fully abandoning and schools have never really mastered,
Software Freedom is more than a slogan or set of ideas about licenses. At heart it's a humanist concept that places software on par with basic individual needs that vary from person to person, plus a creed of conviviality to help each other achieve technical parity and mutual defence based on needs not just comfort, conformity and convenience.
It says, "We're in this together". "How can I help?"
It recognises the status of code alongside food, shelter, warmth, community and other human needs, and asserts that code cannot be "factored out", removed or managed by any power group.
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The race for "AI" and building of massive data-centres seems like a suicide mission for the whole species at this point. It doesn't fit with any sane strategy. It's the gamble of the desperate. It magnifies everything wrong with present stupid-thinking, populism, ignorance, dependency and lostness.
So it's possibly safe to say at this point that Software Freedom is also aligned with negative freedom-from "AI". Again I want to emphasise that I use "AI" to denote a technofascist political project, not any specific area of machine learning, statistics, or signal processing - potentially useful stuff in sane, benevolent hands. In this frame it represents a defence of older, tested computing paradigms that are workable and can help save humanity from a brute-force death march into the pit of narcissistic involution.
So Software Freedom arises from a context of existential co-dependency of humans with technology. It's not about the rights of marginal hobby groups to "tinker", it's about our collective right to build a safe and agreeable technological society. It guarantees the rights of the body politic to coordinate in healthy, but not too harmonious technological praxis, with informed citizens, respect for difference, abstinence if so desired, proper distribution of power and benefits.
It is freedom from monomaniacal hyper-industrial, centralised, magical, wishful thinking of people whose minds are addled by money and ego. In the present context of hyper-capitalism, oligarchs, monopolies, cyber-war and widespread abuse it mostly boils down to "restoring technological power to the people", restoring democratic consent and public assemblies on crucial tech questions where there is currently no informed democratic voice.
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"Linux" or GNU, is really another name for Unix, a system built at Bell Labs by very smart people. Fortunately the technofascists were not smart or quick enough to stifle and lock it down under "intellectual property" laws. Lord knows they tried when a company called SCO (Santa Cruz Operation) (bankrolled by Microsoft) spent a fortune trying to sabotage software freedom in the 1990s.
Like email, the Web (WWW), Directory Name Services (DNS) and the TCP/IP protocol, a species of Unix - actually somewhat based on Andrew Tanenbaum's MINIX and older Berkeley code - escaped enclosure and went global before wealthy, powerful interests were able to hunt down and cage it. It is part of the core or substrate of digital society and the Internet that is a protocol not a product or a platform. It can't be bought, sold, acquired, or controlled.
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Unlike a platform such as Google, a protocol is not a company. A protocol is an informal contract of common agreement that can be written on one side of paper, often called an RFC (request for comment). For example, RFC5322 defines email. Once people choose to democratically adopt it there's nothing any power in the world can do to stop that. To malevolent actors, its more dangerous than poetry. That doesn't stop tyrants from gouging eyes and breaking fingers in the hope of preventing some people reading and writing poetry, but an established protocol is the proverbial "idea which cannot be killed".
For people who like GNU/Linux the last ~10 paragraphs will strike a nerve; along the middle there is abundant discussion of Software Freedom. It's an excellent article. █
Image source: Binary code