Bonum Certa Men Certa

Monkey See, Monkey Share

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 28, 2024

Monkey Feels Sad

Living beings, primates, humans, or whatever we prefer to call them cannot cope with captivity. Studies have long been conducted about isolation in small spaces, loneliness, signal deprivation, and a lack of peers/company (not the same as loneliness per se). In the movie Cast Away a man loses his sanity because living all alone in an island seems pointless. He (the character played by Tom Hanks) wants to commit suicide.

In the case of software, being separated from the development process, the community of users, the decision-making etc. means isolation and helplessness. It means companies like Apple and Microsoft can impose truly malicious 'features' on all users. The user is kind like a prisoner inside the cell and is occasionally moved to another, potentially much worse, cell. Yes, new versions. Or new restrictions, e.g. "secure" boot, where "security" means Microsoft is in charge of everything and arrogantly denies you booting your own operating system of choice.

A development process that results in many hundreds of operating systems (or "distros") gives people a lot more options and also a freedom to roll out their own. That means that the software (or whole system) can adapt to individual people or groups of people (or nations). It can be described as "collective autonomy". There are distros that target specific ethnic groups and even certain religions.

Software development should not only be collaborative; it ought to maintain a strict sense of sharing, enforced by legal mechanisms such as copyleft (to avoid exclusion of others or "hoarding"). With the exception of some licences, a lot of "Open Source" works similarly to copyleft, but not in name.

Don't let a bunch of Microsoft monkeys convince you otherwise.

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