Cory Doctorow Explains Why Software Freedom Matters, Whereas "Open Source" Misses the Point and Helps Monopolies
1.5 months ago: [Video] Cory Doctorow Explains DMCA: DRM in the Browser (or Webapp) Will "Make It a Felony to Protect Your Privacy While You Use It."
Cory Doctorow has this new article in which he explains why the "Open Source" "partisans [exist]: first, they didn’t like the ambiguity of “free software.” Famously, Richard Stallman (who coined “free software”) viewed this ambiguity as a feature, not a bug. He liked that “free” had a double meaning: “free as in speech” (an ethical proposition) and “free as in beer” (without cost). Stallman viewed the ambiguity of “free software” as a koan/conversation-starter: a normie, hearing “free software,” would inquire as to whether this meant that the software couldn’t be sold commercially, which was an opening for free software advocates to explain the moral philosophy of software freedom."
Today I learned about someone who uses Ubuntu (GNU/Linux) and refers to that as "Open Source". The corporate media helped promote this term, evading any discussion about freedom or respect for the dignity of computer users. That really ought to be considered in light of the forces that led to this. We'll soon show some more OSI scandals.
Doctorow explains: "But the “open source” side wasn’t solely motivated by a desire to simplify things by jettisoning the requirement to conscript curious bystanders into a philosophical colloquy. Many of them also disagreed with the philosophy of free software. They weren’t excited about building a “commons” or in preventing rent extraction by monopolistic firms. Some of them quite liked the idea of someday extracting their own rents."
"At the outset," Doctorow explains further down (after a discussion about Wikileaks' CIA leaks and national security aspects), "“open source” and “free software” were synonyms. All code that was open was also free, and vice-versa."
Here's the punchline: "But only Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook get to decide whether to run it, and how to configure it. And since nearly all the code our users depend on takes a loop through a Big Tech cloud, the decisions made by these Big Tech firms set the outer boundaries of what our code can do. They have total freedom while we make do with the crumbs they drop from on high. In other words, the freedom mattered, and when we forgot about it, we lost it."
It's a very long article and he must have spent a long time preparing it. That also covers copyright trolls, which Doctorow helped me cope with (when they sent me threatening letters he sent me advice on how to deal with them). That's connected to us covering EPO corruption.
At the moment there are only 2 "Responses" to it. Maybe it deserves far more exposure, which our sister site tried to provide. █