this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023

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Free and Open Source Software

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Really interesting thoughts on whether the creators of free software really want their users to be free (werd.io)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 51 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

What's a FUD?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

fear, uncertainty, and doubt

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Ok thanks

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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."

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

free people from proprietary gardens, yet FOSS has actually been one of the biggest creators of such gardens

Forgive the nitpick, but FOSS is not creating walled gardens, companies are. (After all, software has no willpower... yet)

[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago

The goal of the copyleft movement (which overlaps heavily with the free software movement) is to carve out an intellectual commons that can't be re-enclosed. This commons is important for a number of reasons, including that it tends to be better for end-users of software in the sense that anti-features can't really gain a foothold. It does not automatically solve UX issues, nor does it stop people from using the knowledge of the commons to do bad things.

Much of the strength of the intellectual commons is that it builds on itself, instead of having to re-invent the same things in a dozen or more different proprietary endeavors. If we were to start a "peace software" movement, it would be incompatible with the commons, due to the restrictions it imposes. Peace software can't build on copyleft software, and none of the commons can build on peace software. These sorts of things were considered, and compatibility was deemed more important than pushing more specific values. This isn't a matter of the FSF or OSI standing in the way, it's just that "peace software" would have to go it alone.

Due to this dynamic, those that want to build "anticapitalist software" would be better served by using the GNU AGPL, rather than a license that restricts commercial use. The AGPL fixes the loophole that the GPL leaves open for network services, and should allow us to carve out a new noncommercial online ecosystem. It should even be used for non-network code, as that code may be repurposed or built upon by network services. I'm glad to see lemmy, kbin, and mastodon using it.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I've always felt the FSF has had no idea what they were doing. Therefore I do not always agree with or support 100% of what they do.

I do feel that sometimes code should be able to carry reasonable restrictions. Just not sweeping restrictions.

An example of a reasonable restriction would be a clause that prohibits commercialized use of free software without first obtaining permission from the project in question. Another reasonable restriction would be a clause that prohibits governmental use or use by military entities.

An unreasonable restriction would be naming only specific companies that are not allowed to use the 'free' software. It would also be further considered unreasonable for rights to use 'free' software if it expires, goes away, or is revoked if you commit a specific crime, or fall under suspicion of committing said crime.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I’ve always felt the FSF has had no idea what they were doing. Therefore I do not always agree with or support 100% of what they do.

They absolutely have no idea what they're doing. For the most part, they've been reactionaries who have prioritized code over people. And then the rest of the time, they're having to make excuses for Stallman, or pretend like he's not a boat anchor that's preventing the organization from actually doing anything meaningful.

The FSF imo are a failed org.

We need to make sure that we're prioritizing the empowerment of people through free and open source. Give tools to the hobbyist, the amateur hardware hacker, people running homelabs, or the person who wants to start a business that's driven by Linux servers, but then also make it clear that we don't want the software being used to build bombs, or run global surveillance networks, or to create inequality and injustice. It needs to be a community movement that understands the realities of the modern world, how things change, how that change accelerates, and the threats that the world currently faces. It can't be driven by an org that doesn't understand that it isn't still 1980, or ideologically driven by and abusive, shitbag hermit.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

When the bad actor in question in a military or government organization, one of the realities of the modern world is that they will use your code whether you like it or not. They aren't going to stop because you use a license that prohibits them using it, if they deem it something that is useful enough. They'll just ignore your complaints and hide any wrongdoing long enough for you to go away.

If you publish FOSS, you are relinquishing a lot of control of how that software is used. A license that says "don't use this in bombs" only works if all parties are acting in good faith, and I don't think we can rely on millitaries playing nice if there's an advantage to be had.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

Isn't this treating the symptoms, not the cause? The real problem here seems to be that militaries and bad actors are killing people they obviously shouldn't, but it feels like the article just accepts that as something that "downstream users" do.

I'm all for responsible software use, but I think the issue lies deeper than software licensing.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I was just trying (and failing) to imagine a distribution and development framework which was limited to those entities which agreed with a set of social parameters.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There is no good way to open source user research

Users can easily give feedback to the developers by opening an issue on GitHub.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

[...] by opening an issue on GitHub.

after creating a GitHub account.