I'm generally sympathetic to Melody Horn's (boringcactus's) assessment in hir 2020 article, "Post-Open Source." I deviate / branch out in a few ways, but it was a timely polemic which caught a lot of attention, spawning a struggle session on the Orange Site and becoming the basis of a very good episode of General Intellect Unit.
The Free Software movement has not liberated computing. The "Year of Linux on the Desktop" is never coming - and it has nothing to do with how prepared or mature or comprehensive the collection of Free Software has become. We are still not living in a tech utopia. Our computational infrastructure overwhelmingly is designed to spy on us, rat on us to the state, propagandize us, and empty our pockets. The labor of Free Software contributors is typically exploited by megacorporations and plunderbunds to collect rents on private computational and network infrastructure. Microsoft "loves" Linux, now that they are able to charge you a monthly fee for running it in Azure. Companies like Facebook are perfectly happy to "Open Source" core frameworks like React.JS as a method of outsourcing the costs of maintenance, development, and training.
The Free Software movement has produced a vast collection of useful software, but without control over the networks, the data centers, or the factories where personal electronics are produced, all this software is severely stunted in its capacity to transform daily life. As some posters here have pointed out, the original sin of the Free Software movement was the assumption that people would "vote with their feet," and embrace the technically and socially superior option. And yet, the end-user market share for libre operating systems like GNU/Linux, BSD, etc is still at 1%. It is still nearly impossible to buy a machine with Debian, Guix, Ututo, Gentoo - whatever - anywhere. A few boutique manufacturers sell Libre laptops and smartphones, but they are EXPENSIVE compared to mass-produced computers and phones subsidized by end-user exploitation and sprawling monopolies.
Personally, I have taken the "be the change you want to see" route. The result is that I have a very cool computer which runs games like Witcherino on Gentoo at 4K on an entirely free software graphics stack. It isn't making my internet bill any lower or dissolving the monopoly platforms. We need to take over the networks. We need to take over the factories. We need to take over the data centers.
If every minute of dev time put into GIMP had instead been put into comprehensively stealing and reverse engineering Photoshop that would have been a better use of time.
Freedom and capitalism fundamentally cannot coexist, in software or anywhere.
I'm generally sympathetic to Melody Horn's (boringcactus's) assessment in hir 2020 article, "Post-Open Source." I deviate / branch out in a few ways, but it was a timely polemic which caught a lot of attention, spawning a struggle session on the Orange Site and becoming the basis of a very good episode of General Intellect Unit.
The Free Software movement has not liberated computing. The "Year of Linux on the Desktop" is never coming - and it has nothing to do with how prepared or mature or comprehensive the collection of Free Software has become. We are still not living in a tech utopia. Our computational infrastructure overwhelmingly is designed to spy on us, rat on us to the state, propagandize us, and empty our pockets. The labor of Free Software contributors is typically exploited by megacorporations and plunderbunds to collect rents on private computational and network infrastructure. Microsoft "loves" Linux, now that they are able to charge you a monthly fee for running it in Azure. Companies like Facebook are perfectly happy to "Open Source" core frameworks like React.JS as a method of outsourcing the costs of maintenance, development, and training.
The Free Software movement has produced a vast collection of useful software, but without control over the networks, the data centers, or the factories where personal electronics are produced, all this software is severely stunted in its capacity to transform daily life. As some posters here have pointed out, the original sin of the Free Software movement was the assumption that people would "vote with their feet," and embrace the technically and socially superior option. And yet, the end-user market share for libre operating systems like GNU/Linux, BSD, etc is still at 1%. It is still nearly impossible to buy a machine with Debian, Guix, Ututo, Gentoo - whatever - anywhere. A few boutique manufacturers sell Libre laptops and smartphones, but they are EXPENSIVE compared to mass-produced computers and phones subsidized by end-user exploitation and sprawling monopolies.
Personally, I have taken the "be the change you want to see" route. The result is that I have a very cool computer which runs games like Witcherino on Gentoo at 4K on an entirely free software graphics stack. It isn't making my internet bill any lower or dissolving the monopoly platforms. We need to take over the networks. We need to take over the factories. We need to take over the data centers.
If every minute of dev time put into GIMP had instead been put into comprehensively stealing and reverse engineering Photoshop that would have been a better use of time.
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