Twitter at the speed of parenting
Been thinking a lot about what comes after “free software” & “open source.” Both terms were coined when the tech industry (& the world) was a very different place. I think we’ve outgrown them.
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Open source and free software licenses gave power to the users - the individuals - at the expense of the companies.
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But that balance of power has shifted over the last 30 years. What we are noticing is that free and open source software is now accumulating power once again in the _companies_, since they’re the end the users of the software, rather than individuals.
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And so we are seeing calls for licenses that shift power back to the authors - who are often still individuals or collectives rather than companies.
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The OSI can persist in its insistence that “open source” means transferring power to the user, but if they do, I think they’re missing the larger point of their movement.
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If we want free and open source software to continue to be about giving power to individuals at the expense of companies, then it’s time for a change.
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I want to read more about the legal aspects of open source licensing - both generally in terms of what kind of case law exists, and specifically around what constitutes "distribution."
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But IANAL, so I've googled, but I don't know how to evaluate the trustworthiness of the results. I assume that in law, as in software development, there are a lot of bad takes out there.
Law and law-adjacent folks: any pointers?Show this thread
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This also correlates to a shift back towards a mainframe/cloud mentality wherein computational power and the machines that run software are centralized.
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I was just having this conversation... And it's clear that the "four freedoms", at least in my eyes, are no longer what we need for the current landscapehttps://twitter.com/PaulDJohnston/status/1175052640948051968 …
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The "open source" community sees the "freedoms" as the purpose, rather than what they were originally intended for. Maybe what we need now, is a new form of license that takes some of the ideas, but embeds the ideas of justice. I've had a few people say the like the idea.
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This certainty doesn't apply to all cases, but a lot of software is installed on servers of big corporations and used by individuals over the Internet. So it seems like wider use of the Affero GPL might help shift some power from corporations to individuals.
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I think FSF (even misguided as it was) should regain it’s place. It should also adhere the concepts you are mentioning. Closed code environments still harm society (closed iPhone features, etc). In some corporate cases closed source still means having slaves working in a place.
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