Who Is Free Software For?

I also think that a lot of people have no clue about what is free software/open source at its root.

Nothing was said to make money, be rich or avoid someone else (being big companies) becoming rich.

At the origin, the greatness of the concept was that you were free on your own computer to do whatever you wanted, how you wanted it. For yourself. And more particularly, FOSS was allowing anyone to have access to tools and server software that was restricted to companies with very expensive and complicated licenses before that.

See Linux that gave access to an Unix-like OS at a time were it was unreachable to hobbyist. In my own time, I remember this incredible pleasure of being able to host his own web server with WAMP or LAMP stack, at a time where you were forced to buy and use windows Pro with corporate license IIS to host even a simple website...

Nowadays, the greatness of FOSS is that anyone can still access for free, without string attached, to all the software needed to train and run LLM models.

> With Open Source/Free Software as well as Creative Commons we have build pipelines to contribute to the commons (great!) but we never thought about how to defend those commons against appropriation.

Perhaps the CC people have not thought about this, but it is precisely why GPL exists, and later AGPL.

If courts find that derivative work comes from AI systems, the AGPL will become a very interesting legal landscape for even hosted models.

Free Software is "for hackers" because, quite frankly, most other people just don't care about the goals of the movement. No amount of "getting out of our comfort zones and modes of operation" is going to change that. And the political angle generally makes it less palatable to general public, not more.

"Meeting people where they are" would require a drastic change of goals, to the point where the result would be unrecognizable, and wouldn't prioritize the things that hackers care about. Which isn't wrong per se, but then why expect hackers to drive such a movement?

I still prefer Louigi Verona's deep ruminations on free/libre software:

https://louigiverona.com/?page=projects&s=writings&t=philoso...

There's a reason why FOSS is by hackers for hackers—it's software written by people to solve their own needs. They release that software as Free/Libre so that others can benefit from it if they would like to, but first and foremost it's written because the author themselves saw a problem and wanted a solution. What's changed is that as startup culture infected hacker culture a few subcultures developed within FOSS that thought that that wasn't good enough.

One of those subcultures decided that it was an imperative that they make more money off of their FOSS projects than anyone else does—this is how you get the Matt Mulenwegs of the FOSS world, who diss on other FOSS developers because "most of the value" of their projects was "captured by others" [0]. They see FOSS as a revenue stream and if it's not a revenue stream (or if it ends up being a bigger revenue stream for someone else than it is for you) it's a failure.

Another subculture thinks that FOSS should be mainstream. That's the idea typified here: by "hackers for hackers" is selfish and we should instead "reshape our thinking towards more political goals and values".

The fact is that both of these perspectives are fundamentally not about adapting FOSS to the times—they're both about building two entirely different philosophies. FOSS is not a business model, and what the Matt Mulenwegs of the world actually want is to be a tech startup CEO. And FOSS is not and cannot be mainstream because to become mainstream requires a bucketload of UX design and user support work that no one in their right mind wants to take on for free as a hobbyist.

FOSS is by hackers for hackers because it must be. If you want to make more profit than anyone else does off your project or if you want to pursue "political goals and values" you're looking for an entirely different type of organization.

[0] http://web.archive.org/web/20241014235025/https://ma.tt/2024...

Free Software isn't for hackers. It's for users. Hackers are also users, but they're not special.

The purpose of Free Software isn't to teach people how to program. It's not a scholarship program for gifted kids to generate startups. It's to institutionalize the right to access and change that software that defines the behavior of the machines that control our lives. You may say that only a programmer can take advantage of that right, so that means that Free Software is meant to create hackers. But I can hire a hacker just like I hire a plumber, or like my condo association hires a roofer, or my town hires a construction firm.

There should not be machines in your life that run on secret commands that you are not allowed to know about. They are not working for you.

edit: it is best not to talk about Free Software Licenses and Open Source/Creative Commons licenses at the same time if you're not talking as a consumer. They don't have much to do with other, other than that their development models are similar and that Open Source software will always be available over the same channels as Free Software.

Copyleft licenses like the GPL are very restrictive licenses that try to make sure that access to the code that they cover will never be restricted to a user of that code. They are an attempt to grant the rights that people should have to all code to enough code that one can accomplish one's goals without having to touch a locked-down black box, and to forbid the makers of locked-down black boxes from taking advantage of, embracing, extending, or extinguishing that code. The copyright holders of copyleft code are granting you that right of access and modification instead of the government. Open Source/Creative Commons has zero interest in that.

Open Source/Creative Commons are liberal licenses that allow anyone to do what they want, and make no (or very few and trivial) demands. You can take it and lock it behind any license. They are only compatible with copyleft licenses because copyleft licenses are part of the class "any license," not for any other reason.

AI tools are removing coding barriers so everyone benefits except those who depend on restrictions, but even they benefit in the long run.

A couple minor issues: the AGPL and similar licenses exist and have been effective at stopping classes of appropriation, and the cake quote is the common misconception. It's referring to the nutritious leftovers usually discarded, and free software means the corporate code deemed nonessential enough to release under free licenses gets spread around, so let's eat that delicious free software cake.

Free Software is for the people who build it. Great closed source companies become great through their ability to sell to many customers. Great free software projects become great through their ability to coordinate and integrate the contributions of many people. The larger the percentage of "people who have contributed something" to "people who use it", the healthier the project is (think of this as [C/(C+U)] where C=Contributors and U=Non-Contributing Users; every Contributor is a user).

The reality that you can use many free software projects without much contribution at all is a happy and good accident of the system; but a dangerous one that can and has been often-accidentally weaponized to burn out the actual contributors.

There's always going to be some tension between people who push free and open source software for ethical or political reasons, and those who push free software for technical and practical reasons. This article seems to give a very unfavorable view of the latter, suggesting that the primary purpose of the "open source" movement was to make free software more palatable to corporations. Well, I believe that it was largely for that purpose, but when you put it that way, it misses the point, I think. The average enthusiast of the "open" movement sees openness as a major advantage in and of itself, for a variety of practical reasons, and the potential benefits in terms of user freedoms are largely just a consequence of that, whereas free software enthusiasts generally seem to be mostly concerned about the movement as a solution to the problem of software that doesn't respect the user's freedoms.

I don't have any issues with the concept of free software, or having strong ethical convictions, or anything like that; however, I am not convinced by the arguments the FSF and Richard Stallman have made on a philosophical level, and frankly, as a programmer, I largely don't even really care to spend much more time worrying about the philosophy of it all. I am glad somebody does, but it's not for me, at least insofar as much as I can avoid having to do it.

And that's okay, because I don't really have to. The fact is that many of us have always preferred open source software primarily due to the side effects that having software with permissively licensed source code available has: the freedom to fork, the ability to audit code, fix bugs, re-use code for new purposes the author did not foresee, and of course, the fact that it is also typically free-as-in-beer. The funny thing about this ad-hoc list of benefits is that it is exactly the same for corporations as it is for users; the reason why so many startups release open source software is because it is a good way to gain trust and goodwill early on. Companies and their employees are more willing to adopt open source solutions because of these things, even if they don't necessarily intend to exercise all of the options it gives them.

The reason why open source is somewhat lopsided, e.g. it's obviously better for corporations than users in many cases, is because the arrangement in which there is no discrimination on who can use something for what yields the maximum utility for everyone. The moment you add even a single restriction, such as "People named Rick are not allowed to use this software", it opens up a world of complexity. Open source licenses can get a little complicated, but the broad strokes are so much simpler and easier to reason about. Think of the complexity that unfree packages place on Linux distributions.

And honestly, the discussion of the "for hackers, by hackers" mentality doesn't really seem fully baked. What does it even mean to be a "hacker" anymore? What identity are we asking people to assume?

I have another theory for why the Linux desktop and Firefox are not winning: it's because they kinda suck. Don't shoot just yet; I use Firefox and Linux all day, every day, and Firefox is in relatively good shape nowadays despite Mozilla seeming to always piss away any opportunity and goodwill they have. But, for-profit corporations have more money, more people and move faster. Competing with Google and Microsoft is hard. Open source can never beat Microsoft and Google at their own game.

However, what open source can do is beat them at games they're not playing. While corporations move fast, open source endures. In the longer term, I believe many prominent open source projects will rise to the top, as we've seen with a select few. Look, I don't expect a "year of the Linux desktop", but if it does happen, it won't be what most people were expecting in the 2000s. Microsoft's enshittification will most likely just lead to a situation where Linux wins by doing nothing, so to speak... I think we're going to see a lot more of that as the software industry slows down.

But honestly, the fact that these behemoth projects exist is a testament to it's success. I don't expect an offshoot to be able to replicate its success, less surpass it. Before people jump on board, I think there really needs to be some more convincing arguments for why we should abandon a movement this successful for an unproven alternative. It's not unfathomable... but personally, I remain unconvinced.

Yup, this article hits it straight on the head. Both Free Software and Open Source (the later is just a more corporate-friendly version of the former) are fundamentally 80s ideologies, concerned about software you run on your computer and the whole thing was created because Stallman couldn't fix his Xerox printer. 40 years later, many things have happened - the Internet, widespread usage of embedded devices and SaaS - and the movements just.... didn't adapt to them at all.

The whole culture is so enmired in the original definitions that it simply can't see anything outside it - so everyone just drains from the creative commons but doesn't really expand it. There's a reason why most prominent FOSS applications are old pieces of software. It's just not a model which works in the 2020s, except for software libraries.

Ironically, many Free Software projects are almost indistinguishable from "look but no touch" software - while in theory you can make changes, in practice you can't because contributing to it is next to impossible and the project structure basically spells the definition of NIMBYism out.

There's also a fundamental tension here - anyone who argues that the current tradeoffs of open source/free software just aren't good enough almost instantly gets dismissed with "well well well.... if you don't like it, don't use it/pick a proprietary licence lol". Or they go straight to victim blaming with "you should have known what you got yourself into, no takebacksies~"... There's a strange dynamic here where if you want to earn money from your project, then FOSS is not a business model, but if a megacorp wants to earn money from your project, then it's okay because everyone wins and you don't lose anyway. Or something like that.

The Free Software movement rejected all ideas which could have contributed to a solution to the ecosystem thriving - non-commercial licences, usage-based licences, dual-licences (in the sense of different terms applying to different users) and countless other things in favour of strict textual interpretation of founding principles. Religions didn't survive thousands of years only on textualism so Free Software won't survive this way, either.