Software freedom isn’t about licenses – it’s about power
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Re: Software freedom isn’t about licenses – it’s about power
#2Somewhat related: Something's seriously wrong when farmers complain about John Deere trying to prevent farmers from repairing their own tractors.
It seemed that companies are trying to exert power over the horizon of user property rights.
It had gotten to the point that "right to repair" movement became a thing.
Re: Software freedom isn’t about licenses – it’s about power
#3 > While the most egregious violations of user freedom come from companies publishing proprietary software
"Software freedom" is the big enabler and partial driver of centralized computing. It is the big enabler in that if you were paying a per CPU license for Windows NT Server, you would go out of your way to make sure that as much as possible was being done on the users computer. In addition, the most widely used copyleft license, the GPL, actually penalizes you if you make a client program that uses GPL libraries(by requiring you be release the source code for your program if the user asks for it), but happily allows you to instead run the program in a datacenter and never have to share the code with the user. Thus you are incentivized to put as much of your program in the datacenter as possible and not on the user's computer. The thing is, if software is on the user's computer, whatever the license, they actually have far more de facto control. They can control what is getting shared. They can reverse engineer the files to allow perfect export and backups. They can own their data. They can also verify what the software is doing with the data (even if it might take a lot of efforts). Once computation happens in a data center, the user is at the complete mercy of the corporation. The corporation can make it impossible to get a true copy of their data, requiring use of legal means instead of technical means. The corporation can store and share and process the data in ways the user has no control or even awareness about.
Sometimes I wonder if we would have been better off from a society point of view and user freedom and privacy, if the old Microsoft vision of the PC as the hub of a users digital life, and users paying money for software they find useful, instead of what we have now where the cloud is the hub of a users digital life (even stuff that could work on a local network, will by default try to contact the cloud), and users are provided useful software in exchange for their engagement, privacy, and attention.
Re: Software freedom isn’t about licenses – it’s about power
#4What I find interesting is that the proprietary software tmost egregious in its impact to the customers product is device drivers, arguably where the free software began. Yet the devices drivers in and of themselves are not exactly worth anything, the company is selling a physical product after all.
Re: Software freedom isn’t about licenses – it’s about power
#5I agree with the general sentiment, but the author gets a few things simply backwards:
Individual hobbyists care about tinkering with the software of their choice, emphasizing freely licensed source code. These concerns do not affect those who do not make a sport out of modifying code. There is nothing wrong with this, but it will never be a household issue.
This couldn't be further from the truth. Consider the simple example of tinkerers making a patch that disables DRM or telemetry, and sharing it with "those who do not make a sport out of modifying code". This is no hypothetical - she writes:
Consider third-party clients to centralized unencrypted chat systems. Although two users of such a client privately messaging one another are using only free software, if their messages are being data mined, there is still harm.
The Off-The-Record plugin (https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/) encrypts otherwise unencrypted centralized chat systems. It works even if you "do not make a sport out of modifying code".
Re: Software freedom isn’t about licenses – it’s about power
#6> While the most egregious violations of user freedom come from companies publishing proprietary software I would say the actual most egregious violations of user freedom and privacy come from companies that are powered by open source infrastructure and that actually are big backers of open source. "Software freedom" is the big enabler and partial driver of centralized computing. It is the big enabler in that if you…
While you are making valid points here I think the primary driver in the push for cloud was the rise of the smartphone. Suddenly regular people wanted to have the same view into their data both on a phone and on a computer.
There are ways to do this peer to peer of course, but google and apple clouds became default.
Google already was a website so it only made sense for them to put their office suite next to the other web stuff as it was "their turf". Of course license cost would have become an issue here. But they could have developed their own backend as well.
I would rather see it as: there was demand and it was useful. Google knew they wouldn't beat microsoft on a Windows machine or Apple on ios/Mac. So they created their own plattform and made sure it is as much web as possible (so Andeoid was/is only a way of pushing their web plattforms).
Re: Software freedom isn’t about licenses – it’s about power
#7> While the most egregious violations of user freedom come from companies publishing proprietary software I would say the actual most egregious violations of user freedom and privacy come from companies that are powered by open source infrastructure and that actually are big backers of open source. "Software freedom" is the big enabler and partial driver of centralized computing. It is the big enabler in that if you…
While you are making valid points here I think the primary driver in the push for cloud was the rise of the smartphone. Suddenly regular people wanted to have the same view into their data both on a phone and on a computer. There are ways to do this peer to peer of course, but google and apple clouds became default. Google already was a website so it only made sense for them to put their office suite next to the othe…
I think cloud had little to do with smartphones per se. The transition started earlier, and I believe the main drivers were what pg made his money on and praised so much in his early essays - the ability to write your software in whatever stack you wish, bugfix and update it for all users instantly, without having to ship anything to anyone... and ultimately, having a justification for subscription revenue.
There were a lot of technical things that had to fell into place for the cloud to spread everywhere - web technologies, ubiquitous Internet access, and perhaps even smartphones - but ultimately, the driver was always the same: if you control access to something, you can charge rent for it.
Re: Software freedom isn’t about licenses – it’s about power
#8Somewhat related: Something's seriously wrong when farmers complain about John Deere trying to prevent farmers from repairing their own tractors. It seemed that companies are trying to exert power over the horizon of user property rights. It had gotten to the point that "right to repair" movement became a thing.
To me, it's the same issue. The way I see it, "Right to Repair" is the hardware equivalent of Free Software movement.
(It's also widely misunderstood. It's not, as some claim, assuming everyone can be a software developer / electrical engineer. It assumes everyone can either be one, or find one in their neighborhood - being able to ask, and possibly pay, other people to fix or improve your software/hardware is the goal here. Free Software and Right to Repair want to let people do what people do best: self-help within their communities, be it personally or via local markets.)
Re: Software freedom isn’t about licenses – it’s about power
#9> ...large corporations claim to love “open source”. No, they do not care about the social movement, only the cost reduction achieved by taking advantage of permissively licensed software.
My job has me convincing and coaching large companies through their first open source steps. In my experience, the cost reduction is a nuanced issue in the boardroom. Mainenance and support costs (and availability), trust of strangers, loss of control, and the clash of openness in a highly secretive world, are strong motivators against the relatively tiny (perceived) expense of building it yourself.
The argument that carries the most water in my experience, is the argument of interoperability. For reliability at modern scale, multi-cloud is an inevitable step. And open source technologies drastically reduce the complexity and cost. Why would you build on Azure's (excellent) CosmosDB and set yourself on a course for painful integration and migration, when you can build with Cassandra and avoid those issues?
To the author's list of important areas impacted by software freedom, I would add diversity and inclusion. It's nice that a bunch of white guys with West US culture build great solutions to their problems that makes sense in their cultural context. But those off-the-shelf products don't help people operating in a different cultural context. With open licenses, it's possible to modify software to fit your own needs, like the users who got braille support into MuseScore, or the Swiss companies who built privacy-friendly email services to compete with gmail on Ux.
However, I disagree with the overall article. These important issues (sustainability, privacy, copyright, outrage-for-profit, D&I, etc) are not components of freedom. They're areas that benefit from user freedom. Software can be "Free as in freedom", and still be Bad For You. It's OK to have open source gambling software, or video games, or bloated office suites. The point is that users get to choose.
This is a nice argument for some kind of "software for good" label, like the kosher K on your food. We could certify that this software:
- respects the 4 FLOSS Freedoms - does not leak or store _any_ information remotely - is (reasonably) free of unnecessary hardware requirements and bloat - does not try to manipulate you for "engagement"
etc.
Re: Software freedom isn’t about licenses – it’s about power
#10That's true about all freedom (not only software).
That's why we need to be able to hack/boot other OS on our hardware and that's why we need to be allowed to have guns.