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Software freedom isn’t about licenses – it’s about power

rosenzweig.io

11–19 of 19 posts

Re: Software freedom isn’t about licenses – it’s about power

#11
Another thing is that corporations use the open source tools to shape industry practices, often in ways which result in net loss of productivity for themselves and their competitors.

Corporations in the software industry are often monopolies. They derive their success primarily from network effects - It has nothing to do with the quality of the software that they produce or their development efficiency; in fact, big corporations are the least efficient of all at building software. Even Google has admitted in the past to completely rewriting most projects every few years.

Clearly this is a sure sign that they're not developing software correctly... What normal company under competitive pressure can afford to constantly rewrite projects? Why then are indie developers and startups spending so much time and effort trying to emulate these big corporations and trying to use the same low quality tools that they use?

The open source tools produced by corporations are heavily marketed and seem to cause lower productivity almost by design. Perhaps they are designed to create some Kafkaesque anti-competitive moat around their products. Big corporations can afford to be inefficient. Maybe they they want to make sure that everyone else is inefficient too. They don't want people to come up with more elegant solutions, they want everyone to be brute-forcing software development by the numbers, throwing hundreds of developers at every problem; because that's the only game they know.

They use their 'open source' software along with their monopolistic network effects to try to draw everyone into that Kafkaesque game.

The best open source tools are outside the corporate sphere but most people don't even know they exist because they are heavily suppressed by the corporate monopolies. They don't want to give up power.

They want to control the landscape of software development; to keep it at a low level of productivity that they are comfortable with.

Re: Software freedom isn’t about licenses – it’s about power

#12

> 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…

> 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.

they shy away from the Affero GPL, and their key elements are proprietary.

Re: Software freedom isn’t about licenses – it’s about power

#13
post #7
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wer…

I'm convinced that the biggest thing the Free Software movement could do, is build a convenient voluntary payment model (and software implementing it very conveniently).

Right now, by far the most convenient model is ads/tracking - it's literally on every platform that respectively can display images/text and doesn't have extensive privacy features, which is basically every platform on the planet. And it's so convenient it requires zero clicks to pay with it!

Ads/tracking cause the "you're not the user, you're the product" problem, which IMO is the reason why everything needs to be online - if you're offline, they can't send you ads or receive your data.

And a proper user-based funding mechanism would also make corporate funding less necessary, which will enable Free Software devs to prioritize consumer users instead of having e.g. Canonical's "but most of our money comes from servers" problem that ends up de-emphasizing the desktop despite their best intentions.

Re: Software freedom isn’t about licenses – it’s about power

#14
post #12

> 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…

> 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. they shy away from the Affero GPL, and their key elements are proprietary.

That's why AGPL software can be divided into small ideologically motivated camp (won't use it, but I respect the choice) and "due diligence mine" as part of dual-licensing AGPL/proprietary setup where the point is to trip people into becoming paying clients.

Re: Software freedom isn’t about licenses – it’s about power

#15
post #14
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. they shy away from the Affero GPL, and their key elements are proprietary.

That's why AGPL software can be divided into small ideologically motivated camp (won't use it, but I respect the choice) and "due diligence mine" as part of dual-licensing AGPL/proprietary setup where the point is to trip people into becoming paying clients.

> ideologically motivated camp

The idea that GPL is ideological and other licenses aren't is false.

Allowing companies to proprietarize software and not caring about user's freedom is just a different set of values.

Re: Software freedom isn’t about licenses – it’s about power

#16
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why AGPL software can be divided into small ideologically motivated camp (won't use it, but I respect the choice) and "due diligence mine" as part of dual-licensing AGPL/proprietary setup where the point is to trip people into becoming paying clients.

> ideologically motivated camp The idea that GPL is ideological and other licenses aren't is false. Allowing companies to proprietarize software and not caring about user's freedom is just a different set of values.

I'm not saying other licenses aren't. In fact, I'll repeat, I respect AGPL used for ideological reasons. But I find it rarer than cases where it's used as part of bait-and-switch tactic by startups preying on other startups (a bit of simplification, but that's non-trivial component of it).

Re: Software freedom isn’t about licenses – it’s about power

#17
post #2

Somewhat 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.

Also somewhat related, "Motor Vehicle Owners' Right to Repair Act" covered similar ground for automobiles. This help discourage auto manufacturers from keeping the digital aspects of repair (error codes, etc.) from being too secret.
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