What comes after open source

The point about what is in the right spirit is important to discuss, however, there's also a lot wrong in this article. The thing that bugs me the most is misrepresenting FSF.

1. Attributes this https://fsfe.org/news/2019/news-20190326-01.en.html to the fsf. That is not the fsf, but the fsfe, which is independent from fsf.

2. I don't think that fsfe press release "supports expanding copyright".

3. "The FSF didn’t move to GitHub because GitHub is proprietary, and they see that as inconsistent with their values." Thats not correct. For starters, see https://www.gnu.org/software/repo-criteria.en.html

4. "If a company were to add a proprietary feature to an open source project, yet pays five employees to develop the open source part further, the FSF sees this as a tragedy." Wrong. First, FSF accepts donations from proprietary software companies, so it's participating in in a tragedy? FSF does not say things like: "The FSF believe because your born, you're going to use nonfree software, which is bad, so being born is a tragedy."

5. Look at what fsf and osi say about "open source" vs "free software" https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point...., https://opensource.org/faq, and neither say that permissive or copyleft being any part of the of it, so its definitely not the main thing like the article describes.

> I would love to see more CS history classes.

It would be nice to see something like that. I'm not sure it will happen.

Our human society in general - for some reason - has deemed that the history of "computation" - or however you want to put it...isn't important.

Think about how many automobile museums there are in the world - or google it, whatever. Both public and private. You probably have several where you live - especially if you live in the United States (less so in Europe, even less elsewhere).

Or museums about aircraft and aerospace - another technology that has fundamentally changed human society.

Then compare those to the number of "computer history" museums.

Despite the known fact that the computer has fundamentally changed our society in ways that are still not completely clear, and ongoing - we have done so little to preserve that history.

Software is a large part of that as well...we have systematically destroyed, or have left to "bitrot" because "proprietary software" in some back room (or worse, in an unknown location because a company went out of business, or was purchased and re-purchased, etc).

For instance - there are several Cray supercomputers out there - in private ownership and in museums - but have you ever tried to find the OS software or documentation in order to actually make one run? I'm not going to say it's impossible to find, but I wouldn't call it easy, either (a great resource for info on these old machines and software is the bitsavers archive).

We ignore this history at our peril; there are numerous cases on both the hardware and software side of things of "reinventing the wheel" because this history isn't widely known or understood. In some cases, it's not even avoidable because the information that would prevent it is either not easily or widely available - or is non-existant period! In other cases, it may be available, but it just isn't widely known about or taught.

I don't see this changing any time soon, unfortunately...

> Is it true that developers are rabidly anti-union?

To me it seems this way; there are pros and cons to unionizing - while there hasn't been a formal discussion, obviously, developers have seemed to have selected for "no unionizing".

I recall there being a call for a union and efforts toward this back in 1998 or thereabouts; 20 years ago roughly. It died out rather rapidly. Maybe related to the dot-com implosion, I don't know.

But...something is going to need to be done. We are rapidly either heading toward needing a union, or we'll be forced to be certified and/or licensed, much in the same way actual engineers are. Maybe a combo of those things.

We are seeing software being integrated more and more into devices and machines that can and do put people into life threatening situations. Self-driving vehicles, drive-by-wire controls, and other things - while none not actually "new" - have been failing in ways that are much more public than in the past, and has caused discussion on the idea of "who is at fault".

Companies are ultimately going to want to shift the burden from them, to their employees. I'm honestly surprised it's taken this long - and the fact that it still hasn't occurred ; I'm not sure why that is.

The implementation of Multicasting (it's in GNUnet roadmap) can quickly make the mesh more efficient. In cities, wifi devices can start working together and manage bandwidth in a better way. Then a program can signal that, for example, 4 different wifis with GNUnet cover the same physical location. Somebody (network analyst hobbyist) could write to them and offer them to get a communal wifi that uses GNUnet superior performance while saving a lot on ISP services.

If your question is "why haven't software engineers unionized?" the answer may be that the average software engineer doesn't get mad enough to start a union. haha