Seize the Means of Computation
Seize the Means of Computation
Without the mention of FOSS, these types of pro-market "solutions" will always end up dead in the water.
This is not just a matter of competition for its own sake. This is about guaranteeing users the fundamental right to technological self-determination, a right that corporate monopolists will not yield willingly. This is nothing less than empowering users to seize the means of computation.
Can't have tech self-determination if everything's a black box controlled by corporate entities.
Had some related thoughts I wrote about here https://justiceinternationale.com/articles/2020-12-02-we-must-own-our-tools/
To be honest, after 20+ years of using Linux and working in tech I've concluded it is not the openness of the tech that matters, but the governance of the providers. I've been tinkering with running a little ISP doing email, nextcloud hosting, etc, and running it as a cooperative.
That's to say that the socialist thing is public ownership, and the nearest we can come to that is coops, at the moment. Governing provision is much more interesting on the basis that it enables people who aren't terminally online to make good choices.
I think so. Moreover, I think doing FOSS is waste of energy and time under capitalism. If it will be less developed, almost nobody will use it. If it will be competitive to comercial products, it will be seized by capitalists in some way. Why reinvent the wheel, when we can pirate something? It hurts companies the most. And yes, the most important factor is who owns the software code, big data and the like. This should be publicly owned. Making FOSS under capitalism is wasteful since this time and energy can be better used to fight capitalism by other means. Unless someone does it for fun as a hobby.
We are slowly transitioning to FOSS (maybe just open source), ironically it's big tech itself the one sponsoring the transition. Not out of goodwill but because it's cheaper and more efficient to mantain and develop open source code.
At least for 'mainstream' computing. Specialized industry software is decades behind and might never become open source.
Not out of goodwill but because it’s cheaper and more efficient to mantain and develop open source code.
And then you have the companies that use open source throughout their product but don't contribute upstream at all or even close source and only use permissively licensed open source. Which is less great 😢
Frankly I'm hesitant about FOSS as a movement these days. It has a libertarian bent a mile wide (actually giving your license clauses that stop people from doing harm with your software in various ways makes it "no longer free"), is poorly applicable to the actual user, and doesn't care about anything other than itself (free software should be intersectional but the FSF continues to champion and cater to white men and sex pests)
Libertarians want proprietary. Libertarians believe the highest form of human to be the scammer. FOSS people don't scam. FOSS isn't libertarian.
Libertarians open source (not free) because it ties into their idealistic notion of how individual freedom is true freedom. In the end software with open source licenses like MIT end up being free high-skill labour for megacorporations who don't give back, neither in terms of financial support nor code changes.
Libertarians love both proprietary and non-free open source licenses for this reason.
There are a lot of liberals and libertarians involved in FOSS, to the point where some FOSS and FOSS-adjacent media (ie 'Slashdot') is practically unreadable. Even the most (in)famous FOSS advocate, Richard Stallman, has appeared on Infowars and is reportedly a sex pest. But there are comrades involved in FOSS too, and there are obvious benefits from avoiding corpo lock-in and corpo spyware (what they call 'telemetry'), so... there's that.
There are definitely way too many questionable individuals in the movement but it's definitely a thing where everyones interests align.