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> I feel that we're in a post-revolutionary phase of open source It seems increasingly clear to me that this is true, albeit in the sense that the revolutionar

by brennen 10y ago

> I feel that we're in a post-revolutionary phase of open source It seems increasingly clear to me that this is true, albeit in the sense that the revolutionary aims of the FOSS movement (if we can genuinely lump things together) have been for the most part utterly defeated, and the handful of people who are sincerely concerned about them are now engaged in a tattered and obviously doomed rear-guard action. Open source as an engineering approach is doing fine, of course: Its practical benefits turn out to provide a great deal of leverage for centralizing and consolidating power.

davexunit 10y ago
>and the handful of people who are sincerely concerned about them are now engaged in a tattered and obviously doomed rear-guard action. This is very demeaning and insulting. The revolution is alive and well.
- brennen 10y ago
  Since it was unclear from my comment: I consider myself an active (if entirely unimportant) participant in the movement, and the state of affairs I describe is one I'm deeply concerned by. I still see it as broadly true that we're in bad shape and losing ground fast.
  - davexunit 10y ago
    Hmm, sorry for misinterpreting, but I disagree that we're in bad shape. Free software has never been more popular. I've never been able to do more with 100% free software than right now. I owe my career to free software. The threats are great, I agree, but we will keep fighting.
    - brennen 10y ago
      > I owe my career to free software. Me too. :) I'm not giving up - and I agree that both as an end user and a developer, there's plenty to appreciate right now. Still, I think there are a lot of hard, complicated thoughts to be had about the distribution of power and the direction things are headed.
      - davexunit 10y ago
        Yes, fully agree. This is a difficult time for all social justice causes.
labster 10y ago
Can you elaborate please? This seems like an opinion without supporting evidence, but evidence probably exists? I just don't want to reject your argument out of hand because the health of the open source ecosystem is important.
- brennen 10y ago
  Sure. My thesis is just that: a) open source as a technique and a body of work has become indispensable (or at least, for the moment, quite important) to a lot of industry and to the structure of the existing network that enables it. I don't think anyone very credible on the issue would seriously dispute this. b) open source as a technique and a body of work has been instrumental in giving players like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Twitter (etc. ad infinitum) the leverage to build a service-oriented / centralized / siloed model of networked computing which is antithetical to the aims of user control and freedom expressed by the Free Software movement and a broad set of more-or-less related ideological impulses. By some measures, the health of the open source ecosystem seems quite robust. By others, we're plainly fucked and I'm not sure what to do about it.
- matt4077 10y ago
  The idea of Open Source was, first and foremost, to allow the users of software to inspect and modify the source code. "free" in this regard has something of a political as well as an economic component. To summarise the political very broadly, I'd say that software (and the data it manages) are power, and giving broad access to both distributes that power among the users of software. The economic aspects are not just cheap access to software, but also the benefits of increased competition result from access to the code, which allows the creation of data-compatible competitors. These missions have failed for anyone but software developers, because so much of today's software runs on servers where the GPL does not enforce sharing of code, and because the community has become dominated by commercial players and permissive licenses like MIT. As a metaphor: the bakers are all happy because the flour and yeast are free. But bread is as expensive as ever, and most people eat in restaurants, anyway.

by brennen 10y ago

davexunit 10y ago

>and the handful of people who are sincerely concerned about them are now engaged in a tattered and obviously doomed rear-guard action. This is very demeaning and insulting. The revolution is alive and well.

brennen 10y ago
Since it was unclear from my comment: I consider myself an active (if entirely unimportant) participant in the movement, and the state of affairs I describe is one I'm deeply concerned by. I still see it as broadly true that we're in bad shape and losing ground fast.
- davexunit 10y ago
  Hmm, sorry for misinterpreting, but I disagree that we're in bad shape. Free software has never been more popular. I've never been able to do more with 100% free software than right now. I owe my career to free software. The threats are great, I agree, but we will keep fighting.
  - brennen 10y ago
    > I owe my career to free software. Me too. :) I'm not giving up - and I agree that both as an end user and a developer, there's plenty to appreciate right now. Still, I think there are a lot of hard, complicated thoughts to be had about the distribution of power and the direction things are headed.
    - davexunit 10y ago
      Yes, fully agree. This is a difficult time for all social justice causes.

labster 10y ago

Can you elaborate please? This seems like an opinion without supporting evidence, but evidence probably exists? I just don't want to reject your argument out of hand because the health of the open source ecosystem is important.

brennen 10y ago
Sure. My thesis is just that: a) open source as a technique and a body of work has become indispensable (or at least, for the moment, quite important) to a lot of industry and to the structure of the existing network that enables it. I don't think anyone very credible on the issue would seriously dispute this. b) open source as a technique and a body of work has been instrumental in giving players like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Twitter (etc. ad infinitum) the leverage to build a service-oriented / centralized / siloed model of networked computing which is antithetical to the aims of user control and freedom expressed by the Free Software movement and a broad set of more-or-less related ideological impulses. By some measures, the health of the open source ecosystem seems quite robust. By others, we're plainly fucked and I'm not sure what to do about it.
matt4077 10y ago
The idea of Open Source was, first and foremost, to allow the users of software to inspect and modify the source code. "free" in this regard has something of a political as well as an economic component. To summarise the political very broadly, I'd say that software (and the data it manages) are power, and giving broad access to both distributes that power among the users of software. The economic aspects are not just cheap access to software, but also the benefits of increased competition result from access to the code, which allows the creation of data-compatible competitors. These missions have failed for anyone but software developers, because so much of today's software runs on servers where the GPL does not enforce sharing of code, and because the community has become dominated by commercial players and permissive licenses like MIT. As a metaphor: the bakers are all happy because the flour and yeast are free. But bread is as expensive as ever, and most people eat in restaurants, anyway.