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Analyzing social movements, taken on face value, with pure logic alone isn't good enough. You have to learn their history as well; otherwise you're only compari
by tboyd47 6y ago
Analyzing social movements, taken on face value, with pure logic alone isn't good enough. You have to learn their history as well; otherwise you're only comparing empty slogans against each other.
Libertarianism and the free software movement are two social movements that have very little in common except the word "freedom."
Libertarian philosophers like Hayek, and even those who would describe themselves as anarchists like Rothbard, do not advocate a lawless society. They accept the bottom-up process of building up common and constitutional law through court precedent and reject the top-down imposition of laws by fiat.
To your specific points, American society has already worked out which "freedoms" impinge on others' freedoms over the course of 200+ years of constitutional law, building on many more centuries of British common law. The idea that a single person can sit at a desk and calculate "trade-offs" between civil rights enshrined by law and enjoyed by large groups of people over many hundreds of years would be absurd to a libertarian, though commonplace today. Who is allowed to make such a decision, and why?
The free software movement emerged as a defense of pre-existing collaboration networks between academics from the threat an attempted corporate takeover in a very specialized area of computing at a specific point in time, i.e. OS development in the 1980s.
I find that few developers understand the forces the original software freedom movement was fighting against, although such forces are stronger than ever. This is only because the software freedom movement so thoroughly wiped out its opposition within its own limited domain that those looking from the outside can't understand the point of it anymore. Perhaps that's what true victory looks like in the historical record; when the opposition is not only defeated but silent, the victors look like a bunch of loud extremists going on and on about something irrelevant.
- icebraining 6y agoI have to say I find it hard to follow your argument. How can the forces be stronger than ever if the opposition was defeated and wiped out? According to lore, Stallman started the movement due to a closed-source appliance (a printer) he used and which he wanted to improve. Closed devices continued to be and are still the norm, so I don't see how the opposition was defeated, let alone wiped out.
- tboyd47 6y agoCorporate influence stronger than ever outside of the limited domain of operating systems for mainframe computers at universities. The opposition that was wiped out was closed-source, proprietary operating systems for the PDP-11. It may seem an insignificant footnote to us, but if we look at everything built on Unix -- Mac OS, Linux, practically the entire internet -- the battle was universe shaping for computing. Despite the huge influence, the moral and legal arguments made by free software proponents fall on deaf ears in 2020. My view is that those arguments don't have the same meaning outside of the specific context they arose in. Stipulating that people who extend your open source software make their extensions open source is meaningless in the context of 10,000,000 JS libraries that take a developer a few weeks to create, all are delivered in plaintext anyway, and all intended to run on Google Chrome or Safari. It's more meaningful in the context of an operating system designed to run on 100s of computers and interface with 1,000s of peripherals, most of which are not known to the OS developer, which the OS developer wouldn't even have access to if they knew about it, and would take said developer months or years to support if they did have access to it. The GPL and other legal tools were developed for that context, and they succeeded to a revolutionary degree in that and to evaluate them in a different context is to miss the forest for the trees. One of the best accounts of the movement I've read is "Open Sources." Highly recommend it!