The entire FOSS movement is stuck in the 1980s-1990s and has not adapted to the new business and computing environment of the 21st century. Source code is far

The entire FOSS movement is stuck in the 1980s-1990s and has not adapted to the new business and computing environment of the 21st century. Source code is far less relevant to freedom today. The new closed is closed runtimes and closed data. I can run a service based on 100% open source software that I either use from others or produce myself, and if the runtime and user data are behind a paywall the result is something that is more closed than closed-source software. At least with closed-source software you can still run it. I can take a file produced by a 1980s DOS program and load it up under that program in DOSBox on a computer today. I also have all the data I ever made, and if I want to put in the effort to reverse engineer the format could extract it or port it to some other format. My data is my data. None of this can be done with hosted SaaS. Cloud is the new closed and is far more closed than the old closed. We confuse free "as in beer" with free "as in freedom." These two are actually at odds. If all software is free "as in beer," it becomes impossible to field any business model that prioritizes the user. The only available business models are closed-data/closed-runtime SaaS, usually with a healthy dose of lock-in and surveillance capitalism, or closed super-locked-down hardware like Apple's iOS that effectively achieves SaaS levels of lock-down but at the edge. A model in which the user pays directly for the software is necessary (but not sufficient) to enable software that actually prioritizes the user. (The other necessary condition is at least some users exercising discernment and purchasing software that doesn't treat them like shit.) If you can't sell software, you either have to sell the user (surveillance capitalism), exploit/con the user (gambling-based models like loot boxes), or find some other way to erect a paywall (SaaS, locked-down hardware). Free "as in beer" means honest straightforward business models are impossible. Finally the idea that all software even can be free "as in beer" is a fantasy, especially when you go beyond bare bones open source code that requires a lot of expert setup or "geek tools." Software that non-geeks can actually use requires exponentially more effort to produce and maintain than open source projects that are made for programmers by programmers. Getting a program to work is often maybe 5-10% of the effort, with the other 90-95% being UI/UX. Worse, UI/UX is the sort of work that most programmers do not find fun. As a result they have to be paid to do it, which is why few if any truly free "as in beer" open source products have broken out beyond hacker subcultures and IT/developer audiences (unless they are used as a hidden platform or component in providing something else, like Google's massive surveillance capitalist empire running on Linux). IMHO we need to re-think the entire open source social contract from the perspective of how to maximize freedom (and privacy) in today's world. Dogmatism is the largest impediment to this, but I also have the sense that the institutional side of open source (e.g. OSI) is completely captured and in the pocket of FAANG companies that do not want anything to change. I recall a FOSDEM lecture a while ago on "threats to open source" that read a bit like this article, and the presenter was a lawyer for Facebook. If organizations like OSI won't help, we need new organizations. We may also need new terminology. Edit: AFAIK Richard Stallman would probably agree with at least some of the things I say above. He argued on several occasions that open source did not always have to imply free as in no payment or no economic model. The GPL has issues that hamstring its adoption and is not the right answer to this, but it's still one of the better licenses for open source ventures that want to dual-license or prevent SaaSification.