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Stallman has basically served his purpose at this point. The path forward is not further awareness-building of Free Software, because everyone is in the orbit o
by syntheweave 5y ago
Stallman has basically served his purpose at this point. The path forward is not further awareness-building of Free Software, because everyone is in the orbit of GPL-licensed software now. It is a problem of creating economic incentives for a commons in computing technologies.
Recall that the thing that kicked off the need for Free Software in the first place was the 1970's move to an enclosure of software under IP law to enable the existence of a "software industry" built on shrink-wrapped products. This move often comes in tandem with hostility towards users and non-repairability, but the underlying key point is that of ownership vs stewardship.
What has made the OSS/free world work historically is a dependency on a few key organizations like the FSF or Red Hat that finagled some marginal and often self-interested incentives for the creation and maintenance of the software. Much of it had huge gaps in function or documentation that gave open source an elitist image, of the "we use it internally but we can't tell you how to set it up" sort.
But more recently, we've see the rise of the Patreon developer, who can command some pretty big bucks by being a visible leader in a popular open project. You don't actually need a huge number of those to substantially propel projects forward, since if they do the job well, the drive-by contributors are much more effective, and more user issues get addressed. That is an example of how stewardship is starting to take over software. It is not an evenly distributed phenomenon, and brings certain inequities of its own, but there's some potential to devise better standard arrangements of this sort.
- einpoklum 5y ago> The path forward is not further awareness-building of Free Software, because everyone is in the orbit of GPL-licensed software now. I'm not so certain. There has been a strong pull away from GPL software towards weakly-licensed software, which is difficult to resist. Hell, _I_ have not been able to resist, and my publicly-available software is 3-BSD-licensed. So, I would say that advocacy for GPL-style licensing and virally-FOSS software is still very much necessary. The same goes for many of the principles RMS argues for. > What has made the OSS/free world work historically is a dependency on a few key organizations like the FSF or Red Hat No. Since the software is free, we are not dependent on an organization maintaining it. Naturally, if the maintainer "drops" a piece of software, that is a problem and a challenge, but still. > Much of it had huge gaps in function or documentation that gave open source an elitist image Unlike commercial software, free software is unusable if Joe User can't it figure out themselves. So, without documentation and relative consistence of functionality - it's of very little public use. > we've see the rise of the Patreon developer, No, we haven't. What fraction of FOSS developer can use that as a living? I'd be surprised if it's 1 in 5,000. > who can command some pretty big bucks by being a visible leader in a popular open project. Again, very few projects are this bug. Most FOSS projects have a small number of users.