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This is a good read about how to interpret what is...
# linking-together
i
This is a good read about how to interpret what is meant by "open source" Open Source Power Pullquote:
This definition of open source prohibits discriminating against megacorps and nazis. That's a problem for me.
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d
This is fantastic. The links and citations are so rich too.
j
Really well written post. It makes explicit something I’ve been confused about. This new criticism of open source doesn’t really resonate with me.
Yet if open source code alone could change the world, it would have happened by now. When Microsoft suddenly turned OSS-friendly in the 2010s we triumphantly proclaimed "open source has won!", but what have we got to show for it? More technology does not on its own correlate with better quality of life.
This desire that software licensing (of any sort, open source, fair source etc) changes the world as a whole for the better is not something I share. Perhaps I’m being pessimistic in that. But I see the ability of corporations to take advantage of open source and gain more power from it as not a failing of open source, but as a fact of the political structure of the corporation. If we, collectively decided to move to a fair source (or any of the alternatives I’ve seen proposed) model, my belief is that too would end up benefiting corporations (particularly large ones) disproportionately to the rest of us. I definitely think there is more that I disagree with here. But I really think this gets to the heart of where the rest of those disagreements come from. My worry, is that because I believe this is true, these efforts to restrict, or draw boundaries, will exclude some who would have had access otherwise, and will just give more tools for corporations to further consolidate their power.
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d
The way I see it, and what resonated most with me, is the idea that ~open source (shared, source available, whatever it is) is a precondition for any kind of commons around software. I guess that regresses to "do we expect commonses to change the world for the better?" which in my case I would say yes, but that is a site of argument too.
c
@Jimmy Miller I share a similar sentiment, licensing as the only theory of change seems unlikely to materially change things. I think this essay articulates it the best I've seen.
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There's history that tends to lack in these conversations as well. For example the open source movement didn't form around a politics to create a software commons resistant to enclosure or labor exploitation, it formed around trying to reframe the free software movement into something that is beneficial to commercial interests.
k
I agree with @Jimmy Miller's criticism as well, and yet I do see a possibility to use licenses as a tool towards a more commons-oriented world. The link is Conway's law. It actually applies in both directions: software architecture both influences and is influenced by the social structure of whatever entity develops the software. A license that pleases commoners and displeases corporations can make a difference. Pleasing includes both legal and moral aspects, plus maybe more. The moral ones probably matter more, given that it's hard to enforce the legal aspects against infringement by big players.
p
@Christopher Shank You're right about the origins of the term open source, but I would disagree with language/framing in that article. Admittedly, I was young and naive at the time, but my recollection is that "open source" just felt like a slightly more pragmatic way of pushing the same revolutionary ideas. From today's perspective, it's easy to underestimate, but I think the whole idea did seem like a big threat to the established software companies back then.
For a while now, I've been wishing someone would write a book about this — how FOSS went from being a threat to the established software corps, to be co-opted and ultimately a source of their power.
k
@Patrick Dubroy My memories agree with yours. The discussion was about "pragmatic" Open Source vs. "fundamentalist" Free Software. In scientific research, where software was at that time absolutely not recognized as a valuable contribution, we all (i.e. the small minority of youngsters believing in software) jumped on "Open Source" in order to be more relevant, hoping to get from industrial users the recognition that we couldn't get from academia. Of course, most of the issues the article addresses didn't exist back then. No entity dominated anything in tech space (as far as research was concerned, maybe IBM already dominated banking etc.).
g
aside: The prevailing culture was very different from today. All source was closed and proprietary. The first tutorial in every university computer course began with a lecture about our allotted budget for doing computer homework. I remember being allowed to use $20.00 for doing assignments in one course. I ended up using only $10.00 and used the other $10.00 to "pay" for printing out all of the source code to Utah Lisp on fan-fold paper.
c
@Patrick Dubroy this is from the wikipedia entry of the history of FOSS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_free_and_open-source_software#The_launch_of_Open_Source The citation links to this book on how to run a FOSS project (screenshot below) https://producingoss.com/en/introduction.html#free-vs-open-source
There's this great paper on how the PC revolution became co-opted and it describes a couple of different strategies for how it can happen.
In a regularization strategy people try to fix social reality in the terms laid down by the dominant ideology, controlling social situations so that the ideal principles of social life become real and palpable.
Adjustment strategies seek to redress this stigma, not by rejecting the dominant value system, but by attempting to portray the marginal personas a valuable human being within the dominant value framework.
Reconstitution strategies stem from a conscious attempt to rewrite the rules, change the dominant ideology, and reshape the social context. Such strategies frequently make use of symbolic inversions or reversal.
I've been thinking about how such a framework applies to FOSS: • the free software movement used a reconstitution strategy aiming to challenge the dominant ideology of closed/proprietary software with inversions that source code should be freely available, modifiable, and unable to become proprietary (copyleft). It's worth noting though that free software was a reactionary movement, aiming to recreate the golden era of software of the 60s/70s, where all software was in the public domain. I think such nostalgia failed to account for the starkly different environment that was, particularly with the advent of microprocessors and digital copyright. • The open source movement looked at the reconstitution strategy of free software as a failure because businesses (run by business people) misunderstood what "free software" meant. I totally agree with you that the early OS advocates wanted to carry forward the ideals of the free software movement. But they did so with an adjustment strategy, figuring out how to market free software within the dominant system of business and proprietary software. Adjustment strategies carry an ambivalence towards the dominant ideology, and I think for open source that (eventually) meant departing the "ideological" copyleft licensing of free software towards more permissible licensing that proprietary software can use. Thus marking the beginning of how open source became enclosed and extracted.
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the recognition/relevancy that @Konrad Hinsen talks about maps very closely to the situational adjustment of hackers in the PC era
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p
@Christopher Shank Been meaning to read that paper since you shared it on Bluesky a while back!
c
@Patrick Dubroy once you get a chance to read it, I'd love to hear you're thoughts on it!
j
In the mid 80s we wanted the software we used to be better and more “user serviceable”than the junk we got from vendors like Data General, and much of it was open source avant la lettre because it benefited us. Stallman’s crusade was off to the side of things like BSD, &c., and many of us believed at the time that less encumbered software was simply more free (“here it is, do what you want with it”). We did not at the time foresee a future when large corporations would run on our code without giving support to the people writing and maintaining it. In some sense we succeeded beyond our expectations and are now being punished for it.
k
In some sense we succeeded beyond our expectations
Some people still see it as a success. A while ago (maybe a year or so), I listened to a podcast interview with Peter Wang, well-known in the scientific Python universe for being one of the founders of Anaconda. He summarized the history of Python in science and pointed out the enormous success of a project started by a few young scientists which ended up supporting large-scale projects such as PyTorch. Well, I was one of those young scientists, and I don't see the conversion of scientific Python into a corporate-backed project as a success. In this case, the issue is not lack of financial contribution, but project dominance by two corporations, under whose influence scientific Python has become unsuitable for small-scale research because of the high cost of living with its tech churn.
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p
Very well put @Jack Rusher! I wasn't aware of this stuff in the 80s but I appreciate the perspective. I've been thinking about this thread, and came to the conclusion that I don't enclosure is the right metaphor at all. I think open source did succeed, at least in terms of the goals that people were concerned with when I became aware of these ideas (late 90s).
c
@Patrick Dubroy what were/are the intended goals to you?
p
@Christopher Shank I think both "free software" and "open source" are pretty explicitly about only two things: (a) individual freedom (I should be able modify the software I use) and (b) software quality (given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow).
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k
Both of these have been hollowed out by software size and complexity since then. Legally, I am allowed to modify Firefox as I like. Technically, I can't even compile it from source code any more. And with bugs that span layers of dependencies, cognitively limited eyeballs are no longer sufficient, no matter their number.
j
People find bugs in bug complicated programs all the time, so I can’t agree with this binary characterization of the inutility of many eyeballs. OTOH I would say that many eyeballs turned out to be fairly unhelpful with architecture and UX problems, which are widespread in FOSS 😔 (the complexity that bothers us all is usually the result of the architecture decisions rather than line by line coding errors)
i
I'm struck that there hasn't yet been any mention of the source availability of every single website. Even with modern JS DX obsession, utility CSS, the node_modules black hole, bundling and minification and such obfuscating things to the point of FUBAR, I still frequently pop open devtools and explore how sites are made, learn new techniques, steal assets, overcome user-hostile "features", etc.
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k
@Jack Rusher Sure, my comment was about the "all" in "all bugs are shallow".
@Ivan Reese From a Free Software perspective, most of what you see via browser devtools isn't source. The GPL definition is "_The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it."_ A Web site that has undergone a build step is not published as source. It's still very helpful for exploring, even reverse engineering, of course. A lot better than native code. But I guess WASM will put Web sites on the level of apps if it ever gets widely adopted.
j
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