A critical, unavoidably sociopolitical, and possibly optimistic (depending on your worldview) critique of the open-source movement and it’s philosophical origins that failed to take root. Regardless of your views I think it articulates an undercurrent seen in many discussions within the open source community. I would absolutely love thoughts on this article, as the wider discussions adjacent to it are obsessively interesting to me and have been for a long time. Freedom isn’t Free

i really like the phrase “public luxury”—communicates much better the value of things like libraries, parks, the postal service (IMO)

This highly personalized model of social change proposed an individual solution to a structural problem, which necessarily neglected the wider social context.

Yeah I've been thinking about this exact thing lately as well. Open-source has historically lacked intersectionality with other, more obviously material social issues. FOSS's roots in the problematic and esoteric "hacker ethos" also doesn't help.

I agree with @yoshiki. There is a hard core in the FSF that still promotes GNU-style freedom as the ultimate road to happiness, but most people in the Open Source universe have recognized that licenses aren't the whole story. My main worry about the FOSS world right now is a tendency towards tribalism in Open Source communities. For many people, their community is everything, more important even than the software it produces and the impact it has on the wider world. As an example, for many people in the scientific Python ecosystem it seems more important to promote Python than to enable good science.

@yoshiki solarpunk is interesting, as a cultural and aesthetic movement I think it serves to reclaim the future, at least one possible future_._ What I mean, is that we have few large sources of inspiration for our future as an aesthetic: the techno-determinist futures found in shiny Apple products, Elon Musk and platforms like Uber; and the reactionary futures as a response to climate change. I think both of these are problematic and not actually desirable (even as I write this on an iPhone, which I do think is quite sexy) I love any effort to rekindle a sense of what’s possible, especially building new and desirable aesthetics around it. and for anyone familiar with political theory this is all closely related to ideas such as ‘_capitalist realism’, the ‘end of history’, and ‘modernity’_

Fostering a sense of community is probably necessary to get people to devote the kind of energy a project like Python requires, though.

I think this take on open source undervalues many ways in which that movement increases the personal freedom and autonomy of users. Being able to fix things oneself (in the spirit of Right to Repair laws), audit one's system to make sure it's not running spyware, &c, are very good things that fall outside of the scope of this piece's focus on the means of production. (Which is not to suggest those questions aren't important!)

@Jack Rusher I suspect the author would totally agree with you, she writes about those same feelings in a book called Abolish Silicon Valley (about her disillusionment with the status quo, which might resonate with some here)

@Chris Knott Definitely. Like for all large-scale coordination of human efforts. But then we get into the realm of <https:/www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html|Jerry Pournelle's "Iron Law of Bureaucracy"> , and with further growth the organization becomes a danger for its environment. It's the human version of the paperclip maximizer. It would be great if FOSS community leaders were aware of this mechanism and took preventive action, but so far I don't see that happen. I'd love to see codes of conduct also mentioning the community's impact on the outside world, and larger communities nominating outside observers to provide them with feedback. Among the biggest damage FOSS communities can create is depletion of the global attention reservoir. Which I think is one of the issues of FoC work. Anyone doing serious work in tech nowadays has to delve so deep into Linux that it becomes hard to envisage computing without Linux.

Digital Democracy is a great example of an organization that fuses FOSS values with a mission of larger social change, in their case empowering marginalized communities:

Digital Democracy’s mission is to empower marginalized communities to use technology to defend their rights.

https://www.digital-democracy.org/mission/

We believe in creating open source technology and contributing to open source libraries. Our tools are free or inexpensive, and we look for affordable technology for our partners which is hardware agnostic and cross-platform. We create easy to use, flexible and multilingual tools, adaptable to local cultures and contexts, which our partners can use to collect, manage and take action on information they gather.

https://www.digital-democracy.org/values/