As close readers of this blog know, I attended the Free Software Foundation’s annual convention, LibrePlanet 2023, last month owing to the generous sponsorship of my readers, friends, and family.
Clinton Ignatov is presenting "The long history of metrics before and after cybernetics" right now in the Saturn room. Check this out and more via https://t.co/6kK0pWXBlw at #LibrePlanet pic.twitter.com/uw7VbG7ORr
— Free Software Foundation (FSF) (@fsf) March 19, 2023
The video of my presentation is not yet out, and so I was waiting for its release to do a write-up here. However, a reddit thread on a blog post by programmer Drew DeVault titled “The Free Software Foundation is dying” has hit a nerve with me. So here’s a counter-thread linking to this blog post. Having only just flown back from Boston, MA, where I encountered a very, very lively and dynamic group of hackers, activists, organizers, and doers and shakers, the title alone is absurd. But I’d like to take a moment to address a nearly forty-year-long implicit division in the intended focus of Free Software of which, I believe, this piece is only a recent example.
Since most readers of my blog are here for the McLuhan stuff, I’ll have to explain some of the situation for this new audience in my response. These opinions are my own, not those of anyone at the Free Software Foundation or anywhere else.
To jump straight to the end, Open Source advocates—even before the term Open Source went mainstream in the mid-90s—saw the importance of source code availability from the perspective of programmers, hackers, coders, and software vendors. Free Software advocates since the founding of the FSF always speak in terms of the rights of end users and the general non-coding public at-large. Free Software cares about users and computer owners, Open Source cares about programmers.
Failure to recognize this split is precisely the reasons why Open Source advocates find Free Software advocates to be unreasonably compromising the joint-mission of “FOSS,” the umbrella term for “Free and Open Source Software” as a community. Open Source folks find Free Software absolutists to be puritans, holding back this joing cause with an “unrealistic” “radical ideology,” as the reddit commenters complain.
Mr. DeVaults post is exemplary of the discourse. His arguments are in full accordance with a long line of very respectable software advocates and authorities, and so all respect is due to him in that regard. He complains that its purity of ideology, including prescriptive language (nomenclature) alienates new users and prevents growth.
The organization’s messaging is tone-deaf, ineffective, and myopic. Hammering on about “GNU/Linux” nomenclature, antagonism towards our allies in the open source movement, maligning the audience as “useds” rather than “users”; none of this aids the cause. The pages and pages of dense philosophical essays and poorly organized FAQs do not provide a useful entry point or reference for the community. The message cannot spread like this.
Points about confusing documentation are well taken. But let’s try to find out what “the cause” is Mr. DeVault is complaining about here. Whose cause? The Free Software Foundations? The companies and programmers who make use of “open source” software? Or some imagined common cause shared by the FOSS umbrella? It seems the latter:
And is the free software movement healthy? This one gets an emphatic “yes!” – thanks to the open source movement and the near-equivalence between free software and open source software. There’s more free software than ever and virtually all new software contains free software components, and most people call it open source.
I maintain that there is not an equivalence, and if there is, it’s the fault of semantic drift, or bad nomenclature. The Free Software movement is healthy. And the Open Source software movement is healthy as well. And they are two separate things which Mr. DeVault—in accordance with many, many other knowledgeable and coders and activists and authoritative persons in the Open Source world—elides and blurs together in one giant movement.
To get at my point of contention, let’s first understand what Open Source folks think the importance of FOSS—within which they include the FSF as merely one member—entails. Here is a different post of Mr. DeVault’s from earlier this year, “hammering on about” open source “nomenclature,” titled “The phrase ‘open source’ (still) matters.”
The meaning of the term “open source” is broadly understood to be defined by the Open Source Initiative’s Open Source Definition, the “OSD”. Under this model, open source has enjoyed a tremendous amount of success, such that virtually all software written today incorporates open source components.
The main advantage of open source, to which much of this success can be attributed, is that it is a product of many hands. In addition to the work of its original authors, open source projects generally accept code contributions from anyone who would offer them. They also enjoy numerous indirect benefits, through the large community of Linux distros which package and ship the software, or people who write docs or books or blog posts about it, or the many open source dependencies it is likely built on top of.
Under this model, the success of an open source project is not entirely attributable to its publisher, but to both the publisher and the community which exists around the software. The software does not belong to its publisher, but to its community. I mean this not only in a moral sense, but also in a legal sense: every contributor to an open source project retains their copyright and the project’s ownership is held collectively between its community of contributors.1
The OSD takes this into account when laying out the conditions for commercialization of the software. An argument for exclusive commercialization of software by its publishers can be made when the software is the result of investments from that publisher alone, but this is not so for open source. Because it is the product of its community as a whole, the community enjoys the right to commercialize it, without limitation. This is a fundamental, non-negotiable part of the open source definition.
The general importance of Open Source software to Open Source proponents—of which Mr. DeVault summary is exemplary—is focused on the benefits to developers and the development of software, and the software itself. It is developer, or provider, or vendor centric. They have a better product to sell when they participate with the larger hacker community. The code is in many hands—most importantly the hands of programmers.
To contrast, Free Software is about liberating the end user. The owner of the machine. Your mom and uncle and classmates and local library. We can witness this division of focus even back in the mid-80s, when the Free Software Foundation had only just first launched. Before “Open Source” was even a buzzword assembled on a corporate executives refrigerator magnet board. Go ahead, see for yourself! Here’s Steve Wozniak, Richard Stallman and an unidentified hacker hashing it out in 1985. Skip to 15:42 if the timecode doesn’t work.
Steve Wozniak says source should be made available to hackers so that they can learn how to make programs. The unidentified hacker says that, because “his soul is in [his] product, [he] doesn’t want anyone fooling around with that. [He] doesn’t want anyone hacking into that product, changing it, because then it wouldn’t be [his].”
And then Richard Stallman responds, “Image if you bought a house, and the basement was locked. And only the original building contractor had the key. If you needed to make any change—repair anything—you’d have to go to him. And if he was too busy doing something else he’d tell you to get lost and you’d be stuck.”
Do you see the difference in focus here? Wozniak and the unnamed neckbeard speak for the voice which became, in the mid-nineties, the corporate-friendly Open Source movement. They care about developers—i.e . Free Software is about liberation of computer owners, and society in general, even people who cannot and will never code. Free Software is about the ideal of freedom, of liberty. Free Software is about giving you, the non-coder, source code to your programs, so that a) if the developer stops maintaining the software, you can hire a new developer or learn to code yourself. And, what Open Source software doesn’t do, it prevents you, the end user, from being coerced into some proprietary, locked-down software fork of the software you do rely on. It does this by disadvantaging programmers who are not free to take Free Software and lock it up. Licenses vary widely, but this is a notable result from the implicit split between focus.
In my opinion, The Free Software foundation doesn’t need to worry about growing market-share, or organizing or compromising on it’s principles with other groups—very important, laudible, praise-worthy groups in their own right!—who do not share the same focus or goals as they do. It is end-users, individually, one by one, who can make the choice to subscribe to the so-called “radical ideology” of living without proprietary software. If the organization which supports them on that, The Free Software Foundation, compromises its principles in order to join collective efforts of groups who emphasize Open Source affords, then those individuals will have lost the one group dedicated to them and their needs. To put it personally—if I wanted to support the EFF (just to pick on them, arbitrarily) , I’d go hang out with the EFF. I don’t want the FSF to compromise on all the reasons I support the FSF in order to get along better with the EFF. Diversity is important, and calls for conformity of mission between diverse groups is antithetical to the Freedoms which FOSS fights for in its various manifestations.
The notion that growing the community or doing out-reach work is an imperative which over-rides the difficulties with living the ideal Free Software lifestyle—that is, using no proprietary software or hardware, meaning no SteamDeck, no game consoles, no smartphones, etc.—defeats the raison d’etré for the Free Software Foundation. Maybe lifestyles that are hard to live need communities and organizations dedicated to supporting people who make the difficult decision to live that way.
Demanding that theFSF ease-up on their ideology in order to include more people who don’t share the ideology would destroy them. Besides, there are plenty of members who aren’t living like Stahlman anyway. The FSF is open and accepting to people who can do the service of talking the talk, and respecting the lifestyle, even if they don’t walk the walk. But asking the FSF to compromise on principles is like asking Alcoholics Anonymous to begin accepting casual drinkers who don’t choose to go sober. Yes, AA wants more members, but making that an overriding priority destroys them for the individuals who are already there. If a gym dedicated to hardcore, competitive weight-lifters opened their doors to The value of the organizations to individuals is what’s missed. To the individuals, the purity of the FSF Mission is extremely important. Just because the sum of those individuals is small in relation to the collective size of other gruops doesn’t mean the FSF is “dead.” Small, dedicated groups have value. They don’t need to compromise in order to grow their numbers—that’s a commercialized way of thinking, to think that growth is all important.
Until this key distinction is made between the different focuses of Open Source and Free Software, I’m not sure how much more useful it will be to delve into the minutiae of argumentation from which we could here proceed. Any mistakes here are my own, I speak for myself.
edit: To include something I posted in the original reddit thread as an addendum:
The FSF has it’s own well defined ideology founded in the materiality of the machine and freedom—if mainstream distros don’t live up to it, then they don’t make the cut. It seems everyone here agrees with the ideology ideally too. You don’t compromise on that.
This is a long-game for the sake of freedom on a generational scale. The FSF needs to be the planet Terminus in the Foundation series. There absolutely should be a lodestone of ideological purity when everyone else is “cooperating” and compromising for the sake of pragmatism.
The argument about “obscurity” is short sighted. Everyone knows who the FSF is. They don’t need to be handling the same issues as the EFF or other more activist-centric places. Diversity of mission is good, that helps cover the field better. This is like back when people complained that open source software doesn’t do enough to gain “market share,” forgetting that it’s not a commercial commodity, and so market share is not a metric of overriding importance. Tools for power users—liberated computer users—don’t need to fight for market share to be the best. Owing to the importance of competition in web-engine hegemony, Mozilla had to change Firefox to compete for market share and now it sucks as a tool for power-users: you can’t even choose the homepage for new tabs!
The FSF is not obscure or else nobody would be reading this reddit forum. If you want to help the FSF, join up, go to conventions like I do, stick a sticker on your laptop. But don’t tell them to compromise on their very important ideals when they’re the last stake-in-the-ground for real computer freedom.
Got a lot of various feedback on this piece which I tried to address the following day in this post.
Thank you for taking the time to untangle the differences. I’m one of those advocates who doesn’t fully walk the walk but I do explain the issues frequently to people as primarily highlighted in Stallman’s essays.
It’s a great piece to be able to refer others to. I’m just musing over a more boiled down example that’s more precise than the AA comparison.
Thanks again.
This is a bad take
I’ve been trying to reformulate the thoughts here into the larger strain of ideas on this site. But for an initial overview of the problem I stand by it.