Yesterday I jumped into a conversation on reddit’s /r/programming sub by writing about my thought on the Open Source/Free Software distinction. It goes to show that I haven’t participated in this side of the tech culture for a long time because I was unprepared for the arguments I encountered, and what I wrote apparently didn’t get to the core of what the crowd apparently thought the argument was. I’m definitely out of touch—my posts are both upvoted and buried into the negatives, so apparently I’m all over the map. The fast pace of arguing online got the better of me, and I actually had a pretty busy day such that I couldn’t really spend the time to address everyone and everything properly.

If you read the sidebar of this blog, you’ll see that I launched this site a few years ago with the mission of developing a “Full Stack Media Ecology.” At the same time, I don’t think I’ve ever really been clear about what that means. Media Ecology, as I’m approaching it through McLuhan, approaches something like a metaphysics of our material existence. It’s about our embodied relation to our world as we’ve shaped it. When there are major discontinuities in our material world which are purposefully inserted there, then there are metaphysical problems and language fails us, as theorists who discuss “virtuality,” “simulation” and the like endlessly demonstrate with their mind-bending prose.

Now that’s a line of thought I’ve only come into lately, since about 2016 or so.  The “Full Stack” part I’ve understood much longer, and it’s my answer to the problems of those metaphysical problems and the complications encountered and obliquely explicated by those theorists. So let me get toward that by way of talking about what I misunderstood in my little jump out of the frying pan yesterday. Once again, I’ll state outright that these thoughts are just my own as a Free Software enthusiast and as two-time presenter at LibrePlanet—I’m otherwise not affiliated with the FSF in any meaningful way.

Nobody wants to be the bad guy

Having had a day to think about it and re-read the flurry of comments, it seems that my problem is that I didn’t realize how many people out there find advocacy for the Free Software mission, as an ideal, to be somehow punitive or snobbish or condescending or impossible to please. I assume that it’s because most people talking about tech online work in tech, and to work in tech implies, in the overwhelming majority of cases, to be “the bad guy” in the Free Software narrative.

My summary of the mission would be this: people who own private property should be free to understand, inspect, take apart, use, share, and hack the objects they bought and own. Notice that I didn’t even need to mention computers. It’s really just a natural extension of private property ownership into the domain of computers, which are a special case owing their complexity. The fact is that computers have, through the historical accrual of layers and layers and layers of abstraction, come to entail the separation of compiled “binary blobs” from their human-readable source code. And companies make money selling binary blobs (the apps, or executable files and libraries, etc., install files, etc.) while keeping the source code. So there is a gap, a negative space, a black-box, a discontinuity artificially created in the end-users computer stack as a result. Nowadays end-users may own hardware but they can’t control what the hardware does. They merely pay money to “license” the use of software to run on it.

As a GNU/Linux user, 99.999% of the software I’m running is software that I didn’t write, just like a Windows or Apple or Android/Chrome/Whatever user. However,complete power over what happens on your computer is within my reach inasmuch as I can get the source code for all of it and pay someone to inspect or change or hack it up as I’d like. My programming days are history, but in a few months I could be back at it, hacking away at anything I’m running.

This has just always been overwhelming common sense to me. In the tech sites I was reading as a teenager, it was common sense then. But it seems that, since the explosion of jobs in programming which the Smartphone revolution brought in, this “common sense” ideal is rather unforgiving and damning in its righteousness to the millions and millions of people who make money selling people binary blobs. Or who make money developing software which is Free or Open to the company running the cloud server, but not the end-users holding their smartphone who pay that company every month. Coders enjoy “open source” software because it helps them learn and grow, and they can enjoy the control over their apps the way that Free Software users do. And they like sharing source code with other developers, because it builds community and feels like the right thing to do. But since they’re not using arcane legal mechanisms like the GNU Public License which would destroy their employer’s business model, or because they’re releasing software for evil proprietary systems like Windows or MacOS, they don’t fit Free Software’s ideals. They fall short. They’re hurting freedom.

No one likes to be judged, or accused of working for the evil empire over something which seems so mundane as working in a regular software job. They’re not mercenaries for hire, or imperialists extracting resources from foreign countries by force. They’re not working in abattoirs. They’re just coders working for a living! They make apps which help people! They celebrate small victories, and champion incremental progress toward privacy protections and the like. But measured against the ideal of computer owners have the freedom to own their own box, they’re only feeding the beast. Each victory is a whitewash of the exploitative system. The Free Software advocate in their imagination stands there sneering at them, mocking their celebration of some new regulation, “Oooh! Big daddy Google is going to let you have just a bit more privacy in your guilded cage. Oh how wonderful for you.”

I don’t work in tech. One major reason is precisely this mindset—I didn’t want to be part of a giant exploitative system. I dropped out of Comp Sci, and while that might not have been the major reason, it was certainly one of the rationalizations which made the decision easier to accept. So by not being in that social group, I find it a lot easier to, as Rushkoff’s book is titled, Throw Rocks at the Google Bus, as it were. Everyone I know is living ensnared in a mess of proprietary cloud crap, oversharing their life continuously, losing control over and over, getting milked of their money. And the software industry are the culprits. If the charge is that Free Software advocacy damning of the people who are part of it, then I’m guilty as charged.

But, of course, I’m also guilty of something else. I’ve got an Nvidia video-card which uses proprietary drivers. I’ve got Steam installed, and once or twice a month I’ll play a few hours of video games. Most of the software development for the PinePhone is still too unreliable to rely on, so I’ve got a hacked Android phone (LineageOS) which has lots of proprietary drivers and software on it. My “Free Software” life-style is compromised in a million different ways, and so is everyone elses. Sure, I’m not profiting from this, but I do feel a bit of a faker by hyping the Free Software ideal while falling short in many different ways.

With the reflections of the past day, I realize that this has been holding me back. And it gives me a window on the level of inadequacy or shame that software developers in tech companies must feel for also falling short of some ideal.

I think that a great deal of the arguments I read yesterday and today against the FSF stem from this universal sort of shame, which has always existed in the faces of ideals. Maybe it just doesn’t get explained often in terms of something as arcane and nerdy as the Free Software ideal—we encounter it everywhere in culture at large in stories about heroes and saviours and stoics and those who make sacrifices.

What I was trying to defend yesterday was the importance of holding up and championing ideals—even ones which we fall short of. Even ones which put us to shame. To claim that holding up those ideals is counterproductive, or anti-social, or smug or elitist is wrong-headed. That’s just a bitter ego-reaction to falling short of a standard which is still, today, impossible. Of course you feel bad for reifying a system which prevents the possibility of a world of truly-free computing. That’s healthy. Don’t attack the people who are championing that world for making you feel bad. Live with it as the imperfect person you’ll always be, or doing something to change.

Lack of Actual Participation

The second, much-less interesting sort of reaction I noticed was that people are generally just ignorance of the Free Software Foundation’s make-up and activities. I had numerous people making claims about “the leadership” of the FSF while being unable to name a single person other than the founder Richard Stallman. They said that the Free Software Foundation doesn’t do anything because they don’t see them doing anything—as in, I guess, their activities aren’t being talked about on whatever websites or publications they read. The FSF isn’t making headlines, so therefore they must not be doing anything. Those people just need to visit the website more often, subscribe to the newsletter, or join themselves to see what’s up. The leadership and the volunteers I met and saw in action at LibrePlanet were incredible. They were motivated, passionate, and seemed entirely ready, willing, and able to keep the fight for software freedoms moving forward.

People who talk about an organization that they don’t know anything about except through second-hand sources and the “word on the street,” who repeat what they’ve overheard, are just living in a zeitgeist. They say what sounds right, or plausible, based on not knowing what’s up. Again, this is something observable everywhere. It’s easy to form a complex mental image of someone you barely associate with informed wholly by gossip. It’s hard for that image to be anything close to accurate, however.

People who are claiming the FSF aren’t doing anything just aren’t checking in. And furthermore, they might not appreciate how the lack of publicity might be accounted for by looking at some other factors…

Who’s Afraid of the FSF?

The Free Software Foundation is mostly run by volunteers and subsists on donations—and seeing as they stand in direct ideological opposition to the fundamental business models of most tech companies, they aren’t exactly getting the big bucks dropped on them from corporate towers. If you look at the sponsors of many other large “Open Source” organizations, often household names billed as “Gold Sponsors” or “Platinum Sponsors” who give keynotes at their major, stadium-sized conventions, you begin to understand where my frustrations and suspicions derive from. I jumped into the conversation yesterday because of a blog-post which said, alongside many other things, that the Free Software Foundation was dying because it wasn’t “compromising” in order to cooperate with other, open source organizations. Fuck that shit.

People who think they’re helping the cause by advising the FSF to abandon it’s principles are only hurting themselves and others. I’m not claiming they’re on the payroll directly—although I’m sure there are probably some people with a conscious, explicit goal of getting the FSF into the fold, by calling Free Software advocates zealots, or radicals, or white supremacists (?) as I was called yesterday. Any technique which will work. To buy into the very form of the arguments I saw being made against the FSF is to have already lost the thread. They’re a small, mean band running up against titans. The demands being made of them are phrased as though they compare in resources to the organizations which have compromised on the ideal. On the vision.

Free Software and Open Source are two different things, and only one of them is embraced by billion dollar enterprises. If the price for admission is compromising on the ideals of Freedom, then I’d advice the Free Software foundation to stay the course and fight on. Fuck the haters. I’ll be right alongside them.

The Metaphysics

My talk at LibrePlanet 2023 this year was not about any particular piece of technology, per se. It was an exploration of that idea I laid out at the start of my piece, the idea that discontinuities are artifically created in our perception when layers of the computer stack are black boxed. Discourse surrounding cyberspace, virtuality, and the like occur when we treat computers as having some non-existant, fictional space inside of them. The way to dispel this perception, which is extremely convincing to not only our rational minds, but the development of our embodied relation to our physical world, is by knowing how our computers work top to bottom. This is an issue of overwhelming fascination and import to me, and is not often a reason given for supporting Free Software. But I do think it goes a long way to explaining the passions evoked in computer circles given this subject. We all sense there is something deep to the idea of knowing, or not knowing, how machines work. The illusions which are possible, the imaginary spaces in the mind formed by endless abstractions ungrounded in material reality.

Our place in the world, and in the universe, now must also be understood in regards to our relation to the infinite complexity of these devices we have brought forth. We must continue to understand them, collectively if not individually, to continue to understand ourselves.