[Themaintainers] The historical (and ethical) context of the Open Source movement

[Luis Villa]

Hey, Don-

On Tue, Jan 21, 2020 at 8:40 AM Don Goodman-Wilson <don at maintainerati.org>
wrote:

>
> One of the most common responses I've received is that I am attempting to
> "inject politics" into OSS, an inherently apolitical endeavour. I've
> responded by saying that my understanding is that OSS was, at least at the
> beginning, part of a larger movement that saw the emancipatory potential of
> technology, and believed that universal access to technology would liberate
> and empower all humans. OSS's goals of maximizing distribution was a tool
> used to achieve that aim, not the goal in and of itself.
>

I wrote about some of this when GPL v3 was released, first two questions
here: https://lu.is/blog/2007/06/28/gpl-v3-the-qa-part-4-odds-and-ends/

See also
https://lu.is/blog/2007/08/07/freedom-for-users-which-users-did-you-mean-exactly-or-of-users-user-deployers-and-user-consumers/

That said, note that the tension is age-old; Bruce Perens resigned from OSI
over this issue in the last millenium:

https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/1999/02/msg01641.html

Where I think Mandy's (generally excellent) post goes slightly wrong is
that it conflates FSF-style freedom with OSI-style open; FSF actually has a
bunch of good ideas going in theory when Stallman is not ruining things,
whereas OSI has been broken by design (from a justice/equity perspective)
from the beginning.[1]

CC is an interesting case - if you're trying to grok the history, you could
do worse than exploring the various not-libre/open CC licenses (e.g.,
https://creativecommons.org/2004/09/13/developingnationslicenselaunched/ )
and why they were retired. That's a deeper and more substantive battle than
the (mostly rhetorical) FSF/OSI battles.

[1] caveat: if there were ever in human history the case to be made that
'making the infrastructure cheap/easily available will lift all boats', it
really is OSS. I do wish advocates would make that case more explicitly and
clearly; it'd make for a much more interesting discussion than the current
argument with straw men. Perhaps I'll write it up sometime. Definitely
would love to discuss in person in Brussels!
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