Aral Balkan
I feel it’s important for the future of our species that we understand the difference between “open” (as in “open for business) and “free” (as in freedom).
This isn’t some inconsequential bike-shedding over terminology. It is the difference between living in a corporatocracy and living in a world with individual sovereignty and a healthy commons.
chipmunk for remediation 🐿️
@aral I dont concider free software to be actually free. For software to be free, the people need control over the software to a certain extent.
Today free software tools gives open access to a lot of great tools, but tools that are developed to help the upper class suppress everybody else.
We need to take back control over development through connecting developers to the grass roots and let the grass roots finance the development.
Aral Balkan
@vegafjord There are lots of ways in which the free software movement of – what is it now, 40 years ago? – doesn’t meet our needs today. I mean, heck, some of our earliest critics were from that world because we didn’t toe the line or criticised some piece of dogma or other. But there’s a world of difference between “open” and “free” and the latter (however imperfect it may be) if the foundation we should be building on.
Aral Balkan
@tomstoneham “We’ve released all the foundational code of Matrix as permissively-licensed open source”
“We’ve released the code so it can be enclosed and now people are enclosing it.” Yes, exactly. That’s what permissive licenses are for. They’re functioning exactly as designed.
Tom Stoneham
@aral
This seems pertinent to that distinction:
https://matrix.org/blog/2022/12/25/the-matrix-holiday-update-2022
Aral Balkan
@vegafjord The problem is Google likes to use “open” too. And their marketing budget is slightly larger than yours. So it means what they say it means. And that’s “open” as in “open for business.” (Liberal licenses and code that can be easily enclosed.)
chipmunk for remediation 🐿️
@aral Yes, its a good foundation, except that it is branded as free software. Freedom can not be reduced to a binary state. Freedom is subjective and should be explored from many angles. A feminist lense, an engineers lens, an activist, an organizer and so on. Therefore, I like to use the more descriptive term open to describe these tools.
ophiocephalic 🐍
@tomstoneham @aral And facebook was built on CentOS. But is the implication here that open source licenses should be less permissive, i.e. conditioned on reciprocation and ethical application?
Aral Balkan
@ophiocephalic Nope, open source (liberal) licenses are that way for a reason. They’re meant to be enclosed by corporations. It’s just privatisation by a different name.
We already have licenses that attempt to avoid that in the free software camp like the AGPL.
Tom Stoneham
@aral
And those enclosing it have taken it to be 'free' - something they are not obliged to support financially.
Open source meets extractive capitalism and loses ...
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