It has always struck me as odd that Stallman, and the #FreeSoftware movement broadly, have this radical thought that all software should be _Free_ for the benefit of all humanity, but never extend this line of thought to, well, anything other than software.
If we should share and render common our computer programs for its myriad of advantages and enjoyable freedoms, then maybe there are more fields where abolishing private ownership yields positive results.
@carmenbianca well, software, as something intangible, is very different from other things. And as software is a set of instructions running on a hardware that has access to one's personal information, it is very different from other intangible goods and services, too.
I also believe that "single issue" foundations and movements make sense, and people are free to be part of more than one movement.
@nicemicro Capital or private property isn't just 'stuff', though. It can be as intangible as software, and it can have far more influence over your life than software.
Your boss determines what you can and cannot do for 8 hours per day, 40 hours per week. Your landlord (not unlike non-free software) prevents you from renovating your residence, and (not unlike DRM) can withdraw your right to live at the residence. Those who own capital pull the strings, and those who do not have no say.
I'm not necessarily saying that the FSF should hoist a red banner yesterday, but it hasn't exactly escaped my notice that they host several articles reasserting that you can absolutely sell Free Software, with the implication that the ideology of Free Software is not incompatible with capitalism. So they're not _impartial_.
And if we zoom out from the FSF/GNU and examine the movement more broadly, then there's a dearth of #socialist thought, even though other schools of thought (veganism, environmentalism, LGBT activism, etc.) have no lack of loose ties between each other and leftism. But in the Free Software sphere, it's mostly a bunch of right-libertarians, and it makes no sense to me.
#FreeSoftware as an ideology is so fucking radical, but the nerds won't think beyond their keyboards.
@carmenbianca I don't agree with #FreeSoftware being so "radical" though (in the political sense). I personally view it as a "consumer protection" issue, similar to right to repair, or your right to privacy (even in your rented home 🙂).
I think that you can arrive at Free Software from multiple political axioms, this is why we have both left and right libertarians in the sphere, not because half of the Free Software movement is too dumb to put two and two together.
@nicemicro #FreeSoftware is radical, though. The base moral assertion is that _all_ software should be free, and that any software that is not free is to varying degrees immoral (on the part of the distributor, anyway, not the user).
And I don't know. In a world ruled by non-free software, that's a hell of an assertion to make.
And there's so much more to the radical nature of Free Software. Apart from the freedom and autonomy inherent to using Free Software, there's a sense of collective ownership over the digital commons. As a loosely connected whole, the Free Software community collaboratively maintains a parallel digital society with freedom as its foremost value. 'Literally everything related to computers? We collectively create, shape, and maintain it as a disparate community, and empower you to do anything you can think of.'
Imagine if we extended that thought _beyond_ computers.
Of course, in meatspace, you can't fork a bridge, so things won't be entirely analogous, but the achievement of Free Software in creating and curating the digital commons—our collective digital infrastructure—is radically powerful.
@carmenbianca I don't agree to the part of "collective ownership over the digital commons", but maybe my understanding of the word "collective" and "ownership" is different from yours.
I see people as individuals maintaining software they personally have an interest in, and sometimes when people give up on a project, others pick it up, sometimes they just let it go.
It is beautiful, but it is not some great collective action, but a randomly emerging thing from individual choices.
@nicemicro You're ignoring the #community projects that aren't maintained by a single soul.
But even the one-person projects are part of a _collectively owned_ whole, even when the project itself isn't. Distro maintainers package the thing, users report bugs, savvy people sometimes propose bug fixes, other projects make dependencies on this project, and this project liberally depends on many other #FreeSoftware projects. There's a #cooperative spirit here that is silly to ignore.
I work at a worker cooperative, and it's not like we do absolutely everything together. Sometimes I just take a project and veto a lot of decisions. Until that becomes a problem (and I am mindful of it not becoming a problem), I do the project solo as a mini dictator.
I also don't want to get stuck on the definition of 'ownership'. Legally speaking, it's a copyright thing. But practically speaking, there is a lot of #collective maintainership. Maybe a better term would be collective or distributed stewardship, but I don't want to get lost in the weeds there.
Carmen Bianca BAKKER
NiceMicro
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