free software resistance

 the cost of computing freedom is eternal vigilance

### how-the-left-gets-open-source-wrong *originally posted:* jan 2024 this article is not a condemnation of the left, i want the left to take over free computing. free computing is a term i use sometimes to describe the necessary progress of free software, free culture and free hardware. the free software movement, which acts entirely too beholden to its founder to its own detriment, does not have a healthy relationship with either free culture or free hardware. yes, there are individuals who try admirably. i am sympathetic to these other movements- i want them to do well, and i do not think that unquestioning subservience to free software will help them- it is important at least, that the questioning be honest. i also think we need free software just as much as we need free culture and free hardware. there is absolutely no way that all three of these movements can advance while making another movement the primary goal. sometimes this truth gets overstated- forgetting that for example, trans rights are workers rights. it should be clear from the many times in this article where i call it out for doing so, that free software MUST stop throwing other causes under the bus. doing so is the second biggest reason, after corporations funding enormous reactionary campaigns, that free software has shed so many of its allies. but these movements, i.e. free software, free culture and free hardware, are partially or occasionally at odds with each other in the short term- the goal of bringing the three together must be achieved organically, not by one of these forcing the others to obey a standard outside their goal. there must be faith in each of these movements to ultimately work towards the common good- this faith can be bolstered by honest critique, but not by the micromanagement inherent in movements that draw from deontological ethics. asking someone to run before they walk may be ideal for a revolution, but a revolution that draws on ableism and unrealistic goals must routinely check itself and correct course. anyone who believes revolution exists for its own sake, and not ultimately for the people, is doing it wrong. isnt that the fundamental problem with tankies? i am not saying that any of these causes should dismiss or diminish the importance of the others, but free software absolutely will make sacrifices that do not advance free hardware (and that is acceptable, provided that the movement ceases to straw man and misrepresent or dismiss free hardware in the blatantly dishonest way that its leadership does) and vice versa. these sacrifices are inevitable in the short term, but they should not include blatant dishonesty and dismissal of related causes. we will all need free hardware. we will all need free software. we will all need free culture. and this is not a call for unity, but a call for honesty. we do not actually need open source. open source is at best, a luxury that costs us things we need more. open source is a privilege that removes equity between users and developers. (and also lower-tier developers from developers with far greater privilege). the equity that free software creates, open source counters and calls itself a new revolution. this isnt to say that free software deals only in equity. one of the most difficult things (difficult for many people, not difficult for good theory) to resolve is the fact that people who sought to make free software even better were unable, and thus joined open source. this may sound like a defence of the latter, but it is more incidental than intrinsic: open source held a banner for ALL causes that compete with free software, from monopoly to co-opting to anyone who could "openwash" the same companies that free software fought for freedom. and nothing helps openwash a cynical, insincere cause like a necessary, sincere one. it is a knee-jerk and ongoing reaction to such necessary and sincere causes to lump them in with and discredit them for their association with open source. but that ignores the fact that free software gave these causes no refuge, and some were absolutely driven into the arms of a controlling and cynical alternative. which has zero bearing on the importance and necessity of these causes. open source from the beginning, was the blaire white of free software. open source is a terrible ally, with developers and project leaders in privileged positions constantly talking over the people who created and sympathise with the movement itself, the same way white feminist liberals and terfs do to feminists. if you dont do this- great! though it should be said that most people who do, dont realise it or dont admit it, and often dont care enough to realise it or change. so it is with people who advocate open source. free software was a riot- but every day, open source invites the police to the pride march. granted, the military industrial complex absolutely seeded AND funded the entire history of computing! grace hopper and ada lovelace were the first pioneers of modern programming, and grace hopper was a rear admiral in the united states navy who worked professionally for defence contractors. alan turing became more famous while enlisted in building and using computers to thwart nazi encryption for the british government. no ones trying to rewrite that history, nor is there any good reason to. when i compare open source to blaire white, what i mean is the way that conformity is policed, queering is criticised, capitalist optics, values and priorities are reinforced. blaire white insists that queering is a problem and straight coding the trans community is beneficial. open source is the capitalist coding of free software. we have to be careful how this is addressed, because the left has an inherent obligation to workers, not excluding the tech industry. every worker in tech has a right to address grievances, and the left by definition must hear these grievances. with that said, the grievance that not enough is done for the union leader, for the company, for capitalism itself, is not a leftist goal or value, and a need to be further co-opted cannot and should not be taken seriously. the freedom to wear handcuffs is absolute bunk, but given two decades to do so open source only admits this when its related to a short term goal. open source is not honest, neither morally nor intellectually, and honesty is a prerequisite for freedom. this need for honesty also applies to those ignoring the legitimate side of the coup, to those ignoring the legitimate grievances of people who were abused by prominent and valued members of various projects. once you find evidence that there is an honest side to it, the importance of those complaints cannot be reasonably denied. it is always okay to talk about the faults of free software. this includes harmful transphobia from the free software leadership, which (also like blaire white) denies the harm it does by couching its actions in its pedantic little rewrites of what trans advocacy needs to be. this is the same thing richard stallman did to free culture, the same thing richard stallman does to free hardware! and its the same thing open source has done to the free software movement from day one. none of these things are honest- stop. co-opting. causes. i do sympathise with those who see the way that corporations "borrow" these symbols of progress for purposes of self-promotion- in the guise of promoting a real cause. the lgbt community knows that corporations are pretending to care deeply about the cause, while using child labour and sweatshop labour to further their own bottom line. many in the lgbt community, and certainly the left which overlaps substantially, know that its easier for corporations to promote an image than it is to put substance and commitment to action behind it. these are token efforts, more for the sake of the company than the cause- even when both benefit. open source is also a tokenisation of effort, open source is a rainbow logo on a tech corporation, but for user freedom rather than other causes. and the point of this article is that its amazing how so many people who see this happen to their community, do not realise that corporations have done this to the free software community for decades. it is absolutely astonishing how bad the theory is which open source promotes, and how bad faith (and patently identical to bad faith arguments against the lgbt community) many of the arguments open source promotes are. im not kidding, terfs took all the arguments against gay rights and did search-and-replace on them to target trans people instead. open source makes arguments against free software that are just as dishonest, and one-sided. the free software leadership- and this includes members of the gnu advisory committee, creates such a double standard for trans developers that i have stopped caring if anyone ever salvages the gnu project- something i spent years calling for people to do. smash it to the ground! i do not care! gnu WAS the very flagship of the movement, flagships DO get outmoded and fail to defend their owners after many years of service, i WOULD HAVE liked to see gnu preserved (i would have supported a museum for it) but all its stewards are either traitors or horrid, and though disvaluing gnu nokia-like made it easier to take over, it now belongs in every meaningful way to ibm and disvaluing it further can only make it harder for them to milk what they stole from the community. but mostly its the people in gnu leadership and the fsf that i have lost all respect for. this never includes hyperbola, theyre the only legitimate wing left in the entire sector. but dont rewrite history and leave out the ways in which gnu and the fsf were sabotaged. i mean for the past 20 years, i mean by the same bad theory and bad faith arguments i talked about before. i mean by holding what could still be a grassroots movement to a higher standard than it holds the corporations they take funding from, not only because of "bribery" (as some call taking donations, including myself occasionally) but also because of people having sympathy for their oppressors. yes, every tech worker has a right to air grievances, but this is not an excuse for the counterrevolution known as open source. more than that, many well-paid and conventionally successful tech workers have told lies and half-truths to discredit worthy opponents (on the side of users and freedom) in favour of monopoly. liberals can focus solely on optics and polls, but the real left must consider the needs of all workers, INCLUDING those who suffer greater exploitation and including those who work without payment. open source, being industry-leaning, focuses on people who seek payment and discredits activists who do things for the sake of activism. bruce perens wants to help free software by making it even more about those who are doing this work commercially, ignoring the fact that if everyone does this commercially, the result will be that free software is even more capitalist. i really dont even think it should be called open source at this point, free software is almost inherently neutral towards commercialism (neither for nor against it) but open source really ought to be called capitalist source- not because it cares about profit but for the way it "intentionally" or otherwise pushes making everything into a project that benefits corporations. behind a threshold, commercialisation was not a problem for freedom. past a threshold, which is also what open source has always sought and continues to seek, commercialism takes precedence over freedom and leaves it behind. free software begins with whats good for users, then open source pushes whats increasingly good for monopolies. the two causes are at odds, and open source is never honest about this. why would open source be honest about this? why would corporations say "yeah, we dont really care more about the lgbt community than our bottom line, because its always our job to make profit our #1 priority"? in order to promote capitalism, you have to lie about the people it exploits- you have to lie about where most of the profits will really go, you have to lie about the nature of the system itself entirely, and you have to lie about the double standards and the way that capitalists CONSTANTLY smear anyone who opposes such exploitation. so open source has done EXACTLY the same to the community since its inception, and you would think the left would call this out for what it is. nope! but to those on the real left, those who actually care about theory, its a mystery why so many dont call out open source as barely leftist- on its BEST DAY open source is mainstream liberal software. to be fair, stallman himself is more reformer than leftist, he actually conflates communism with stalinism and then unironically poses as some form of socialist. blaire white cares more about how the queer community will look to people outside it than how much of the community is actually represented, and starts policing the community in alignment with her own privilege to the point of setting back advocacy and blaming the people she does this to. if you think this is new for open source, i fell in with open source originally, suckered by its dishonesty, and when i witnessed this same behaviour from open source more than a decade ago, i denounced it and supported free software instead. its not that free software is without flaws- ive spent many years citing more and more of those flaws (some of them, i ought to have recognised a lot sooner) and some of those flaws (like the way it misrepresents free culture) ive complained about for more than a decade- ive complained about that almost as long as ive supported free software. please note im saying free software, and NOT the fsf. not fsfe. not fsf-la. these organisations do not fight for you, even if they were important to the fight many years ago. they stopped. its not that im entirely against organisations, but i recognise that corporate entities in the not-for-profit sector are not sustainable. so many foundations begin to flounder within a year, and osi is not even special in that regard. perens resigning and citing the problems with osi is more rare, and among everything its the best thing he ever did for free software. i wish he was as critical today, but his inability to fully call out open source for still doing (and never ceasing to do) the same things he called osi out for in 1999, is like being afraid to call out blaire white for promoting blatant transphobia, just because she happens to be trans. im not saying he has no integrity, but his constant handwavey backpedaling and calling things out in such a wishy-washy way makes him ill-suited to the very cause he wants to promote today. corporations, including not-for-profits (but even moreso, for-profits) must not lead these movements- neither free software, nor free culture or free hardware- in a way that talks over the people who need these movements so they can be free. its the people that matter, more than the fsf. the fsf has NEVER prepared for or acted upon this reality. in the short run yes, the fsf bolstered the movement- we needed it. but today, the fsf is a corporate vehicle for co-opting the movement. many other organisations are worse, but above all the fsf itself SHOULD know better. caught up in his own personal battles, even stallman himself should know better. more than this, EVERY leader should know better. a leader who is not a servant of the movement will ultimately turn against it. the fsf includes trans members of staff, but the fsf holds trans developers to an oppressively double standard in the same way that blaire white works against the community. note please, that blaire white as a metaphor was first mentioned here to describe what open source is doing, but open source does not have a monopoly on double standards even if it seeks a monopoly on your freedom. none of this should be forgiven or overlooked. to truly move forward, these problems must be corrected. while the coup of 2018-2019-the present DID help to serve the goals of large corporations looking to further co-opt a movement, this must not be blamed on those who fought injustice in good faith. instead of recognising both factions, most people either sided with those working for the benefit of ibm or those defending the awful mistreatment of trans and other lgbt developers. for this, i blame microsoft, and that spells "ibm". rather than choosing one good to the exclusion of the other, those who rightfully called out the fsf leadership for its mistreatment of people should also condemn the capitalist skullduggery of the corporations who benefit from it. "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" does not apply here- the movement simply has two problems and is divided by which one it is willing to admit openly. this does not describe everyone of course, as some will admit both problems when pressed to do so. the coup itself was steered in a direction that made this difficult, and i dont blame the coup itself for that. but i did previously. and the people who called out the corporate skullduggery also need to see the real problems that the coup was not dishonest about. i dont want to give either side too much credit and suggest that either of these scenarios is more likely than the other. if im honest, i feel cynical about this and my writing for years now reflects this. ultimately though, if i believed no change was possible i would stop talking about it. cynicism does not preclude the possibility of things getting better, though nihilism might. at any rate, you will not get my vote by forcing me to choose which of these issues is truly important. there is no freedom without honesty, and no honesty in pretending that one fatal flaw of the cause matters while the other fatal flaw does not. open source was never a good ally- it was an ally run by privilege, run for profit, which always gives more to capitalism and monopoly than it offers to freedom or volunteers. the fact that we can fund more volunteers and give greater privileges to some already decently paid developers is moot, if we intend to give up everything else in the bargain. what happened to "before we give out seconds, everyone must get a plate?" who among us is foolish enough to believe both that they are legitimately working for the left, AND that any for-profit corporation can ever support that level of equity? who among us claims to be vigilant, but ignores or says nothing when for-profits begin to exercise undue and excessive influence over the not-for-profits we rely on to do better than the rest? who claims to know theory, and is still unaware that this is a typical part of the life cycle for not-for-profit organisations? we can never rely on foundations to be as vigilant as the people who need them. not unlike developers or leaders, organisations do burn out or retire. sometimes they sell us out. when these things happen, its solely up to the people, and solely the people- no one else- who can fix the problems failed foundations leave us with. open source is fundamentally cynical and fundamentally dishonest, for reasons that perens more than hinted at twenty years ago- though i hardly expect him to deliver a treatise on the inherent oppression of capitalism. perens may be a capitalist with a good heart- but open source is terrible theory. someday, i hope the left calls it out at least as much as perens once did. i will go as far as saying that if anyone manages to fix whats wrong with open source, it will not be open source anymore. and thats good, actually. not that i think "post-open source" will work, the problem is not only that open source did not achieve the goals of free software, but it really never sincerely intended to. the fact that perens MAY be more sincere than that, only means he is projecting his own good intentions onto something insipid and counterrevolutionary, just like he did in the 90s. that too, is bad theory. this article is mostly about the faults of open source and admits many problems with free software as well, but post-open wont really be post-open until the counterrevolution of open source is truly behind us. the optimism of perens, like the "progressivism" of blaire white, is one of the saddest kinds. i truly wish for a movement that is post-making-ourselves-feel-better-by-fooling-ourselves. we should stop diverting our efforts towards helping those whose literal job it is to sucker us evermore. heres hoping. license: 0-clause bsd ``` # 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 # # Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for any # purpose with or without fee is hereby granted. # # THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND THE AUTHOR DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES # WITH REGARD TO THIS SOFTWARE INCLUDING ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF # MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS. 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