Brazilian hacker Felipe Fonseca writes about attending a meeting about free software (as "open source") at the UN headquarters in New York and writes, among other things:
"... almost nothing that I heard on those three days was new. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. Some stories are worth being re-told, and some questions are not supposed ever to be answered. Witnessing the same types of discussions that we have had regularly twenty years ago in Brazil now making it through to the United Nations is a reminder not to give up. On the other side, though I see the fantastic potential of having the UN pushing for open source practices amid its agencies, member-states and other organisations, it is also a bit sad. I mean, if that support was there twenty years ago, the movement wouldn't have lost so much talent to corporations that are not at all aligned with openness (or the SDGs, or even the concept of “good”). Many innovative and committed people have dropped out because it became impossible to counter proprietary for-profit corporations and still make a decent living. Some of the best among us were recruited by the very corporations we used to challenge and counter. And I believe that process is irreversible."
and
"n my intervention, I wanted to draw attention to a particular sequence of events that happened twenty years ago. I didn't get to mention all of them, but list below:
It's a good and thought-provoking read:
https://is.efeefe.me/stuff/open-for-all
-- Carsten Agger - agger@fsfe.org https://fsfe.org --- https://blogs.fsfe.org/agger/ FSFE Denmark Coordinator, General Assembly & European Team Member Free Software, Free Society!