On Friday 17. November 2017 03.30.40 Mirko Boehm wrote:
On 17. Nov 2017, at 09:13, J.B. Nicholson jbn@forestfield.org wrote:
That is self-contradictory but begins to get into why the open source development methodology and philosophy exists. In short, open source is (as Stallman has pointed out) a right-wing reactionary counter to the free software movement. The free software social movement existed for over a decade before open source came along. Open source enthusiasts continue to try to talk about the practical benefits of free software to business without talking about the software freedom or the ethical underpinnings of the social movement.
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Open source is not right wing, and free software is not left wing.
Nobody is saying that the software is one thing or the other. But I would argue that people with a neoliberal perspective are unlikely to talk about "Free Software": they will instead talk about "open source" because, as others have said, it focuses on the properties of the product instead of any ethical motivations for giving the product those properties. And such ethical motivations do not sit well with exploitative corporate practices that deny users control over the software.
Meanwhile, the supposedly pragmatic motivations given for "open source" are largely concerned with making software development cheaper or better in some way. Those motivations can be spun in all sorts of ways to make "open source" sound like it is better for business and the consumer, which is the kind of uncontroversial thing that people are comfortable talking about in public without being labelled as having "an agenda".
Of course, those pragmatic motivations are also convenient to get Free Software developers to work for less or for free while proprietary software businesses can maximise their margins, particularly if the Free Software developers have been persuaded to use permissive licences. And they are convenient for withholding control from the users by telling them that the "development methodology" has given them better, cheaper software. Not that "open source" is actually a methodology in any real sense.
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Even the classic that the free software movement existed before open source is just smoke and mirrors,
I don't think so. Although it is said that software played a secondary role to hardware in terms of revenue generation around the products involved in the beginnings of the Free Software movement - organisations paid for the mainframe or other hardware and the software was bundled - the cost of producing software was high and needed to be funded by such high-margin products.
At that time, people writing software might have been doing so "for fun" as well as in their job, but these will have been well-paid people, and I doubt that there would have been enough of them to be played off against each other in an attempt to drive the cost of software towards zero, which is what you see today with "open source" advocacy. I read somewhere recently that coding is the next "blue collar" profession, but the economic factors probably indicate that it is already there, at least for the software that nobody wants to fund properly and yet include in their own products.
So in that earlier era, with software development being a more confined, more expensive activity, before the age of packaged, proprietary software being sold at retail in any volume, one might have expected that ethical considerations around the sharing of software would have been a more relevant topic for consideration. And the progression to proprietary software business models only made the case for software freedom more acute.
Paul