What Dystopia?

There have been a few posts recently about the state of the Free Software movement.

In particular, from Ploum:

We need more of Richard Stallman

> We live in the dystopia future RMS warned us about.

I was a member of the FSF for quite a few years, but gave back my badge and hung up my coat—because I think we’re pretty much done. The big battles are over, and freedom won.

As a child I grew up in Microsoft land—first DOS, then Windows 3, 95, 98. Then I discovered Linux, and that I had been using junk: cheap consumer products aimed at control, when there was a world of high quality software for the sake of software that had been denied to me. I was deeply unhappy about this.

The battles, then: that you had to buy a computer with a Microsoft operating system; that you had to use closed source software, and pay money for it; and that you had to trade files in proprietary formats that required that for-pay software. Oh, and you had to use Internet Explorer to browse the web, because so many pages were made specifically for it.

Living In The Future

None of these stand any more.

Apple has a popular competing operating system to Windows, and there are plenty of free operating systems. You can buy PCs with no operating system pre-installed, and roll your own.

All but the most specialist software has a free software offering available—apart from gaming and some professions, you don’t need closed source software any more.

Open file formats are now the norm, not the exception.

There are enough browsers, and they’re standards-based, too.

Hobbyist Heaven

Hardware is so much cheaper than when I was a child—it’s another world.

The wealth of open source software available is incredible—and you can download it quickly.

There are oceans of free resources for learning about anything you choose, and people ready and willing to help with any question you might have.

There has never been a better time for those who enjoy writing software.

New Problems

It’s not all rosy.

The are new problems that we didn’t have twenty years ago: the rise of social media, the dominance of algorithm-optimized information feeds.

But while I agree that these are problems, I don’t think they’re software freedom problems. They are about humanity learning how to cope with what software can do—even, how to regain humanity given what software can do. Whether that software is closed, open or run as a service seems not particularly relevant.

Quoting Ploum again:

> Copyleft was considered a cancer. But a cancer to what? To the capitalist consumerism killing the planet? Then I will proudly side with the cancer.

I’m 100% with you: pro planet, against consumerism. But I’m afraid it doesn’t matter in the slightest if you use copyleft to make the megacorps less efficient; they can afford to be less efficient. The problem is not the “supply” side—it’s the “demand” side. Why is it that billions of humans act in a way that is so clearly against their own interests?

It is, I’m afraid, rather like the climate change catastrophe. There is enough individual freedom that if we all decided together to solve climate change, it would be very quickly solved. The majority chooses, every day, to let the planet burn. The same is true of the dark sides of software. There is enough freedom—people don’t use it.

I’m not blaming individuals; a crowd is a different thing to a collection of individuals; the billions, the consumers of consumerism, behave in a way that we only just start to understand because we have not had a world like this, before.

I don’t know what the solution is. Words come to mind: awareness, leadership, discourse, civility, consideration. But everyone’s too busy—timescales have shrunk, it’s all about the next five minutes. We are not a purely biological species any more—we are melded with The Internet and its hundreds of billions of terabytes of data. Ain’t no license gonna reverse that. We’re headed somewhere new.

Wrapup

This was intended to be an upbeat post—“yay, software!"—but it’s ended up quite dark. The state of humanity could use some work, but at least the software is great—yay?

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