Hard fork the whole FOSS scene.
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@GyrosGeier Sure, if @fsf can expand its domain beyond licensing. Otherwise it's a fight between a checkers prodigy and a well funded criminal gang. @lrhodes
@GyrosGeier Maybe we don't need steward organizations to save us, but we minimally need them not to actively work against us. @lrhodes
@bremner @lrhodes The licensing topic is basically dead until the next "OSS means legal uncertainty" campaign from Microsoft, which would be a really stupid move right now, because their only angle would be "AI introduced this uncertainty."
The basic situation is the same as in the 1990ies -- developers get to decide if they are content with being allowed to ship software in someone else's ecosystem, on someone else's terms, or take control by creating their own ecosystem.
OSS is not sufficient for users to be in control. The freedesktop environment moves at the pace of middle management having to justify their presence by rearranging buttons, and they have perfectly recreated the experience of running Windows, minus the backwards compatibility, and they arrived there by introducing the same distinction between developers and users (and "power users" who are locked into the system by their non-transferable knowledge) that we know from the Windows world.
But this distinction only makes sense if you either want to sell something, or you want to feel smug about your status. Proper "free software" assumes that every user might want to modify their system to fit them better, and recognizing that this is the same drive that brought us here.
I suspect one reason proto-fascists find open source development so attractive is that the collaborative nature of the project makes it easier to build relationships of dependency that make people less inclined to break ties when their masks come off.
@lrhodes recently i went back and read some of the foundational [F]OSS literature that got me interested in the movement 25 years ago, and i must say reading things like the Four Essential Freedoms now you can definitely see how a completely self-interested, anti-altruistic individual could look at that and say "oh, so my freedoms are maximized and no one can ever restrict my behavior for any reason? that's my whole ideology, sold!" and so much about the current landscape follows from that.
Actually, if I were going to hazard a more grounded analysis, I would say that FOSS has historically appealed (though not exclusively, if course) to libertarian personality types, and that libertarianism shades into fascism at the edges. So devs come to FOSS pursuing one set of values, and over time they drift into an adjacent set, which ends up being a shirter journey than some people may suppose.
That libertarian thesis also accounts for some FOSS luminaries' counterintuitive embrace of vibecoding, which seems so antithetical to so many of the named values that ostensibly animate the scene. The libertarian ideal can be characterized as "freedom from other people," and that's the emotional (if not factual) affect one gets from generative AI — that you can build whatever you need without relying on anyone else.
I've already suggested one principle as a corrective to the aspirational solipsism of FOSS in the libertarian mode: https://destructured.net/computing-as-a-social-activity Maybe it's time to develop the notion of CASA into something more overtly contrary to that tilt toward fascism. Less an addendum to FOSS than an alternative to it.
