Alright, so
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@ajroach42 thanks for all the thoughts in this thread.
If you all are wondering why so many of us in the “tech” world are feeling such existential dread and exhaustion about our profession, passion, and livelihoods, this thread does a good job of touching on most of the topics.
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The free software movement did some good! I don't want to dismiss it. I am deeply grateful for the existence of the free software movement, and computers would be worse and less safe without it.
But it was insufficient.
From the very beginning, it was also about power, about wielding power, about being protected.
Many of the people associated with the free software movement got a free pass to be horrible, bigoted, or abusive, because they also wrote good code. (or, even sometimes because they wrote code at all, regardless of quality.)
This is playing out now with DHH, but it's been there from the very beginning, with far too many people to list.
For years, I was of the opinion that it didn't matter who wrote the code as long as the code accomplished my goals.
I no longer believe that.
Ideology influences decisions, controls the possibility space.
This isn't an absolute, and it doesn't wholly dictate what software I will use (I am, after all, still an internet user in spite of it's DARPA origins), but peoples values influence their choices and you gotta remember that when you're looking at any given piece of software.
But that's neither here nor there because the worst damage the free software movement did was in expectations.
The Free (libre) software movement seeded the idea that software would also be Free (gratis) and that anyone charging for a piece of software must be punished.
And, in the process, broke the only mechanism for funding software development that ever really worked, and replaced it with telemetry and advertising and surveillance and subscriptions.
I was born in 1990.
I grew up through the last days of shareware and the early days of modern free software.
I got to watch the shareware model die, I got to watch the Open Source revolution.
If you weren't there for the shareware days, what I'm about to say might sound impossible, but small software projects released as limited demos with paid upgrades used to handily pay a *good* wage to solo developers or small teams.
There was a lot about the shareware era that wasn't great, don't get me wrong, and there's a lot about the modern free software era that is much better.
I am a huge fan of not paying for my operating system, and *many* of the things I do are only possible because there is a good, community made, gratis and libre software package out there to make it possible.
But I'd gladly pay ten bucks to keep the kdenlive or [insert project here] developers fed.
One time payment, single transaction, let me mail some cash or a check to a PO Box.
My favorite kind of shareware was the "donationware" or "nagware" model.
Give me the full application, and every time I launch it, give me a splash screen that says who I can pay to make the splash screen go away.
It was great! I paid for stuff that I ended up using.
(I've talked about my history with Shareware in the past. I'm not going to get into it again, but I suspect there's a fedithread or a blogpost that you could find about the flea markets I went to as a kid.)
Here: https://retro.social/@ajroach42/113481632282311122
That was two years ago. I haven't re-read it. I wonder how much I agree with.
Two years ago was around the time I noped out of computers more or less completely to start making toys.
To be clear, I don't think the fault for the "I'm not paying for that" mentality lies solely with the Free Software movement.
I think it mostly belongs to The Internet in general, and as much as major corporations pretended to hate it, I think it largely served their interests.
( I should unpack that)
Modern computers are very fast.
Modern network connections are very fast.
Sometime in the early 00s, the scales tipped, and suddenly it was easier and faster to download a song off the internet than to go to the store and buy a CD and rip the CD.
Network connections weren't gigabit, and hard drive space was limited, but it's easy to understand why piracy was so commonplace, even without the cost aspect. Even on a naked DSL line, I could download an album (or a podcast, or a mixtape) faster than I could go to the store.
Corporations took a while to catch up, and when they did, they mostly embraced the convenience, which is what most people wanted anyway (hence Netflix and Spotify) and when that convenience starts to disappear (Netflix today) piracy takes an upswing.
Now, the beauty of the Free Software movement is that, if your primary developers decide to do something stupid, you can pack your things and go.
We saw this recently with Audacity and Tenacity.
That gets a lot harder in the Shareware model (but this is not an impossible hurdle to navigate! The important parts of free software can live alongside the important parts of the shareware model.)
Oof, I'm getting a bunch of replies taking issue with the way I phrased some of the above.
1) I don't care.
2) If you come at me with a nitpick, and don't add anything else to the conversation, you will get blocked.