Freeing software

A response to Open Source Needs a Reckoning and a sequel to Software vs Capital.

The noble goal of the free software movement is to change the relationship between people & software and to change the relationships between people mediated by software — specifically, to make software work for people by removing legal barriers based on intellectual property law that arbitrarily separate user from developer, so that users can change software to suit their own needs.

(In practice, free software has attained this utopian ideal in only a limited scope. This is not the appropriate place to dig deeply, but suffice it to say that because of myopia & a misplaced pragmatism, in the form of an unwillingness to address barriers other than IP, free software caters almost exclusively to professional developers looking for a free drop-in replacement for a commercial product to use in the course of their lucrative work creating other commercial products. Utopia for the few is a kind of dystopia.)

The legal barriers between user and developer have historically been erected almost exclusively in the name of commerce. While the depoliticized & commerce-friendly ‘open source’ movement has only worked to demolish the barriers separating large companies from unpaid labor, the free software movement has continued to patch new exploits deployed by the forces of capital to subvert ostensibly free software into a position of user hostility in the form of various means to avoid sharing code improvements…