On February 1st I had the privilege of getting to speak at the first Fluconf about Open Source and why that whole movement might not do as much good for as as we might want it to. It’s not that Open Source is “bad” but that it is sometimes presented as a solution to sociopolitical issues it is not capable (nor even trying) to fix.
The talk description was:
“People interested in Fluconf will also be interested in Open Source or to be more precise Free/Libre Open Source Software. Everyone has been using Open Source for many years but many from this community have shifted to trying to run their personal infrastructures on non-proprietary pieces of software and some even hardware.
This is already an important shift towards freeing ourselves and each other from corporate dominance but is it really doing enough? Are our licenses protecting the values we actually care about?
Coming from a luddite background I want to dive into a a bit of a critical reading of the values that we use codified mostly as licenses: Are they really enough? Which aspects are they missing and why? And what are the consequences of those omissions?
I’ll try to end up looking at mechanisms of integrating luddist principles in software projects. Can they offer additional safeguards?
This sessions doesn’t claim to have all the answers. But hopefully some good questions and a few ideas of where to go.”
I embedded a copy of the video on Youtube but you can also watch it on Archive.org for less tracking and everything.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Comments
8 responses to ““A Luddite Criticism of Open Source” at FluConf”
@tante thank you for putting this talk together, Tante.
very important and critical points.
@tante Great talk! I especially like VALUES.md; the open-source torment nexus; breaking out of the mindset of having to scale everything to global scale; and building things that are resistant to uses you disagree with.
In science-open-source there is a recurring bad idea to try to use licenses to enforce other things (eg, scientific citation), and I appreciate that you are suggesting tools and mechanisms other than licenses to achieve our goals.
@tante Great talk, thanks!
Fresh additions to my to-do list:
1) Add VALUES.md to my own repositories.
2) Spread the idea in communities that I am part of.
[…] talked about this a bit in the Q&A part of my talk at Fluconf that gave a bit of criticism of the Open Source movement and its beliefs. But while my argument in […]
@tante Is the slide deck (and/or script?) for the talk available at all?
I uploaded them to my nextcloud: https://cloud.tante.cc/index.php/s/ymZZPMbH6naAKT4
@tante Thanks, having that helped. Good talk
One thing about creating a license that takes a values-based stance is it's really hard to encode values in a way that's describable and tractable. One notable attempt in the open-source ecosystem is the original JSON license, with the clause "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil."
http://web.archive.org/web/20060226161035/http://www.json.org/json.js
This is widely considered non-Free, violating "No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor" criteria. See: https://wiki.debian.org/qa.debian.org/jsonevil
1/2
@tante A lot of digital ink has been spent debating that one clause. A summary that is a bit more dismissive than necessary, but covers the ground reasonably well (linked from the Debian wiki page above) is
https://apebox.org/wordpress/rants/456
I think many people in the Free Software ecosystem would be open to ensuring their software could only be used for the public good – they just can't figure out how. Copyleft licensing and not restricting use is just the closest thing to that anyone has for now.
2/2