Software freedom isn't about licenses – it's about power (2021)

But a hack can only go so far. Roads and railways, power stations and hospitals are not hacks they are society level investments.

FOSS software and FOSS as a service have become ubiquitous and an irresistible part of our daily lives. They have become society level investments even if a small number of hobbyists disproportionately drove them.

And as such there are no more hacks to fixing power imbalances - no secret, no quick trick. We don’t think of some clever hack to keep the power companies in line.

If we want to fix the power imbalances of Big Tech we do it through Big Society (usually Big Government).

HN’ers love a technological fix for a technological problem - but sometimes we need to realise this needs a political fix

(And no this is not a comment on upcoming US election, this is the boring part - write your congressman / MP / etc. join a Union at work. Attend a local council meeting (it always worries them when people do that :-)

Now what kind of regulation, what kind of world do we want? Love to talk about that. But how we get there - it’s through politics, through all of us.

Software freedom, like many other freedoms, need power and energy to maintain.

One software I have to use for complex scientific simulations has a pretty complicated data model and the doc is not nearly descriptive enough. It also only tells you what something is, and not how you might want to go about modeling something. I often have more questions than when I started after reading through the doc. The only avenue for resolution is to talk to the vendor, which costs money. You can't see the source code or really any level of what is going on inside. It's a black box. The tool itself works okay and is pretty flexible, but I'll never willingly use it again. I don't need to see all the source, but it's often the best option if the documentation is severely lacking.

This is probably a rarity on HN, but I thought I'd share. In a way, software freedom is also about not wasting my time. In a different way I could bring up Mathematica, which is some amazingly powerful software that few on HN have used outside of the more limited Wolfram Alpha. On the downside, the licensing was kind of a pain to manage if you're not in a school or company that is a major user. It's also annoying that I couldn't have more than like two notebooks running at a time as the desktop version limited me to like 2 cores which is kind of insulting for the cost. I get that they don't want someone just buying a single desktop license and running it on a server with 100 cores, but in the end it was just irritating.

While they may have the same license, the motivation of each is almost an exact opposite of the other.

One aspires to make the user of the s/w the primary beneficiary, the other aims to make profiting from the s/w the primary benefit.