The political argument that gave birth to GNU/FSF seems to have lost it's bite in this day and age (perhaps due to a feeling that now open source is the de facto default, it will always be this way?)
The political argument that gave birth to GNU/FSF seems to have lost it's bite in this day and age (perhaps due to a feeling that now open source is the de facto default, it will always be this way?)
The political goal was to give users absolute control over their computational environments. In reality, we have less and less control, because computations moved to the cloud (corporation-controlled servers) and the most used devices regressed to a non-hackable state (mobile gadgets).
Even if you use a Linux desktop with 100% open source software, you will still probably do a good part (and the most sensitive part) of your computations on someone else's computer, that you do not control. Open Source ended up making it easier for companies to build this new world, because it provided them with perhaps billions of man-hours of free effort.
The strategy of Open Source as a political movements made sense in the 1990s, but we need something new for 2019...
I'm a copyright abolitionist, so I think when you write a book, you can only "own" that physical copy. When someone reads that book, the words in the sequence that they read them are now part of their memory and autonomy of thought. And so on.
No, that was Free Software. Open Source was created as a reaction to that, with the goal of removing the ethical implications and making it "business friendly". And it succeeded, unfortunately.
See: "Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software"
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....
Since many are so uneducated about the difference, it is especially important to highlight this difference wherever one can.