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Comment by wolvesechoes | Hacker News Reader

I keep longing for a day when FOSS crowd realize that their goals are political, not technical, in nature, and thus require broad political action, numbers, solidarity and force more than yet another project promising what previous dozen failed to achieve.

But I do not have much hope.

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GPL is all about politics, that is Richard Stallman's background regarding his world view and how it applies to computing.

All other FOSS licenses are only a rebranding of Public Domain and Shareware variants that we used to have, with the respective commercial value when used as carrot for commercial products.

Yes, Stallman and his generation was more aware of this reality, yet we are losing it. It is similar across all dimensions of the society, where younger folk take for granted what was gained only after long struggle, as a result losing it, bit by bit.

> GPL is all about politics

People use this excuse to make open source software about politics that has nothing to do with software, ownership etc.

It is no excuse, it is literally Richard Stallman's view on the four user freedoms, how to enforce them legally, and naturally all of those that agree with his point of view.

Note that all the hobby stuff I have on Github created by myself, unless forced by existing licenses, are GPL based.

Even though I am not into FOSS politics, I once were, that time is long gone.

My take is that 15 years of booming software market and endless high paying jobs made people indifferent to the way open source software was/is being exploited by tech as a form of unpaid labour, because a) having an open source portfolio ended up being a kind of resume or bragging card that help get you a high paying job and b) the money being spread around was big enough that people didn't really care anyways. Nobody was starving.

I think it's shifting. I think we'll see a return to copyleft licenses as people realize the stuff they're writing that is actually valuable is just a couple commits away from being some new AWS component they will get no compensation for, and that starts to matter a lot more.

20-25-30 years ago we were a lot more aware of this stuff. There's a reason the Linux kernel is GPL.

If corporate entities want your stuff bad enough, they can negotiate a separate license.

AWS can easily comply with the (A)GPL and still not give people any compensation for using their stuff. You have to go to a non-FOSS license if you want anything out of Amazon, but then they probably won't use your stuff anyway, unless it is popular enough that they can make lots more off it than they would have to give to you.

Look into where the term "open source" came from (the "Open Source Initiative").

Here's a quote from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source):

> Open source as a term emerged in the late 1990s by a group of people in the free software movement who were critical of the political agenda and moral philosophy implied in the term "free software" and sought to reframe the discourse to reflect a more commercially minded position.

The GPL and Free Software were always political from the very moment Richard Stallman conceived of the GPL.

Did you reply to the wrong comment?

No, I think I just misread the comment I replied to. :/

The problem with FOSS isn't a lack of politics (they have plenty of that), but tunnel vision focus on software, when everything that is going wrong with the modern Internet is based around data (who stores it, who controls it, who can access it, who pays for it, ...).

One would expect something like the similar to the GDPR to grow out of the FOSS movement, but it didn't. The FOSS movement still has nothing similar on offer. Handling of data remains a complete blind spot for the movement.

That’s a very good point!

"The problem with FOSS isn't a lack of politics (they have plenty of that)"

The point of politics is to shape society through, well, policies. Considering your point on "tunnel vision focus" I think we agree, it is just that I use the term "politics" in broader, and older, sense.

There’s noyb [1] and the various EDRi-affiliated organizations [2]. In the US, there’s the EFF [3].

[1] https://noyb.eu/

[2] https://edri.org/ https://edri.org/about-us/our-network/

[3] https://www.eff.org/

The FOSS crowd doesn't have a unified goal. Some would love to outlaw tracking in browsers, thinking they then can have Chrome without tracking. Some would disagree, and think that tracking is what enables Chrome to be as good as it is.

What are the dozen failed projects that had the same ambitions as Ladybird?

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