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There are places on this planet where everyone “needs” to use the same app. In some countries it’s Line, in others it’s WhatsApp and in others it’s Zalo.
That is not a good situation to be in. Infrastructure must be democratic, not corporate. Here in Sweden, our politicians can tend to be a li’l bit loosy-goosy with this, and some proprietary apps like Kivra or BankID or Facebook Messenger have started to gain a serious foothold.
FOSS is such a dumb issue that only nerds care about, and that’s great, I don’t want anyone else to have to care about it, but... policy-makers do need to get nerducated (and not get fooled by openwashing). The reason FOSS is such a dumb issue is because “intellectual” “property” and binary code and SAAS leads to a lot of dumb things.
It’s easier to understand how bad things are as we lose them.
If a weirdo guy moved into your kitchen and blocked you from grabbing a spoon whenever you wanted and instead rented them out to you provided you only ate the gruel he provided, the people who would be most able to see the absurdity in that would be be the people who remember what it was like before. Those who grew up with that system would be “whaddayamean? This is super convienient. I just stick my hand in the kitchen and a spoonful of gruel is shoved into it. Like it, love it, want more of it”. They’d be like “people who don’t have a spoon guy are so gross and so dumb. What the heck are they even? Doing rifling through their own cutlery drawer like some sorta eggheads”.
So that’s the dialectic here. I want people to not have to know about tech stuff. I’m not into the tech-for-tech’s-sake lifestyle. I want it to be easy to use. You just tell the computer what you want and it happens, no need to point and click, let alone configure and make. That’d be great. And hackers and modders could add features and share them and everyone would benefit.
But it’s got to be free, free for reals. Open source, and either decentralized or democratically governed.
FOSS seems so dumb to people because it’s so self-evident. It comes across as a dumb idea because it’s what we already should have and we should’ve had all along. “What do you mean? Line and WhatsApp and Facebook are free to use”, they say. “What even is the problem?” they wonder. And explaining the very real issues with having those corporations boots on our faces makes us sound like kooky conspiracy theorists.
Because proprietary software is so absurd.
Software is to a computer what recipes are to a kitchen.
In the seventies when code little-by-little started getting proprietarized, it started out like “Actually, if you wanna cook this dish, you really should buy this particular cookbook since it originated it”. And policy-makers bought into that transaction model, even enforced it, since our economic system is so busted.
And now fifty years later we’ve been frogboiled into a situation where the digital equivalent of our kitchens are completely encapsulated in mental ice.
The unbelievable absurdity of proprietary software makes FOSS seem dumb.
Talking about FOSS is like talking about “free oxygen” or “sidewalks everyone gets to walk on”. People are like “what are you on?”. Because they don’t know how bad it’s gotten.
With LLMs we risk slipping even further in this direction. “I heard you liked clicking on buttons in your black boxes so we made a black box that clicks the button for you without insight or oversight.”
And the flipside is that the sort of ease-of-use that those technologies promise, I want that for people. I want shared solutions that are easy to use, so that everyone doesn’t have to chase down pip dependency trees just to find out the weather forecast.
But power needs to belong to the people or we’re screwed.
Franklin Street Statement on Freedom and Network Services