Narratives on Freedom

An anti-open-source narrative has become louder lately. It doesn't say 'down with open source', it begins with 'I understand', and 'listen, we need to talk', 'we must be realistic'. Soon after (but never from the outset) 'you know what I mean, if you understand business'.

People want to understand business. More than that, they want to say that they do, and don't want to sound like someone who doesn't understand business.

Then we return to the struggling play writer who prompted the Statue of Anne. He's a good guy, he made all the stuff you like, but he's starving to death. And the companies who make all their money from his plays aren't paying him any money. But this time, he's not a writer, he's a software engineer.

And we just need to fix open source licences a little, just to add a few very small restrictions (to be used responsibly, and ethically, to pay starving developers, and stop Nazis only) and that software developer may finally afford to buy his children food once more.

First, there was Rossman, with the corporate tweaks, and repeated emphasis of how very close this licence is to open source, while the company behind it simply referred to their licence as open source.

Then Beattie instructed us that everyone in the area either understands that moving from open source is a laudable thing that some people must do, and that everyone who disapproves of removing open source licences is a 'keyboard warrior', who 'never would have paid anyway'.

I think it's the emphatic 'I am one of you, and I totally get it' that makes these narratives so tiresome.

And here's Muni to inform us that if most people who want to use and promote open source software do so because they are privileged, and ignorant of the realities of the world. We must quell our naïve idealism!

Yet if open source code alone could change the world, it would have happened by now.

Apparently Muni thinks that the world would not look different if people had to pay to use BGP, browsers, an init system, sound-card drivers, ethernet drivers, and every other piece in the link. Muni sees no different in a world without python, or doesn't understand that python is open source.

This narrative really is coming from inside the house, from people who have done excellent work, and have shown a understanding of software's bigger picture. It makes the slimy narrative a real gut-punch.