"For me, the best parts of the open-source movement were always the remnants of the “free software movement” from which it evolved. During the early days of the movement in the 1980s, best captured by Richard Stallman’s book Free Software, Free Society, there were no corporate conferences featuring branded lanyards and sponsored lunches. Instead, it was all about challenging the property rights that had granted software companies so much power in the first place. Stallman himself was possibly the movement’s best-known evangelist, traveling around the world to preach about software freedom and the evils of applying patent law to code."
[...]
"it wasn’t until the free software movement shed its rebellious roots and rebranded as the more business-friendly “open-source movement” that it really took off. One of the most crucial figures in this effort was Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, who built his business empire by identifying the pieces of the free software movement that could be commodified. Suddenly, corporations that had previously considered open source to be dangerously redolent of “communism” were starting to see its value, both as a way of building software and as a recruitment tactic. From there, an entire ecosystem of virtue-signaling opportunities sprang up around the marriage of convenience between the corporate world and open source: conference and hackathon sponsorships, “summers of code,” libraries released under open licenses but funded by for-profit corporations.
If that counts as a victory, however, it was a pyrrhic one. In the process of gaining mainstream popularity, the social movement of “free software”—which rejected the very idea of treating software as intellectual property—morphed into the more palatable notion of “open source” as a development methodology, in which free and proprietary software could happily co-exist. The corporations that latched onto the movement discovered a useful technique for developing software, but jettisoned the critique of property rights that forme
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I wonder where the state of software would be today without him.
/r/StallmanWasRight
I'm looking for something that I can point to as a good introduction to FOSS ideas, something that is understandable also for people who are not programmers themselves.
The background is that I know someone who is very interested in philosophical questions about how society works and different ideologies and so on, and who sees the huge problems of how people are controlled by their technology nowadays (with Facebook/Google/Apple having so much power and so on) but who seems to have no idea about what FOSS is all about. I would like to give this person a link to something that can help win them over to the FOSS cause, so to speak.
Is there a particularly good book about this, or a video clip or a podcast episode or something that can work as a good introduction? Perhaps a video with Richard Stallman explaining everything? Which one?
Edit: Thanks for the answers. The info on the FSF web page and in the sidebar here is good, but I'm still interested in something more, grateful for any more tips.
Now I obviously don't think that RMS is instrumental in keeping the movement alive anymore, but he definitely is the figurehead of the free software movement, and has been since its inception. So when he is no longer that figurehead, who will be?
"The irony of Linux is, things were better when there weren't money in it..." // #lukesmith
Something I've been wondering a lot about lately. Open source software projects such as Linux, Firefox, Chromium, OpenOffice and open data projects such as Wikipedia and Openstreetmap are used by billions of people around the world. In my opinion, they are some of the best examples of (libertarian) socialist ideals in our world today. Even if most developers probably wouldn't consider their software to be a socialist products, they work together across borders without pay or reward to create programmes and services which are competitive with and often superior to commercial offerings.
Many of these projects are sponsored by those who are well off (including large companies such as Google) but the results are shared with everyone entirely for free and accessible no matter where you live. Can you think of a more redistributive effort than free knowledge, accessible by all and funded by the rich (wikipedia)? Or a product which is used by practically every company and every household in the world, and yet is entirely free (linux)?
You only need to look at Github.com to see how many millions of hours of labour and billions of pounds people are willing to give away for free for the common good to understand how impactful this movement has been, and yet I hear next to nothing from people on the left about this... Without free software, none of the devices we use or websites we visit on a daily basis could exist.
So, any thoughts on why this movement doesn't have more recognition within left-wing politics? I would love to see it take centre stage in a labour manifesto, especially when it comes to things like softare patents, copyright reform and tax breaks for companies doing open source/open data.
lists.gnu.org is the mail archive site for the GNU Operating System and the Free Software Movement. Could you please remove it from the porn list?
I really do not like the "teleportation" with just the Move controllers in addition to memorizing where all the buttons are.
I just hope more FPS video game developers would follow the same method as Doom VFR with having the freedom to choose controller or move controllers.
I think the GNU public license should be applied to all digital software and other copyrights on things like inventions and books should be limited to 30 years after the creators death.
