Do We Need To Rethink What Free Software Is?

'Matthew Garrett is a security developer at Google and a Linux
contributor who in 2014 won the Free Software Foundation's annual
"Advancement of Free Software" award. But now he's asking if we need
to re-think what free software is:

If users can pay Amazon to provide a hosted version of a piece of
software, there's little incentive for them to pay the authors of that
software. This has led to various projects adopting license terms such
as the Commons Clause that effectively make it nonviable to provide
such a service, forcing providers to pay for a commercial use license
instead. In general the entities pushing for these licenses are VC
backed companies who are themselves benefiting from free software
written by volunteers that they give nothing back to, so I have very
little sympathy. But it does raise a larger issue -- how do we ensure
that production of free software isn't just a mechanism for the
transformation of unpaid labour into corporate profit...?

At the same time, people are spending more time considering some of
the other ethical outcomes of free software. Copyleft ensures that you
can share your code with your neighbour without your neighbour being
able to deny the same freedom to others, but it does nothing to
prevent your neighbour using your code to deny other fundamental,
non-software, freedoms. As governments make more and more use of
technology to perform acts of mass surveillance, detention, and even
genocide, software authors may feel legitimately appalled at the idea
that they are helping enable this by allowing their software to be
used for any purpose. The JSON license includes a requirement that
"The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil", but the lack of any
meaningful clarity around what "Good" and "Evil" actually mean makes
it hard to determine whether it achieved its aims.

As stewards of the free software definition, the Free Software
Foundation should be taking the lead in ensuring that these issues are
discussed. The priority of the board right now should be to
restructure itself to ensure that it can legitimately claim to
represent the community and play the leadership role it's been failing
to in recent years, otherwise the opportunity will be lost and much of
the activist energy that underpins free software will be spent
elsewhere. If free software is going to maintain relevance, it needs
to continue to explain how it interacts with contemporary social
issues. If any organisation is going to claim to lead the community,
it needs to be doing that.'

-- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/09/28/1741229

Cheers, Peter
-- 
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
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