I love this article, because although it doesn’t offer too concrete a solution, it correctly poses the problem of software freedom and privacy, not in individualistic terms, but as a collective problem, that requires a collective solution.
And stallman is kinda the figurehead of the lifestylist approach to software freedom. We can’t pretend that just because free software exists, and a few people are enlightened enough to use it, that we’ve made much progress at all for software freedom. Capitalist software development, with all its adverse effects on privacy,is still the dominant way people interact with their computers.
As someone who is essentially a newcomer to Linux, GNU, and Free Software–are the FSF and all the other organizations that make up the FOSS ecosystem not the collective solution? The issue of outreach is certainly significant, so I suppose I struggle to understand how much more “collective” the ideal solution would be, compared to how it is now, outreach aside.
They’re essentially single-issue organizations that attack the symptoms (affronts to privacy, etc), not the root cause of the problem: capitalist-driven software development, and its endless drive for profit at the expense of all else, namely human needs.
By separating themselves from the wider political struggles against that system, the best they can do is criticize big tech, and suggest alternatives that have 1/1000th of the money and developers that capitalist software has. This hasn’t worked and will never work. We need political struggles not just for alternatives, but an expropriation of big tech, removing control of them from the profit-seekers, open-sourcing their codebases, and making transparent all the things they’re doing that we don’t know about.
These orgs should either create wings in, or absorb themselves into anti-capitalist political parties who after taking power can actually bring these software companies under public control and civilian oversight.
I love this article, because although it doesn’t offer too concrete a solution, it correctly poses the problem of software freedom and privacy, not in individualistic terms, but as a collective problem, that requires a collective solution.
And stallman is kinda the figurehead of the lifestylist approach to software freedom. We can’t pretend that just because free software exists, and a few people are enlightened enough to use it, that we’ve made much progress at all for software freedom. Capitalist software development, with all its adverse effects on privacy,is still the dominant way people interact with their computers.
As someone who is essentially a newcomer to Linux, GNU, and Free Software–are the FSF and all the other organizations that make up the FOSS ecosystem not the collective solution? The issue of outreach is certainly significant, so I suppose I struggle to understand how much more “collective” the ideal solution would be, compared to how it is now, outreach aside.
They’re essentially single-issue organizations that attack the symptoms (affronts to privacy, etc), not the root cause of the problem: capitalist-driven software development, and its endless drive for profit at the expense of all else, namely human needs.
By separating themselves from the wider political struggles against that system, the best they can do is criticize big tech, and suggest alternatives that have 1/1000th of the money and developers that capitalist software has. This hasn’t worked and will never work. We need political struggles not just for alternatives, but an expropriation of big tech, removing control of them from the profit-seekers, open-sourcing their codebases, and making transparent all the things they’re doing that we don’t know about.
These orgs should either create wings in, or absorb themselves into anti-capitalist political parties who after taking power can actually bring these software companies under public control and civilian oversight.
Thank you for the thorough answer! It is much clearer than the article above in illuminating the core of the issue.