The underlying problem is that people don’t care.

I’ve tried sitting people down and explain the value of libre software but at best they just nod their head in agreement and forget everything after 5 minutes.
It’s unfair to blame FSF or free software community here when the world is simply not ready for mass libre software adoption. I feel that FSF and other libre software communities need to redirect their resources from lobbying casual users to lobbying governments to achieve real change.

An incredible article! Thank you for sharing. This post serves as an interesting extension to your previous post about capitalist efficiency in relation to tech. Capitalism’s efficient when it comes to co-opting movements and people in order to water down their image and effectiveness. “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” is just another form of that same trope specific to the free software movement. Major companies helping out sure is nice in the short-term, but reliance on them shouldn’t be risked in the long-term if the movement will only be watered down as a result. The long-term goal, as the article states, should be getting rid of the conditions that stop the free flow of information, which ultimately means the dissolution of the economy and big tech companies as we know them now.

pantheon of technology corporations that attempt to commodify every aspect of our lives in order to enrich a select few

This is the new problem with tech. It is not only that they commodify the information but more so that they commodify humans as in privacy, behavior, emotions etc… They track you, enrage you and put you against manipulative content like you where a commodity. We need to turn this around, we can already see the consequences of this…

If this is tldr for adhd days, it is worth taking away at least this bit:

But 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.

In his 2004 book The Hacker Manifesto, media theorist McKenzie Wark coins the term “vectoralist class” to refer to those who profit from commodifying information. This process is enforced by intellectual property restrictions to prevent sharing, resulting in an artificial scarcity of a non-scarce good. Given that property rights originally developed under conditions of scarcity, it feels somewhat odd, from a consumer perspective, to apply those same rights to non-scarce goods which can be replicated at zero marginal cost. As a result, initiatives for “digital rights management” are typically unpopular among the public, straining consumer expectations of ownership by imposing restrictions on what you can do with the songs, movies, or e-books you have paid for.

This “artificial scarcity” is needed for capitalism to work as anything that are “non-scarce goods which can be replicated at zero marginal cost” have no value ($0) in capitalism. So all the “IP” laws are there to put information on the market, extend the system that should never be used for information (or anything abundant). What we need is another system that can support creation of information (pay the developer, song writer etc.) but without having their output to be “commodified”.