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long, browser musings 

@freakazoid Open-source has a rather broader ideology than that; for example, quite a lot of folks are interested in it because it provides a public commons (something the free software movement does not explicitly aim for), and the possibility of it being used for proprietary software is just the price of admission to get to that point.

Likewise, my main interest for example is to make it as easy as possible for grassroots efforts to build competitive tech (as a starting point for sabotaging aforementioned closed systems), and some of the 'free software' choices like "burying people in lengthy copyleft licenses" are, to put it mildly, not helpful to that end.

All of which is to say, it's really a *lot* more complex in practice than "user vs. developer freedom", mainly because the "free software" movement bundles in a couple of different ideological choices that don't make sense for everybody (and arguably make sense for very few people, when the rubber meets the road).

As for where we go from here: that's a large question with a large answer. The technical starting point is, IMO, just about the least interesting part of that; sure, it needs to be figured out, but there are much more important questions to answer.

Like for example, how do we avoid building more 'software for nerds'? How do we avoid toxic culture (bigotry, "people will just have to learn how to use it correctly", etc.)? How do we make sure that accessibility is done right? How do we do decisionmaking to avoid the same problem again in the future? Can we make certain architectural choices to 'make a thousand forks bloom' more easily, so to say?

Arguably the first step would be to collect people who are interested in working on this, who understand the above and who, crucially, are open to considering needs and perspectives they had not thought about before (even when that means not doing it the way they originally had in mind). Then go from there.

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