Anyone comparing the philosophy of "open source" to "free software" without acknowledging the harmful stagnation and single-mindedness in the latter community is not making a thoughtful critique in the year 2022.
To the vast majority of people these terms do not mean different things. Semantically, free software and open source mean the same thing and agree on the same software licenses.
The philosophical differences people attribute to "open source" vs. "free software" are usually a combination of development practices (dependent on the individual author) and arguing about copyleft licenses (even though the FSF agrees "permissive licenses" still make "free software").
The FSF and free software movement have failed because they prioritized the hero worship of a single individual over the actual furthering of their ideology. They have had nothing new or useful to contribute to the public conversation in over a decade.
So I can't believe people are still parroting "open source is about efficiency, free software is about ethics" or similar. Free software is about the ethics of one man, it's not a movement. They have spent all their energy alienating new blood.
If I cannot recommend your movement to anyone other than able-bodied cishet white dudes in western countries, and on top of that I have to caveat it with "it's prickly, hostile, and everyone does what Dear Leader says", then who the fuck is it for? That demographic is the *least* harmed by proprietary software.
The manifestos of free software got me in the mindset of serving users and protecting fundamental rights. But the practice of free software is just like open source, with more hostility.
So let's drop the "open source vs. free software" debate please. What has it accomplished? Whether it's open source or free software, the software licensing movement alone is not enough to achieve any of these movements' stated goals.
FOSS is necessary but not sufficient to ensure digital autonomy. https://techautonomy.org/
@ehashman so is "digital autonomy" the next torch-bearer, or is the answer that we need to move beyond torch bearers? or it's too soon to say?
I was kind of hoping for a Mutual Aid Software Movement personally; maybe the Odonian Software Foundation
@technomancy I think the idea of digital autonomy best captures what I wanted from free software but what it was lacking. But I also don't know that the momentum is there to build a movement behind it. There's so much burnout and there's so much risk. Criticizing the free software movement usually means getting harassed for months, and anyone doing it in isolation usually ends up doxxed. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@ehashman @technomancy FWIW, I'd be happy to contribute to such movements where I can (and can take on a reasonable amount of heat harassment-wise).
@technomancy @ehashman Well, that's precisely the problem - I've certainly already been talking about this a lot to people, and criticizing the "free software" movement and the largely imaginary ethical values it encompasses.
But those are only *individual* actions, and more should presumably be possible when working together on this with others. But what exact shape that takes, I'm not sure yet :)
Like, I certainly have my ideas on how these sorts of ideals can be promoted in practice (and do apply them every day), but I also don't really want to be the next RMS-esque BDFL figure who has a Grand Master Plan, so I figured it'd be useful to at least 'sign my attendance' in case there are plans by others for something more organized :p
@joepie91 @ehashman right like ... the first principle of mutual aid is that you provide it; you build the thing and do the work
and yet there persists a lingering feeling that it could be more effective under some form of broader organization
but maybe the organizing principles just vary too widely from context to context? like the early FSF organized relatively effectively towards "have an operating system you can use that's free" but nowadays the goals that (for instance) user-empowering social software have in common and the things that like ... image-editing software projects have in common is pretty slim, so looking for a broader foundation there to replace the FSF might just be a fool's errand