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Banged this out over tea this morning. TLDR: the FSF/OSI four freedoms are myopic in their focus on software developers, and we should complement them by asking what freedoms non-developers value.
https://lu.is/2025/02/freedoms-for-who-revisited-briefly/
@hazelnot Related to our conversation yesterday…
@luis_in_brief Does it concern you that the “freedoms” in your blog post do not consider the interests of personal end users who lack skills/experience/wealth/ability?
@krans @hazelnot sort of? It’s definitely a long-standing concern of mine (literally the subject of the talk that is the source of my banner picture here) but also the reality is that most end-users do not/cannot take advantage of free software. To the extent they benefit (and frankly often they do not!) they benefit indirectly through governance/regulability, competition, etc.
@luis_in_brief I’ve pretty much just been pointing at the @dweb principles https://getdweb.net/
@luis_in_brief I kinda disagree with this, in that the intent us *supposed* to be that they're there for users, and users are supposed to fairly pay a programmer to get the software to do what they want if it doesn't already.
But in practice you're right that too many of the movement participants put too much weight on developers' and capitalist exploiters' rights and DGAF about users.
@dalias @luis_in_brief System is what system does.
FLOSS advocates can chant “users supposed to fairly pay” as much as they want but as long as they put Freedom 0 above all else businesses will keep pillaging FLOSS. Freedom 0 is in direct conflict with the capitalist environment. There's no way around it.
@luis_in_brief @wingo I’d argue that FLOSS is not even focused on software developers, but only on software itself. We’ve seen time and time again the issue of sustainability coming up. Businesses pillage FLOSS without contributing much of their profit back. There are numerous instances of developers burning out for free (as in beer) because their projects become too popular. We’ve seen big FLOSS projects change licenses to non-FLOSS trying to address the issue. Without success so far because FLOSS ensures software proliferation, not fulfilment of the developer's interests.