The ongoing discussions about age-verification and changes in Free and Open-Source Software and GNU Linux and related OSs made me realize a gross misunderstanding on my part. I think many other users may have the same misunderstanding (seeing many comments using the word “traitors”), and it’s important that we become aware of it. We must understand that using or saying “FOSS” or “Linux” does not automatically mean to stand up for human rights, for the community, against corporations, and similar goals and values.
If we read the comments in those age-verification discussions we can see that many developers and possibly also users make statements like “the developers have no obligation towards the community”, “the law is the law, no matter what the community wants”, “we must comply”, and similar. It’s important to realize that many developers work on FOSS not out of consideration for the community, or for human rights, or against corporations. For them it’s just one kind of software development. We may have projects that are FOSS and pro-corporations or pro-surveillance. The “F” in FOSS stands for freedom to modify and distribute the software by/to anyone in the community. It doesn’t stand for “software that promotes / stands up for general human freedom and human rights". But of course there are also developers that work with FOSS because of such values.
So for anyone who, like me, wants to use and promote software as an assertion of, and a stand for, human rights and against corporations, it’s necessary not to stop at “FOSS” or “Linux” but apply more scrutiny and more careful choices. Probably it’s always been like this, but the present times require extra awareness.
I wish there was an acronym or other word that made this moral aspect of some FOSS development clear. This would help users to recognize software projects that share their values, and also those FOSS developers who do work for those values. Is there such a term already out there?
The problem is that “human freedom” and “human rights” are very general and somewhat vague terms and some people’s freedoms and rights are sometimes in conflict with each other. So it’s also often meaningless to say that you support “human freedom” and “human rights” without asking what freedoms and rights and for whom.
FOSS is a very specific subset of human freedom and human rights, it’s the right to control, modify and distribute the software one uses. All other parts of human freedom and human rights aren’t something that the free software movement necessarily has a position on. (Free software can certainly be used to, at least arguably, violate human rights, for example armed forces can use free software too, and should be able to!)
Human rights tend to mean those agreed upon on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, so not very vague at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human_Rights
Okay, how would you connect the UDHR’s core principles to FOSS in a meaningful, concrete way?
It’s great as a set of guidelines, but their implementation is very much left as an exercise to the reader, which I think is what the GP is getting at.
Imo, “being against corporations” doesn’t make sense in this regard unless you are very very far left and think that there should be no private property at all.
Edit:
In short: do you want to add labels to software to indicate
- pro human rights
- being against corporations
How can software be pro human rights?
What’s your problem with corporations, in case you really think that there should be no property?
I disagree. You don’t have to be far left to oppose oligarchy, corruption and crime.
Dig deep enough, read some history? And many on the Far Left contend that you do need to oppose things like Capitalism to oppose Oligarchy.
I’m no Marxist, but his observations on consolidation bear out. From that consolidation, we get oligarchy. From that oligarchy we get corruption and the worst sort of Epstein crimes imaginable. And it all reinforces each other.
What if we all decided together that the people who own Walmart and Amazon are the people who work there, instead of some parasites that sucked out enough wealth to never be able to spend it all for generations?
I’m no Marxist
the people who own Walmart and Amazon are the people who work there
Friend, may I introduce you to a little something known as “Dictatorship of the Proletariat?”
Yeah, I’m not really into “dictatorship” of any sort. Y’all need to update your language to contemporary English.
Regarding “pro human rights”, what I mean is that software development can be (for some) a form of activism for human rights, just like it happens in the arts and in science.
In the case of arts. Arts is the transmitter of the message “human’s have rights”. Usually art also depicts some sort of human right, like freedom.
I am not sure how this can be applied to code. There are some projects that use a ukrainian flag to indicate support for ukraine. Is that what you mean by that?
I think code should be free of politics. I don’t want my tennis club to support human rights either. I want to play tennis, not make politics.
In one sense, nothing is “free of politics”. Should your tennis club allow black people to join? There was a day and age when allowing them to join would have been considered a bold political statement. The rules and decisions your tennis club make are inherently political, whether you think of them that way or not.
That being said, more specific to software licenses, the question is whether we should be using verbage that restricts FOSS from being used for unethical purposes (such as military weaponry). There are cases to be made for and against that, and so far, it would seem most FOSS licenses tend toward a less restrictive policy.
So the “political” question in software licenses is: does it make sense to add restrictions in an attempt to promote societal well-being, or do we stick with the “free”-er approach? Both have political and societal ramifications.
