Bejamin "Mako" Hill (previously) is a free software developer, activist and academic with a long history of shrewd critical insights into the ways that free software, free culture and the wider world interact with each other.
In his keynote address to the annual Libreplanet conference, Mako traces the history of software freedom and how it changed when it met the forces of relentless commercialization and extraction.
Early free software advocates assumed that working on free software would be centralized and would be a kind of voluntary ideological project that would result in pay-cuts to programmers who wanted to ensure that users of programs got as much freedom as possible, and were willing to sacrifice to achieve this.
But markets discovered free software and turned it into "open source," figuring out how to create developer communities around software ("digital sharecropping") that lowered their costs and increased their quality. Then the companies used patents and DRM and restrictive terms of service to prevent users from having any freedom.
Mako says that this is usually termed "strategic openness," in which companies take a process that would, by default, be closed, and open the parts of it that make strategic sense for the firm. But really, this is "strategic closedness" — projects that are born open are strategically enclosed by companies to allow them to harvest the bulk of the value created by these once-free systems.
So Android (GNU/Linux) is everywhere and Apple was forced by its users insistence on jailbreaking their Iphones to create the App Store and allow programmers to participate in its ecosystem. But both mobile platforms have figured out how to use strategic closedness to lock up users and developers and capture the value and assert control over the system.
Mako suggests that the time in which free software and open source could be uneasy bedfellows is over. Companies' perfection of digital sharecropping means that when they contribute to "free" projects, all the freedom will go to them, not the public.
This comes at the exact moment when the world is being devoured by software, and when software freedom is, more than ever, ineluctably bound up with human freedom — in other words, it's a crisis of global and historic proportions.
Mako is calling on people to choose sides: to understand the moral dimension of software freedom, rather than its mere utilitarian benefits, and to commit themselves to human freedom.
(via Four Short Links)
France pulled all its gold from the NY Fed — and made $15 billion doing it
France sold all 129 tonnes of gold it had stored at the New York Federal Reserve, then rebuilt its position by buying from other European central banks — booking a… READ THE REST
Bolivia voided $62 million in banknotes after a plane crash, and now nobody's money works
Yoselin Diaz, 27, had her money rejected five times in a single day in La Paz. "I tried on the minibus and nothing, then I tried to buy some things… READ THE REST
Europe builds its own payment network, ditches Visa
Thirteen European countries have formed an alliance called EuroPA to build a continent-wide payment system that routes around Visa and Mastercard — and the $24 trillion in annual transactions the… READ THE REST
Save up to 20¢ per gallon on fuel with BJ's Wholesale Club for just $15
TL;DR: Right now, BJ's is treating new members to a 1-year Club Card membership for only $15 (reg. $60). Just ensure you fill up your tank by April 30th to take… READ THE REST
You've been renting and using Office wrong since 2009 … fix everything with a 72% discount
TL;DR: Get Microsoft Office 2024 Home & Business plus a full training bundle for $114 — pay once, keep it, and finally learn how to use it (MSRP $409.99). There are two types… READ THE REST
A laptop? A tablet? The Microsoft Surface SE is both — and it's 49% off
TL;DR: With a compact design, the Microsoft Surface SE delivers 16 Hours of smooth performance for school, work, and more with a Microsoft Surface SE Laptop (2022) for just $179.99 (Reg. $329). Need… READ THE REST