The software supply chain is something they've done to themselves
Published on 2024-07-04
We were tricked into thinking that BSD or MIT licences were "freer" like we were tricked into believing that building a polluting factory next to our local river would be "good for the economy". It is a scam. A lot of unpaid or badly paid developers would probably benefit from switching to a copyleft license but they use BSD/MIT because they see themselves are "temporary embarrassed software millionaires".
"On Open Source and the Sustainability of the Commons" (ploum.net)
Ploum and I seem to have very similar views on the so-called software supply chain and open source sustainability.
A while back, I wrote an article about Embrace, Extend, Extinguish:
EEE is something we do to ourselves
And, as the title implies, my thesis was that EEE is something we do to ourselves. This came from a place of frustration, watching as the technical leaders of the Fediverse—one of my semi-permanent homes on the internet—seemed to be voluntarily handing my community over to the same corporate interests that sold out every other internet home I had before it. What's worse, of course, is that members of my community cheered them for it¹, and people like myself were being treated as backwards for not wanting the Mastodon Network to "grow."
In many ways, these are problems we bring upon ourselves. It's the very nature of open protocols that there can be those who federate with Threads and those who don't. Similarly, if you don't want to become a cog in someone else's supply chain, you're free to release your code under the AGPL. Despite the fact that the open source community seems completely engulfed in the ecosystem of American tech companies, free desktops are better than ever.
There's one thing that I think I got wrong in that article, though: there is no "we." This is entirely on them.
Whenever I've read about software developers suffering under the weight of pressure from large corporations using their projects, I've always found I had a hard time really sympathizing with them. I fully believe that it's stressful, but it's stressful in as much as it's stressful to constantly be surrounded by people asking things of you. Like, yeah, that is very stressful, but it's also an opportunity to learn how to politely say "no." In the words of Ploum:
We need to remember that most (if not all) free software is provided, "without liability". That rule should be enforced. We should not care about corporations. If there was no support contract prior hand, let them burn.
I'm not old enough to have grown up in the early days of the FLOSS movement, so I don't know exactly what it was like, but I'm certain that what we call open source today categorically is not it. The confusion seems to be in terminology; we share part of the same acronym, and so we forget to realize that our experiences of this space are radically different. Even if the result is that both our code bases are available to read online, there is something fundamentally different from me, someone who releases their code under the GPL, and someone else who uses the MIT license. Our work serves different ends in service to essentially different communities.
I don't know. I guess it's always seemed strange to me, to think that there literally are people out there who volunteer their time to write critical infrastructure for well-funded companies. Is it enough to just take pride in your work? I'm sure it never starts out like "I want to write software for Amazon for free," but clearly, at some point, that's what it becomes. You could probably get the same feeling volunteering for a local non-profit—they are all in dire need of digital infrastructural support, whether they realize it or not.
Nobody cares about independent digital infrastructure
When I'm not at work, I write code because I either find what I create personally useful in my life (e.g. a static site generator) or merely because it's fun. My definition of fun isn't really building critical network infrastructure, so maybe it'd be different if I did. But I can't escape the feeling that if what you choose to do in your free time is so taxing, so emotionally demanding, that organizing labour action against the companies that are taking the code you've freely given to them is an option on the table², maybe it'd be better to just go plant a garden, bake some bread to share with your neighbours, stop by the library and check out a book, or do whatever it is you need to be happy.
TL;DR: release your code under the AGPL :)
Footnotes
¹ Indeed, the question of federation with Threads on social.coop was controversial, and in the end the community voted to limit rather than suspend them. That's had a lasting impact on how I relate to the Social.coop community. There was always major safety concerns regarding Threads federation for people like myself, and as it stands, limiting Threads does generally mitigate them, but I'm a very principled person. It's decisions like these that set the tone for what a growing community will become.
² I'm strawmanning a bit here, I know, but this isn't coming out of thin air. There have been conversations about free software unions, and while that's an interesting idea, these days I just can't see the point of it when the GPL has always been an option. Ultimately, I'm not describing any "real" person but rather a lot of different ideas about open source sustainability I've seen over the years, and even if there were such a person I'm sure I wouldn't have anything against them. We'd just be two fundamentally different people with different visions for different communities.
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