> This may happen, but we can't be sure of the future. If it does > happen, we don't know when that will be.
When a premise is uncertain and all participants have strong, cogent arguments, we have to ask if a pluralist solution is optimal. A pluralist solution can be optimal in the sense that the risks of all outcomes are prepared for and learned about. Pluralism is robust. It is also inherently aligned with broader communities. Only when the actions of one harm another do we need to study an exclusive solution. If indeed local LLMs or successors meeting the standards of free software adherents never emerge, they may abandon the technology later, and all will remain as it was already destined to be. If that's accepted, then free software advocates have no grounds to discourage the activities of open software advocates. > we never give users orders about how to use or not use Emacs I have no specific complaints about patches being rejected, but this community holds numerous security runes that gate the primary development of Emacs. The existence of a master branch is an instance of an exclusive solution, one which has much more costly pluralist solutions (forking, patching) and is more difficult to make robust. What happens to naturally exclusive resources is a topic of governance that I will leave alone. I bring it up to highlight the importance of respecting independence when the resources in question are non-exclusive, such as using or not using Elisp packages. However, I want to focus on the natural outcome of mass-volunteerism. Some rightly observe that the tactics of the FSF become stronger when adopted more broadly. This leads them to reason that a great deal of shared interest lies in "aggressively encouraging" mass adoption of the tactics. A fraction of FSF believers who I must say are too numerous view this shared interest as justification to shape conversations, dissuade competing ideas, and disrespect participants in any dialog that does not reinforce the politics of mass adoption of the principles. The popular movement becomes a consensus by social coercion. While not expressly a principle of the FSF, it *is a natural emergent consequence of those tactics.* *Without a means of coordinating signalling, action, and the flow of non-code contributions*, when we say "let's get a lot of people together," to make our group-amortizing tactics cheaper for each of us, it is immoral because we are laying what will happen on the shoulders of those who are generous with no means of recruiting those who understand the shared interest but hope that someone else will do it first. This is the volunteers' dilemma, and it must be solved to make all but calls for the most individualistic of cooperation moral. Let's talk about the well-known line of reasoning that states that individual incentive is the foundation of open software development (I have not read if free software advocates differ on this view). Non-programmers (and indeed many programmers) do not specialize in the tools used to build the tools they rely on. If the unit of cooperation cannot be measured in code, it must be some other unit. Otherwise the outcome is that we are expecting all non-code contributing users to ride on the back of those who build the tools. While we may state that those who program the tools got what they wanted from their individual incentive, this rationalization leaves alone a mass of demand that could be served by open software but is not. Abandoning these needs to the proprietary software creates a great deal of harm. For example, instead of strong enough federation tools to pull apart SNS services, we have Facebook. Not solving the volunteers' dilemma and providing means of non-code contributions to convert to open technologies is, in my view, a practical failure so severe that it must be immoral in its consequences. > This may be no coincidence. Your message says "open" many times and > "free" never (although "libre" once). I think you are starting from > the values of the open source camp, rather than the values of the free > software movement. It is no accident. I do not mean the "Open Source" as the FSF has framed it, and I have taken to using the abbreviation "_OSS" to deliberately exclude the "free/libre" and provoke conversations such as these. The formative values compelling my support of open technology and media in general were: - Having access to technology, literature, and media that enabled me to progress according to my virtues instead of my lucky position within the esoteric funnels of the pre-internet society. - Not being asked to pay for things that I could not yet buy as I was following society's recommended course of studying, sometimes by compulsion in public schools. - Witnessing how raising the competitive floor by technology lead to a healthier industry landscape where one misstep would leave an incumbent lagging behind a hard-working startup with a more innovative approach and without the entrenched disadvantages of the innovator's dilemma - Observing high quality open source used to perform valuable work in research and development that makes real technologies go faster, solving critical problems that really can improve our lives and oust stagnation-interested incumbents from their rent-seeking moats. - Being exposed to ideas and cultures I would not have paid to traverse into as I didn't know there was value on the other side These are all very practical and concrete kinds of value with a lot of very practical and concrete kinds of side-effects. For example, when more programmers benefit from open technologies, they are less prone to becoming so lazily immersed in at-risk open technologies that critical skills would diminish until Microsoft would close VS Code, knowing that a sufficient fraction of the users had been captured and that open technologies had become an insufficient deterrent. The abstract ideas of freedom also tell us to prevent this outcome, but my more charitable formulation of Open IP focuses on concrete benefits that more reliably motivate achieving the same end. As long as the emergent coercive consensus behaviors of free software advocates are not clearly denounced by the organization, I will feel compelled to recommend others to turn away from the FSF. As long as the ideologies are too rigid and self-entertaining to adapt and evolve in a world with persistent internet, the potential for global community, and e-commerce, I will again have to recommend others to turn away from the FSF. Experiments grow and evolve, and if there is one thing the FSF is known for more than anything, it is beating a consistent drum. I have observed that beat to be falling away from many pragmatic opportunities identifiable by my formative values, like an energizer bunny rolling forward down a steadily steepening hill. It is immoral not to demand radical change, the embrace of pluralism in the FSF governance structure, and the introduction of means of evolution so that what was once an experiment can finally begin to reach its next stages.
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