ABOUT FREEDOM AND POWER
by Ploum on 2024-04-08
https://ploum.net/2024-04-08-freedom-power.html
Freedom is the right to do whatever you want. Power is the right to
force others to do what you want. Power is, by definition, being able to
restrict others’ freedoms.
Copyleft is a tool that gives you freedom but no power.
Permissive licenses give freedom and power, allowing already powerful
people to restrict the freedoms of others.
That’s why powerful people (and those dreaming of being powerful) don’t
like copyleft. When you are accustomed to the privilege of power,
freedom of others sounds like oppression.
Don’t listen to the powerful people. They will tell you that you need to
protect powers just in case you become powerful yourself. They will tell
you that you need to be against taxation just in case you become rich
yourself. That you are a "temporary embarrassed millionaire". Similarly,
they’ve told you to use MIT/BSD license because you could later become a
"billionaire proprietary software tycoon" with your lines of code.
That’s, of course, a lie. They already are the barons. They want to use
your own lines of code to restrict your own freedoms. We should not
admire powerful people but fight them.
You may dream of power but all you need is freedom.
We need to protect freedom, not power. We need to respect humans, not
bosses nor commercial interests.
Offer a little freedom : use copyleft licenses !
A SOCIETY THAT LOST FOCUS
by Ploum on 2024-03-18
https://ploum.net/2024-03-18-lost-focus.html
Our Mind, the Bottleneck
========================
In the early 90s, after tweaking my MS-DOS computer, I was able to play
games. One of those game was called "Battle Chess". A Chess game were
pieces were really fighting against each other. It was fun. I was, and
still am, a mediocre chess player. I was mate in less than 10 or 15
turns at the easiest level.
For the sake of the experiment, I turned the difficulty to the harder
level and started playing. Something strange happened: I was still
losing but it took a lot more turns. I was able to protect my game, even
to manage a few draws.
Was it a bug in the game?
Even as a young teenager, I quickly understood the reason. With the
setting set to "hard", the game would try a lot harder to find a good
move. On my 386 processor, without the mathematical coprocessor, this
would take time. Several seconds or even one minute by turn. During that
time, I was thinking, anticipating.
With the easiest setting, computer moves would happen immediately. I
knew I had all the time I want but I was compelled to move fast. I could
not take the time while the other side was immediately reacting to my
moves.
The world we are living in is that same chess game on the easiest
setting. Everything happens immediately, all the time. White-collar work
can now be summarised as trying to reply as fast as possible to every
single email until calling it a day and starting again in the morning, a
process which essentially prevents any deep thinking, as pointed by Cal
Newport in his book "A world without email".
As we don’t have the time to think anymore, we masquerade our lack of
ideas with behavioural tricks. We replaced documents with PowerPoints
because it allowed lack of structure and emptiness to look professional
(just copy paste the data of the last PowerPoint you received in a text
file and see by yourself how pitiful it is. PowerPoint communications at
NASA were even diagnosed by Edward R. Tufte, author of the "The
cognitive style of PowerPoint", as one of the causes that led to Space
Shuttle Columbia’s disaster).
The root problem is that, for the first time in human history, our brain
is the bottleneck. For all history, transmitting information was slow.
Brains were fasts. After sending a letter, we had days or months to
think before receiving an answer. Erasmus wrote his famous "Éloge de la
folie" in several days while travelling in Europe. He would never have
done it in a couple of hours in a plane while the small screen in the
backseat would show him advertisements.
In 2012, the French writer Thierry Crouzet had one of the first recorded
"online burnout". Being connected all the time with interesting
strangers and interesting ideas to which he wanted to reply quickly was
too much for his brain. One night, he had a strong panic attack and
decided to spend six months without the Internet, an experience he told
in his book "J’ai débranché".
The Oversold Internet
=====================
The instant feedback of permanent connectivity is clearly a bad thing.
But the worse had yet to come. After the 2000s bubble popped and told us
that Internet was not "magic money", the question became "how do we
monetise the Internet?" A few idealistic geeks replied, "You don’t
monetise it, it’s a non-commercial world." But geeks, as everyone,
wanted or needed to be paid.
To earn money, they handled the reins of the whole new world they were
creating to marketers. That’s it: hackers sold the Internet in exchange
of a salary. Until 2000, marketers played along with the idea of selling
the work hackers were doing. With one small problem: they oversold it
completely, diving in the geek fantasy that, soon, everybody would be on
that Internet buying stuff online.
In the 2000s, nobody but geeks wanted to spend their life behind a huge
radiating screen. Marketers suddenly waked up to that reality with the
dot-com bubble. If not everybody wanted to be on the Internet and nobody
would buy anything on the Internet, there were two potential solutions:
either monetising the fact that some people were already spending lots
of time of the Internet or convincing more people to come on the
Internet.
Surviving companies such as Google decided for the easiest one:
monetising what people were already giving to the Internet: their time
and attention. Advertising was, of course, already part of the web
(mostly through the infamous "popups") but Google innovated by inventing
a whole new way of exploiting attention: trying to learn as much as
possible about users to show them the advertising they are more likely
to click on. The whole story is told in great details in the book
"Surveillance Capitalism", by Soshanna Zuboff.
Whether this "personalised advertisement" really work better than
traditional one is up to debate. For Tim Hang, author of "Subtime
Attention Crisis" and for Cory Doctorow, author of "How to destroy
surveillance capitalism", the real impact on sales is negligible but as
marketers think it works, they invest massive money in it, making the
whole technology a very lucrative bubble.
But the real impact is undisputed : as long as someone buys it, it is
really lucrative to sell the attention and all the information you could
from consumers. As a consequence, the practice has been generalised and
nearly every website, every app on the Internet is trying to get both.
And they are very scientific about the process.
We forgot how not to spy and steal attention
============================================
It is now considered as "normal practice" to try to get the attention
and the data of your users, even if it doesn’t make sense from a
business perspective.
Banking apps send notifications to show you their new shiny logo, good
old e-commerce website ask their customers for the number of children
they have or their income bracket. Even non-commercial personal blogs or
some websites dedicated to privacy contain analytics software to track
their users. Not tracking your users is harder than not! Every single
vendor from which you shop, even a brick-and-mortar one, will bury you
with their mailings.
One could assume that buying a new mattress is something you do only
every decade and that the prospective market for mattress vendors is
those who didn’t buy a mattress in the last five years. So why did
anybody think that, right after buying a mattress, I would be interested
in receiving news about mattresses every single week of my life?
The two consequences of all this are that our privacy is invaded as much
as it is technologically possible and that our attention is
scientifically captured as much as it is technologically possible. And,
in both aspects, technology is "improving" as all the smartest minds in
the world are hired to do just that.
While working at Google, Tristan Harris realised how much what they were
building was in order to get the focus and the attention of people. He
left Google to create the "Center for Humane Technology" that tries to
raise attention about the fact that… our attention is captured by
monopolist technologies.
The irony is palpable: Tristan Harris had a very good intuition but
can’t imagine doing anything else than either "raising attention"
through social networks or building technologies that would notify you
that you should be focused. Let’s build yet another layer of complexity
above everything else and raise attention so this layer is adopted
widely enough to become the foundation of the next complexity paradigm.
Worshipping Shallow Ideas
=========================
Being distracted all the time prevent us from having any ideas and
understanding. We need a catchy slogan. Instead of reading a three-page
report, we prefer a 60 slides PowerPoint, containing mostly stock
pictures and out-of-context charts.
We have valorised the heroic image of the CEO that comes in a meeting
and tell engineers, "I have ten minutes left before my next meeting.
Tell me everything in five and I’ll take a billion dollar decisions."
In retrospect, it is obvious that taking good decisions in that context
is nothing more than rolling a dice. Funnily enough, it has been proved
multiple times than every high-profile CEO is not better than a random
decision algorithm. But, unlike algorithms, CEOs usually have charisma
and assurance. They may take a very wrong decision but they can convince
everybody that it’s the right one. Which is exactly the definition of a
salesman job.
In "Deep Work", Cal Newport tries to promote the opposite stance, the
art of taking the time to think, to ponder. In "The Ideas Industry",
Daniel Drezner observes that long, subtle and complex ideas are more and
more replaced by simplistic slogans, the epitome being the famous
TED conferences. In 18 minutes, people are sold an idea and, if the
speaker is a good salesman, feel like they’ve learned something deep and
new. The mere fact that you could learn something deeply enough in 18
minutes is an insult to all the academic world. Without surprise, the
same academic world is seen by many as boring old people spending their
time writing long articles instead of making a catchy slogan to change
the world.
Succumbing to Our Addictions
============================
Most monopolies were built by removing choices. You could not buy a
computer without Microsoft Windows. You could not visit some websites
without Internet Explorer. You can’t find a phone without Google in a
shop (Google pay many billions dollars every year to be the default
search engine on Apple devices). And if you manage to remove Google from
your phone, you will lose the ability to run some apps, including most
banking apps. Most apps even check at start if Google services are
installed on the phone and refuse to start if it’s not the case. If it’s
really hard not to use Google, it’s by definition a forced monopoly.
Similarly, it is very hard to avoid Amazon when shopping online.
There’s one exception : Facebook. There’s nothing forcing us to go to
Facebook or Instagram. There’s nothing forcing us to spend time on it.
It’s like we have choice. But it seems we haven’t.
Why is this? Why are we playing one hour of what was supposed to be five
minutes of a stupid smartphone game instead of reading a book? Why are
we spending every minute awake checking our smartphone and replying to
mundane chitchat, even if we are in the middle of the conversation with
someone else? Why are we compelled to put our life and the lives of our
children at risk just to quickly reply while driving?
Because of the way the human brain is wired. Evolutionary speaking, we
are craving for new experiences. Learning new experiences, good or bad,
may help your chromosomes to survive more generations than others. We
get that famous "dopamine rush", described in great details by Liberman
and Long in "The molecule of more".
Each time there’s a notification, each time there’s a red bubble in some
part of the screen, the brain acts like it’s a new vital opportunity. We
can’t miss it. A study showed that the sole notification sound was
enough to distract a driver as much as if he was texting while driving.
Yes, even without looking at your phone, you were distracted as much as
if you did (which is not an excuse to look at it).
The brain has learned that the phone is a random provider of "new
experiences". Even in airplane mode, it was demonstrated that having the
phone on your desk or in your bag degrades heavily your attention and
your thinking performance. Performance went back to normal only when the
phone was put in another room.
Fighting to Get Our Focus Back
==============================
That’s it, the only way to not have any temptation is not to have the
phone at arm reach. The aforementioned French writer Thierry Crouzet
told me once that it was very difficult to focus on writing when you
know you only have to move the word processor window with the mouse to
go to the Internet. On the web, writers’ forums are full of discussions
about "distraction-less" devices. Some, including your servitor, are
going back to old typewriters, a paradigm described as a true resistance
by Richard Polt in the excellent book "The Typewriter Revolution".
One may even wonder if the epidemic of "electro-sensitivity", feeling
bad or being sick when exposed to wifi or similar wireless emissions,
may simply be a psychological reaction to the overstimulation. It has
been observed that the symptoms are real (people are really feeling bad
and are not simulating) but that, in double-blind controlled
environment, the symptoms are linked to the belief of wireless emissions
(if you simulate a blinking wireless router without emitting anything,
people feel bad. If you have wireless emission but tell people it’s
disabled, they will feel better).
In his landmark book "Digital Minimalism", Cal Newport offers a
framework to rethink the way we use digital technologies. The central
idea is to balance costs and benefits consciously, highlighting most
hidden costs. Facebook might be free in the sense you don’t have to pay
for it. But being exposed to advertising, being exposed to angry
political rants, feeling compelled to answer, being exposed to picture
of people you once knew and who seems to have an extraordinary (even if
virtual) life is a very high cost.
Simply do the math. If you have 180 friends on Facebook, which seems to
be a low amount those days, if your friends take, on average, 10 days of
vacation per year, you will have, on average, five friends on vacation
every day. Add to this statistic that some people like to re-post
pictures of old vacations and it means that you will be bombarded daily
by pictures of sunny beaches and beautiful landscapes while you are
waiting under neon light for your next boring meeting in a gray office.
By design, Facebook makes you feel miserable.
That’s not to say that Facebook cannot be useful and have benefits. As
Cal Newport highlight, you need to adapt your use to maximise the
benefits while trying to avoid costs as much as possible. You have to
think consciously about what you really want to achieve.
This idea of digital minimalism prompted a revival of the so-called
"dumb phones", phones which are not smart and which are able to make
phone call and send/receive SMS. Some brands are even starting to
innovate in that particular market like Mudita and Lightphone.
Ironically, they are advertising mindfulness and being focused. They are
trying to catch your attention to sell you back… your own attention.
Focus Against Consumerism
=========================
One of the consumerist credo is that the market will fix everything. If
there’s a problem, someone will quickly sell a solution. As pointed by
Evgeny Morozov in "To Save Everything, Click Here", this is not only
wrong thinking. This is actually harmful.
With public money, we are actually actively funding companies and
startups thinking they will both create jobs and sell solutions to every
problem. It is implied that every solution should be a technological
one, should be sellable and should be intuitive. That’s it: you should
not think too much about a problem but instead build blindly whatever
solution comes to mind using the currently trending technological stack.
French Author Antoine Gouritin wrote a funny and interesting book about
that whole philosophy he called "Le Startupisme".
The root cause is there: we don’t have any mental framework left other
than spying on people and steal their attention. Business schools are
teaching how to do catchy PowerPoints while stealing attention from
people. Every business is at war with the other to catch your attention
and your brain cycles. Even academy is now fighting to get grants based
on catchy PowerPoints and raw number of publications. This was the raw
observation of David Graeber: even academics have stopped thinking to
play the "catch your attention game".
There’s no silver bullet. There will not be any technological solution.
If we want to claim back our focus and our brain cycles, we will need to
walkaway and normalise disconnected times. To recognise and share the
work of those who are not seeking attention at all cost, who don’t have
catchy slogans nor spectacular conclusions. We need to start to
appreciate harder works which don’t offer us immediate short-term
profit.
Our mind, not the technology, is the bottleneck. We need to care about
our minds. To dedicate time to think slowly and deeply.
We need to bring back Sapiens in Home Sapiens Sapiens.
Picture by Trougnouf
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:View_through_a_broken_window_from_a…
ANNOUNCING OFFPUNK 2.0
by Ploum on 2023-11-25
https://ploum.net/2023-11-25-offpunk2.html
I’m happy to announce the release, last week, of Offpunk 2.0.
Offpunk is an offline-first command-line browser/RSS reader. You control
it by typing command and it maintains a cache of all the networked
resources to allow you to access them offline indefinitely.
If a non-cached resource is tentatively accessed, the URL is marked as
to be fetched later. Running periodically "offpunk --sync" will fetch
those resources and add them to your "tour" to remind you that you
wanted to access it.
Offpunk official website
https://sr.ht/~lioploum/offpunk/
Offpunk 2.0 changelog
https://git.sr.ht/~lioploum/offpunk/refs/v2.0
List of available offpunk packages
https://repology.org/project/offpunk/versions
Screenshot
==========
Mandatory screenshot showing Offpunk browsing Offpunk’s website. There’s
a screenshot of Offpunk in the screenshot.
https://ploum.net/files/offpunk2.png
Switching the license to AGPLv3
===============================
Offpunk originally started as a branch then a friendly fork of AV-98. It
was called AV-98-offline and, as such, shared the same BSD license.
AV-98, the first Gemini browser
https://tildegit.org/solderpunk/AV-98
During multiple discussions, Solderpunk and I came to the conclusion
that AV-98-offline was becoming too different from the initial goal of
AV-98. It was thus renamed Offpunk. At the same time, I grew
increasingly convinced that we needed more copyleft software and that
the AGPL license was better suited to protect the commons.
"We need more of Richard Stallman, not less", my take on why copyleft is
important
https://ploum.net/2023-06-19-more-rms.html
As a symbolic move, I’ve thus decided to switch Offpunk license from BSD
to AGPLv3 but needed an opportunity to do so. The 2.0 release is such an
opportunity.
Multiple independent tools
==========================
Like AV-98, Offpunk was one single big python file. I liked the
simplicity of it. But it really became a mess and I wanted to offer
Offpunk’s features as separate command-line tool. With Offpunk 2.0, you
will thus have three new command-line tools:
- netcache : when given a URL, will download and cache this URL or only
access the cache if the "--offline" option is provided.
- ansicat : will render an HTML, an RSS, a Gemtext or even a picture in
your terminal, with various options.
- opnk : universal opener. Will try to render any file or any URL in
your terminal. If it fails, it will fallback to xdg-open.
Those three commands should come with a man page and a "--help" but they
are still quite new. To my own surprise, I found myself using "opnk" all
the time. I don’t think anymore about how to handle a file, I simply
give it to opnk.
Packaging those tools was a lot harder than expected and I want to thank
all the contributors to this work, including Austreelis, David Zaslavsky
and Jean Abou Samra.
Themes
======
The goal of Offpunk, through Ansicat, is to render web, RSS, gemini and
gopher pages as coloured ANSI text in your terminal. Until now, those
colours were hardcoded. With 2.0, they can be customised. See "help
theme".
Screenshot of Offpunk customised with the worst possible colours I could
find.
https://ploum.net/files/offpunk2_theme.png
In offpunk, customisation can be made permanent by adding all the
commands you want to run at startup in your .config/offpunk/offpunkrc
file. Mine contains one single line: "offline", ensuring I use Offpunk
only in offline mode.
Getting started
===============
Using Offpunk daily as your main browsing/rss driver takes some
learning. You need to get used to the Offpunk philosophy: adding
elements to tour instead of clicking them, creating lists to read later,
doing a daily synchronisation. It is not trivial.
The "help" command will probably be your best allies. The community also
provide support on a user dedicated mailing-list.
Offpunk-users mailing list
https://lists.sr.ht/~lioploum/offpunk-users
If Offpunk becomes useful to you, the community is open. Contributions,
documentation, blog post about how you use Offpunk, help to new users
and packaging are warmly welcome. Sometimes, simple feedback is all it
takes to make a developer happy. So don’t hesitate to contribute in one
of our lists.
Offpunk-devel mailing list
https://lists.sr.ht/~lioploum/offpunk-devel
Offpunk-packagers mailing list
https://lists.sr.ht/~lioploum/offpunk-packagers
I’ve also started an experimental Matrix room on #offpunk:matrix.org. I
have the belief that mailing-list is better suited for discussions but
I’m giving this the benefit of doubt and willing to explore whether or
not direct real-time discussion could help new users.
Join the #offpunk:matrix.org room
https://matrix.to/#/#offpunk:matrix.org
THE GIFT OF TIME
by Ploum on 2023-11-10
https://ploum.net/2023-11-10-the-gift-of-time.html
Maintaining a free software project is spending years of your life to
solve a problem that would have taken several hours or even days without
the software.
Which is, joke aside, an incredible contribution to the common good.
The time saved is multiplied by the number of users and quickly
compound. They are saving time without the need to exchange their own
time.
Free software offers free time, free life extension to many human living
now and maybe in the future.
Instead of contributing to the economy, free software developers
contribute to humanity. To the global progress.
Free software is about making our short lifetimes a common good instead
of an economical product.
THE FUTURE OF OFFPUNK: UNIX COMMAND-LINE HEAVEN AND PACKAGING HELL
by Ploum on 2023-10-01
https://ploum.net/2023-10-01-future-of-offpunk-packaging-hell.html
> A story about how the UNIX philosophy made me develop tools I’m
actually proud of and why packaging is holding me back.
Two years ago, I decided that I wanted to be able to browse Gemini while
offline. I started to add a permanent cache to Solderpunk’s AV-98, the
simplest and first Gemini browser ever. It went surprisingly well. Then,
as the excellent forlater.email service went down for a week, I thought
that I would add a quick and hackish HTTP support to it. Just a
temporary experiment.
The same week, I serendipitously stumbled upon chafa, an image rendering
tool which was on my computer because of neofetch. I thought it would be
funny to have pictures rendered in webpages in my terminal. Just an
experiment to take some funny screenshots, nothing more.
But something really surprising happened: it was working. It was really
useful. I was really using it and, after adding support for RSS, I
realised that this experiment was actually working better for me than
forlater.email and newsboat. Offpunk was born without really thinking
about it and became a real project with its own philosophy.
Offpunk, a command line to browse Web, Gemini and Gopher while offline
https://sr.ht/~lioploum/offpunk/
Born on Gemini, I wanted Offpunk to keep its minimalistic roots: keeping
dependencies under control (making them optional and implementing the
underlying feature myself as soon as it makes sense), keeping it simple
(one single runnable python script), caring as much as possible about
older versions of python, listening to people using it on very minimal
systems. I also consciously choose to use only solutions that have been
time-trial-tested. I’ve spent too many years of my life falling for the
"new-trendy-technology" and learned from those mistakes. The one-file
aspect assured that it was really easy to use and to hack on it: open
the file, modify something, run it.
I’m not a good developer. Anything more complex than that is too much
for my taste. Unless forced, I’ve never used an IDE, never understood
complex toolchains nor packaging. I modify files with (neo)vim (without
any plugin), compile from the command line and run the resulting binary
(not even needing the second step with python). Life is too short for
making it more complex than that. I like to play with the code, not to
learn tools that would do it for me.
But offpunk.py was becoming a bit fat. 4500 lines of organic python
which have grown over an AV-98 structured to be a test bed for an
experimental protocol. The number of people able to understand its code
entanglement was varying between 0 and 1, depending on the quality of my
morning Earl Grey.
I wanted to make life easier for contributors. I also realised that some
features I developed might be useful without offpunk. So I stepped into
a huge refactorisation and managed to split offpunk into several
components. My goal was to separate the code into multiple individual
components doing one thing and doing it well. And, to my own surprise, I
succeeded.
Netcache.py
===========
I called the first component "netcache". Think of netcache as a cached
version of wget. If possible, netcache will give you a cached version of
the URL you are asking. If no cache or too old and if allowed to go
online, netcache will download it.
It means that if you like Offpunk’s core concept but don’t like the
interface and want, for example, a GUI, you could write your own browser
that would, using netcache, share the cache with Offpunk.
Netcache is currently working just well enough for my needs but could be
a lot better. I should, for example, investigate replacing the network
code by libcurl and implementing support for multithreaded concurrent
downloads.
Ansicat.py
==========
Coloured output in your terminal is done through a standard called ANSI.
As I wrote the first HTML to ANSI renderer for offpunk, I started to
understand how awful the HTML standard was. Armed with that experience,
I started a second renderer and, to be honest, it is actually not that
bad. I’m even proud of it.
Ansicat is really useful when in a terminal because it will render HTML
and gemtext in a good, readable way. If the optional library python-
readability is present, ansicat will try to extract the main content
from a web page (and, yes, python-readability is one dependency I would
like to reimplement someday).
With netcache and ansicat, you can thus already do something like:
netcache https://ploum.net | ansicat --format=html
Yes, it works. And yes, as a UNIX junkie, I was completely excited the
first time it worked. Look mum, I’m Ken Thompson! Making ansicat a
separate tool made me think about adding support for other formats. Like
PDF or office documents. How cool would it be to have a singe cat
command for so many different formats?
Opnk.py
=======
While netcache and ansicat were clear components I wanted to split from
Offpunk’s core since the start of the refactoring, another tool appeared
spontaneously: opnk.
Opnk (Open-like-a-punk) is basically a wrapper that will run ansicat on
any file given. If given a URL, it will ask netcache for the file.
Result will be displayed in less (after passing through ansicat, of
course).
If ansicat cannot open the file, opnk fallbacks on xdg-open.
That looks like nothing but it proved to be massively useful in my
workflow. I already use opnk every day. Each time I want to open a file,
I don’t think about the command, I type "opnk". It even replaced cat for
many use cases. I’m even considering renaming it "opn" to save one
character. Using opnk also explains why I want to work on supporting
PDF/office documents with ansicat. That would be one less opportunity to
leave the terminal.
Offpunk.py
==========
Through this architecture, Offpunk became basically an interface above
opnk. And this proved to work well. Many longstanding bugs were fixed,
performance and usability were vastly improved.
Everything went so well that I dreamed releasing offpunk 2.0, netcache,
ansicat and opnk while running naked with talking animals in a flower
field under a rainbow. Was it really Earl Grey in the cup that day?
Packaging Offpunk.py
====================
Now for the bad news.
As expected, the refactoring forced me to break my "one-single-python-
file" rule.
I felt guilty for those people who told me about using offpunk on very
minimal systems, sometimes from a USB key. But I thought that this was
not a real problem. Instead of one python script, I had four of them
(and a fifth file containing some shared code). That should not be that
much of a problem, isn’t it?
Well, python packaging systems would like to disagree. Flowers fade, the
rainbow disappears behind black and heavy clouds while animals start to
look at me with a devilish look and surprisingly sharp teeth.
I’ve spent many hours, asked several people on the best way to package
multiple python files without making the whole thing a module. Without
success. Hopefully, the community is really helpful. David Zaslavsky
stepped on the mailing list to give lots of advice and, as I was
discouraged, Austreelis started to work really hard to make offpunk both
usable directly and packagable. I’m really grateful for their help and
their work. But, so far, without clear success. I feel sad about the
amount of energy required to address something as simple as "I’ve 5
python files which depend on each other and I want to be able to launch
them separately".
Austreelis’s branch where she works on making offpunk "packageable".
https://gitlab.com/austreelis/offpunk.git
The software is working really well. The refactoring allowed me to fix
longstanding bugs and to improve a lot of areas while adding new
features (colour themes anyone?) On my computer, I added four aliases in
my zsh config: offpunk, opnk, ansicat and netcache. Each alias runs the
corresponding python file. Nothing fancy and I want to keep it that way.
I know for a fact that several users are doing something similar: git
clone then run it from an arbitrary location.
Keeping things as simple as that is the main philosophical goal behind
offpunk. It’s an essential part of the project. If people want to use
pip or any other tool to mess up their computer configuration, that’s
their choice. But it should never be required.
Which means that I’m now in a very frustrating position: Offpunk 2.0 is
more than ready from a code point of view. But it cannot be shipped
because there’s currently no easy way to package it. The pyproject.toml
file had become an obstacle to the whole development process.
I’m contemplating putting everything back in one big file. Or removing
the pyprojects.toml file from the repository and releasing offpunk "as
it is".
Some will call me an old conservative fart for refusing to use one of
those gazillion shiny packaging system. Others will judge me as a pretty
poor programmer if I managed to do 20 years of Python without ever
understanding pip nor using an IDE.
They are probably right. What would you seriously expect from someone
doing a command-line tool to browse Gemini and Gopher?
But there’s maybe an easier solution than to change my mind and
offpunk’s core philosophy. A simple solution that I missed. If that’s
the case, don’t hesitate to drop a word on the devel mailing-list,
Austreelis and I will be happy to hear about your opinion and your
experience.
offpunk-devel mailing list
https://lists.sr.ht/~lioploum/offpunk-devel
While you are at it, bug reports and feedback are also welcome. I’ve
this odd custom of finding embarrassing bugs only hours after a release.
I really hope to do better with offpunk 2.0.
And after we’ve solved that little packaging anecdote together, I will
happily return to my bare neovim to code all the ideas I want to
implement for 2.1, 2.2 and many more releases to come.
SPLITTING THE WEB
by Ploum on 2023-08-01
https://ploum.net/2023-08-01-splitting-the-web.html
There’s an increasing chasm dividing the modern web. On one side, the
commercial, monopolies-riddled, media-adored web. A web which has only
one objective: making us click. It measures clicks optimise clicks,
generates clicks. It gathers as much information as it could about us
and spams every second of our life with ads, beep, notifications,
vibrations, blinking LEDs, background music and fluorescent titles.
A web which boils down to Idiocracy in a Blade Runner landscape, a
complete cyberpunk dystopia.
Then there’s the tech-savvy web. People who install adblockers or
alternative browsers. People who try alternative networks such as
Mastodon or, God forbid, Gemini. People who poke fun at the modern web
by building true HTML and JavaScript-less pages.
Between those two extremes, the gap is widening. You have to choose your
camp. When browsing on the "normal web", it is increasingly required to
disable at least part of your antifeatures-blockers to access content.
Most of the time, I don’t bother anymore. The link I clicked doesn’t
open or is wrangled? Yep, I’m probably blocking some important third-
party JavaScript. No, I don’t care. I’ve too much to read on a day
anyway. More time for something else. I’m currently using kagi.com as my
main search engine on the web. And kagi.com comes with a nice feature, a
"non-commercial lens" (which is somewhat ironic given the fact that Kagi
is, itself, a commercial search engine). It means it will try to
deprioritize highly commercial contents. I can also deprioritize
manually some domains. Like facebook.com or linkedin.com. If your post
there, I’m less likely to read you. I’ve not even talked about the few
times I use marginalia.nu.
Something strange is happening: it’s not only a part of the web which is
disappearing for me. As I’m blocking completely google analytics, every
Facebook domain and any analytics I can, I’m also disappearing for them.
I don’t see them and they don’t see me!
Think about it! That whole "MBA, designers and marketers web" is now
optimised thanks to analytics describing people who don’t block
analytics (and bots pretending to be those people). Each day, I feel
more disconnected from that part of the web.
When really needed, dealing with those websites is so nerve breaking
that I often resort to… a phone call or a simple email. I signed my
mobile phone contract by exchanging emails with a real person because
the signup was not working. I phone to book hotels when it is not
straightforward to do it in the web interface or if creating an account
is required. I hate talking on the phone but it saves me a lot of time
and stress. I also walk or cycle to stores instead of ordering online.
Which allows me to get advice and to exchange defective items without
dealing with the post office.
Despite breaking up with what seems to be "The Web", I’ve never received
so many emails commenting my blog posts. I rarely had as many
interesting online conversations as I have on Mastodon. I’ve tenth of
really insightful contents to read every day in my RSS feeds, on Gemini,
on Hacker News, on Mastodon. And, incredibly, a lot of them are on very
minimalists and usable blogs. The funny thing is that when non-tech
users see my blog or those I’m reading, they spontaneously tell me how
beautiful and usable they are. It’s a bit like all those layers of
JavaScript and flashy css have been used against usability, against
them. Against us. It’s a bit like real users never cared about "cool
designs" and only wanted something simple.
It feels like everyone is now choosing its side. You can’t stay in the
middle anymore. You are either dedicating all your CPU cycles to run
JavaScript tracking you or walking away from the big monopolies. You are
either being paid to build huge advertising billboards on top of yet
another framework or you are handcrafting HTML.
Maybe the web is not dying. Maybe the web is only splitting itself in
two.
You know that famous "dark web" that journalists craves to write about?
(at my request, one journalist once told me what "dark web" meant to him
and it was "websites not easily accessible through a Google search".)
Well, sometimes I feel like I’m part of that "dark web". Not to buy
drugs or hire hitmen. No! It’s only to have a place where I can have
discussions without being spied and interrupted by ads.
But, increasingly, I feel less and less like an outsider.
It’s not me. It’s people living for and by advertising who are the
outsiders. They are the one destroying everything they touch, including
the planet. They are the sick psychos and I don’t want them in my life
anymore. Are we splitting from those click-conversion-funnel-obsessed
weirdos? Good riddance! Have fun with them.
But if you want to jump ship, now is the time to get back to the simple
web. Welcome back aboard!
STOP TRYING TO MAKE SOCIAL NETWORKS SUCCEED
by Ploum on 2023-07-06
https://ploum.net/2023-07-06-stop-trying-to-make-social-networks-succeed.ht…
Lot is happening in the social network landscape with the demises of
Twitter and Reddit, the apparition of Bluesky and Threads, the growing
popularity of Mastodon. Many pundits are trying to guess which one will
be successful and trying to explain why others will fail. Which
completely misses the point.
Particular social networks will never "succeed". Nobody even agree on
the definition of "success".
The problem is that we all see our little bubble and generalise what we
observe as universal. We have a hard time understanding Mastodon ?
Mastodon will never succeed, it will be for a niche. A few of our
favourite web stars goes to Bluesky ? Bluesky is the future, everybody
will be there.
That’s not how it works. That’s not how it ever worked.
Like every human endeavour, every social network is there for a limited
duration and will be useful to a limited niche of people. That niche may
grow to the point of being huge, like Facebook and WhatsApp. But, to
this day, there are more people in the world without an account on
Facebook than people with one. Every single social network is only
representative of a minority. And the opposite would be terrifying when
you think about it (which is exactly what Meta is trying to build).
Social networks are fluid. They come, they go. For commercial social
networks, the success is defined by: "do they earn enough money to make
investors happy ?" There’s no metric of success for non-commercial ones.
They simply exist as long as at least two users are using them to
communicate. Which is why criticisms like "Mastodon could never raise
enough money" or "the Fediverse will never succeed" totally miss the
point.
If you live in the same occidental bubble as me, you might have never
heard of WeChat, QQ or VK. Those are immensely popular social networks.
In China and Russia. WeChat alone is more or less the size of Instagram
in terms of active users. The war in Ukraine also demonstrated that the
most popular social network in that part of the world is Telegram. Which
is twice as big as Twitter but, for whatever reason, is barely mentioned
in my own circles. The lesson here is simple: you are living in a small
niche. We all do. Your experience is not representative of anything but
your own. And it’s fine.
There will never be one social network to rule them all. There should
never be one social network to rule them all. In fact, tech-savvy people
should fight to ensure that no social network ever "succeed".
Human lives in communities. We join them, we sometimes leave them.
Social networks should only be an underlying infrastructure to support
our communities. Social networks are not our communities. Social network
dies. Communities migrate and flock to different destinations. Nothing
ever replaced Google+, which was really popular in my own tech circle.
Nothing will replace Twitter or Reddit. Some communities will find a new
home on Mastodon or on Lemmy. Some will go elsewhere. That’s not a
problem as long as you can have multiple accounts in different places.
Something I’m sure you do. Communities can be split. Communities can be
merged. People can be part of several communities and several platforms.
Silicon Valley venture capitalists are trying to convince us that, one
day, a social network will succeed, will become universal. That it
should grow. That social networks are our communities. That your
community should grow to succeed.
This is a lie, a delusion. Our communities are worth a lot more than the
underlying tool used at some point in time. By accepting the confusion,
we are destroying our communities. We are selling them, we are
transforming them into a simple commercial asset for the makers of the
tool we are using, the tool which exploits us.
Stop trying to make social networks succeed, stop dreaming of a
universal network. Instead, invest in your own communities. Help them
make long-term, custom and sustainable solutions. Try to achieve small
and local successes instead of pursuing an imaginary universal one. It
will make you happier.
It will make all of us happier.
HOW TO KILL A DECENTRALISED NETWORK (SUCH AS THE FEDIVERSE)
by Ploum on 2023-06-23
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Year is 2023. The whole Internet is under the control of the GAFAM
empire. All? No. Because a few small villages are resisting the
oppression. And some of those villages started to agregate, forming the
"Fediverse".
With debates around Twitter and Reddit, the Fediverse started to gain
fame and attention. People started to use it for real. The empire
started to notice.
Capitalists Against Competition
===============================
As Peter Thiel, one of Facebook’s prominent investor, put it:
"Competition is for losers." Yep, those pseudo "market is always right"
people don’t want a market when they are in it. They want a monopoly.
Since its inception, Facebook have been very careful to kill every
competition. The easiest way of doing it being by buying companies that
could, one day, become competitors. Instagram, WhatsApp to name a few,
were bought only because their product attracted users and could cast a
shadow on Facebook.
But the Fediverse cannot be bought. The Fediverse is an informal group
of servers discussing through a protocol (ActivityPub). Those servers
may even run different software (Mastodon is the most famous but you
could also have Pleroma, Pixelfed, Peertube, WriteFreely, Lemmy and many
others).
You cannot buy a decentralised network!
But there’s another way: make it irrelevant. That’s exactly what Google
did with XMPP.
How Google joined the XMPP federation
=====================================
At the end of the 20th century, instant messengers (IM) were all the
rage. One of the first very successful ones was ICQ, quickly followed by
MSN messenger. MSN Messenger was the Tiktok of the time: a world where
teenagers could spend hours and days without adults.
As MSN was part of Microsoft, Google wanted to compete and offered
Google Talk in 2005, including it in the Gmail interface. Remember that,
at the time, there was no smartphone and very little web app.
Applications had to be installed on the computer and Gmail web interface
was groundbreaking. MSN was even at some point bundled with Microsoft
Windows and it was really hard to remove it. Building Google chat with
the Gmail web interface was a way to be even closer to the customers
than a built-in software in the operating system.
While Google and Microsoft were fighting for hegemony, free software
geeks were trying to build decentralised instant messaging. Like email,
XMPP was a federated protocol: multiple servers could talk together
through a protocol and each user would connect to one particular server
through a client. That user could then communicate with any user on any
server using any client. Which is still how ActivityPub and thus the
Fediverse work.
In 2006, Google talk became XMPP compatible. Google was seriously
considering XMPP. In 2008, while I was at work, my phone rang. On the
line, someone told me: "Hi, it’s Google and we want to hire you." I made
several calls and it turned out that they found me through the XMPP-dev
list and were looking for XMPP servers sysadmins.
So Google was really embracing the federation. How cool was that? It
meant that, suddenly, every single Gmail user became an XMPP user. This
could only be good for XMPP, right? I was ecstatic.
How Google killed XMPP
======================
Of course, reality was a bit less shiny. First of all, despites
collaborating to develop the XMPP standard, Google was doing its own
closed implementation that nobody could review. It turns out they were
not always respecting the protocol they were developing. They were not
implementing everything. This forced XMPP development to be slowed down,
to adapt. Nice new features were not implemented or not used in XMPP
clients because they were not compatible with Google Talk (avatars took
an awful long time to come to XMPP). Federation was sometimes broken:
for hours or days, there would not be communications possible between
Google and regular XMPP servers. The XMPP community became watchers and
debuggers of Google’s servers, posting irregularities and downtime (I
did it several times, which is probably what prompted the job offer).
And because there were far more Google talk users than "true XMPP"
users, there was little room for "not caring about Google talk users".
Newcomers discovering XMPP and not being Google talk users themselves
had very frustrating experience because most of their contact were
Google Talk users. They thought they could communicate easily with them
but it was basically a degraded version of what they had while using
Google talk itself. A typical XMPP roster was mainly composed of Google
Talk users with a few geeks.
In 2013, Google realised that most XMPP interactions were between Google
Talk users anyway. They didn’t care about respecting a protocol they
were not 100% in control. So they pulled the plug and announced they
would not be federated anymore. And started a long quest to create a
messenger, starting with Hangout (which was followed by Allo, Duo. I
lost count after that).
As expected, no Google user bated an eye. In fact, none of them
realised. At worst, some of their contacts became offline. That was all.
But for the XMPP federation, it was like the majority of users suddenly
disappeared. Even XMPP die hard fanatics, like your servitor, had to
create Google accounts to keep contact with friends. Remember: for them,
we were simply offline. It was our fault.
While XMPP still exist and is a very active community, it never
recovered from this blow. Too high expectation with Google adoption led
to a huge disappointment and a silent fall into oblivion. XMPP became
niche. So niche that when group chats became all the rage (Slack,
Discord), the free software community reinvented it (Matrix) to compete
while group chats were already possible with XMPP. (Disclaimer: I’ve
never studied the Matrix protocol so I have no idea how it technically
compares with XMPP. I simply believe that it solves the same problem and
compete in the same space as XMPP).
Would XMPP be different today if Google never joined it or was never
considered as part of it? Nobody could say. But I’m convinced that it
would have grown slower and, maybe, healthier. That it would be bigger
and more important than it is today. That it would be the default
decentralised communication platform. One thing is sure: if Google had
not joined, XMPP would not be worse than it is today.
It was not the first: the Microsoft Playbook
============================================
What Google did to XMPP was not new. In fact, in 1998, Microsoft
engineer Vinod Vallopllil explicitly wrote a text titled "Blunting OSS
attacks" where he suggested to "de-commoditize protocols & applications
[…]. By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can
deny OSS project’s entry into the market."
Microsoft put that theory in practice with the release of Windows 2000
which offered support for the Kerberos security protocol. But that
protocol was extended. The specifications of those extensions could be
freely downloaded but required to accept a license which forbid you to
implement those extensions. As soon as you clicked "OK", you could not
work on any open source version of Kerberos. The goal was explicitly to
kill any competing networking project such as Samba.
This anecdote was told Glyn Moody in his book "Rebel Code" and
demonstrates that killing open source and decentralised projects are
really conscious objectives. It never happens randomly and is never
caused by bad luck.
Microsoft used a similar tactic to ensure dominance in the office market
with Microsoft Office using proprietary formats (a file format could be
seen as a protocol to exchange data). When alternatives (OpenOffice then
LibreOffice) became good enough at opening doc/xls/ppt formats,
Microsoft released a new format that they called "open and
standardised". The format was, on purpose, very complicated (20.000
pages of specifications!) and, most importantly, wrong. Yes, some bugs
were introduced in the specification meaning that a software
implementing the full OOXML format would behave differently than
Microsoft Office.
Those bugs, together with political lobbying, were one of the reasons
that pushed the city of Munich to revert its Linux migration. So yes,
the strategy works well. Today, docx, xlsx and pptx are still the norms
because of that. Source: I was there, indirectly paid by the city of
Munich to make LibreOffice OOXML’s rendering closer to Microsoft’s
instead of following the specifications.
Meta and the Fediverse
======================
People who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it. Which is exactly
what is happening with Meta and the Fediverse.
There are rumours that Meta would become "Fediverse compatible". You
could follow people on Instagram from your Mastodon account.
I don’t know if those rumours have a grain of truth, if it is even
possible for Meta to consider it. But there’s one thing my own
experience with XMPP and OOXML taught me: if Meta joins the Fediverse,
Meta will be the only one winning. In fact, reactions show that they are
already winning: the Fediverse is split between blocking Meta or not. If
that happens, this would mean a fragmented, frustrating two-tier
fediverse with little appeal for newcomers.
I know we all dream of having all our friends and family on the
Fediverse so we can avoid proprietary networks completely. But the
Fediverse is not looking for market dominance or profit. The Fediverse
is not looking for growth. It is offering a place for freedom. People
joining the Fediverse are those looking for freedom. If people are not
ready or are not looking for freedom, that’s fine. They have the right
to stay on proprietary platforms. We should not force them into the
Fediverse. We should not try to include as many people as we can at all
cost. We should be honest and ensure people join the Fediverse because
they share some of the values behind it.
By competing against Meta in the brainless growth-at-all-cost ideology,
we are certain to lose. They are the master of that game. They are
trying to bring everyone in their field, to make people compete against
them using the weapons they are selling.
Fediverse can only win by keeping its ground, by speaking about freedom,
morals, ethics, values. By starting open, non-commercial and non-spied
discussions. By acknowledging that the goal is not to win. Not to
embrace. The goal is to stay a tool. A tool dedicated to offer a place
of freedom for connected human beings. Something that no commercial
entity will ever offer.
Picture by David Revoy
https://framapiaf.org/@davidrevoy/110583258129951932
WE NEED MORE OF RICHARD STALLMAN, NOT LESS
by Ploum on 2023-06-19
https://ploum.net/2023-06-19-more-rms.html
The Free Software movement has been mostly killed by the corporate Open
Source. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) and its founder, Richard
Stallman (RMS), have been decried for the last twenty years, including
by my 25-year-old self, as being outdated and inadequate.
Drew DeValut’s FSF is dying
https://drewdevault.com/2023/04/11/2023-04-11-The-FSF-is-dying.html
Free Software is not enough by j3s
https://j3s.sh/thought/drones-run-linux-free-software-isnt-enough.html
Viznut asking if permacomputing should be the successor of Free Software
https://venera.social/display/85a863ed-1064-8cb8-f689-e51559784396
Myself arguing for RMS replacement in 2006
https://ploum.net/97-it-s-a-long-way-to-the-top/index.html
I’ve spent the last 6 years teaching Free Software and Open Source at
École Polytechnique de Louvain, being forced to investigate the subject
and the history more than I anticipated in order to answer students’
questions. I’ve read many historical books on the subject, including
RMS’s biography and many older writings.
And something struck me.
RMS was right since the very beginning. Every warning, every prophecy
realised. And, worst of all, he had the solution since the start. The
problem is not RMS or FSF. The problem is us. The problem is that we
didn’t listen.
The solution has always been there: copyleft
============================================
In the early eighties, RMS realised that software was transformed from
"a way to use a machine" to a product or a commodity. He foresaw that
this would put an end to collective intelligence and to knowledge
sharing. He also foresaw that if we were not the master of our software,
we would quickly become the slave of the machines controlled by soulless
corporations. He told us that story again and again.
Forty years later, we must admit he was prescient. Every word he said
still rings true. Very few celebrated forward thinkers were as right as
RMS. Yet, we don’t like his message. We don’t like how he tells it. We
don’t like him. As politicians understood quickly, we care more about
appearance and feel-good communication than about the truth or
addressing the root cause.
RMS theorised the need for the "four freedoms of software".
- The right to use the software at your discretion
- The right to study the software
- The right to modify the software
- The right to share the software, including the modified version
How to guarantee those freedoms ? RMS invented copyleft. A solution he
implemented in the GPL license. The idea of copyleft is that you cannot
restrain the rights of the users. Copyleft is the equivalent of the
famous « Il est interdit d’interdire » (it is forbidden to forbid).
In insight, the solution was and still is right.
Copyleft is a very deep concept. It is about creating and maintaining
commons. Commons resources that everybody could access freely, resources
that would be maintained by the community at large. Commons are
frightening to capitalist businesses as, by essence, capitalist
businesses try to privatise everything, to transform everything into a
commodity. Commons are a non-commodity, a non-product.
Capitalist businesses were, obviously, against copyleft. And still are.
Steve Ballmer famously called the GPL a "cancer". RMS was and still is
pictured as a dangerous maniac, a fanatic propagating the cancer.
Bruce Perens and Eric Raymond tried to find a middle ground and launched
the "Open Source" movement. Retrospectively, Open Source was a hack. It
was originally seen as a simple rebranding of "Free Software", arguing
that "free" could be understood as "without price or value" in English.
RMS quickly pointed, rightly, that the lack of "freedom" means that
people will forget about the concept. Again, he was right. But everybody
considered that "Free Software" and "Open Source" were the same because
they both focused on the four freedoms. That RMS was nitpicking.
RMS biggest mistake
===================
There was one weakness in RMS theory: copyleft was not part of the four
freedoms he theorised. Business-compatible licenses like BSD/MIT or even
public domain are "Free Software" because they respect the four
freedoms.
But they can be privatised.
And that’s the whole point. For the last 30 years, businesses and
proponents of Open Source, including Linus Torvalds, have been decrying
the GPL because of the essential right of "doing business" aka
"privatising the common".
They succeeded so much that the essential mission of the FSF to
guarantee the common was seen as "useless" or, worse, "reactionary".
What was the work of the FSF? The most important thing is that they
proof-bombed the GPL against weaknesses found later. They literally
patched vulnerabilities. First the GPLv3, to fight "Tivoisation" and
then AGPL, to counteract proprietary online services running on free
software but taking away freedom of users.
But all this work was ridiculed. Microsoft, through Github, Google and
Apple pushed for MIT/BSD licensed software as the open source standard.
This allowed them to use open source components within their proprietary
closed products. They managed to make thousands of free software
developers work freely for them. And they even received praise because,
sometimes, they would hire one of those developers (like it was a
"favour" to the community while it is simply business-wise to hire smart
people working on critical components of your infrastructure instead of
letting them work for free). The whole Google Summer of Code, for which
I was a mentor multiple years, is just a cheap way to get unpaid
volunteers mentor their future free or cheap workforce.
Our freedoms were taken away by proprietary software which is mostly
coded by ourselves. For free. We spent our free time developing,
debugging, testing software before handing them to corporations that we
rever, hoping to maybe get a job offer or a small sponsorship from them.
Without Non-copyleft Open Source, there would be no proprietary MacOS,
OSX nor Android. There would be no Facebook, no Amazon. We created all
the components of Frankenstein’s creature and handed them to the evil
professor.
More commons
============
The sad state of computing today makes computer people angry. We see
that young student are taught "computer" with Word and PowerPoint, that
young hackers are mostly happy with rooting Android phones or blindly
using the API of a trendy JS framework. That Linux distributions are
only used by computer science students in virtualised containers. We
live in the dystopia future RMS warned us about.
Which, paradoxically, means that RMS failed. He was a Cassandra.
Intuitively, we think we should change him, we should replace the FSF,
we should have new paradigms which are taking into account ecology and
other ethical stances.
We don’t realise that the solution is there, in front of us for 40
years: copyleft.
Copyleft as in "Forbidding privatising the commons".
We need to rebuild the commons. When industries are polluting the
atmosphere or the oceans, they are, in fact, privatising the commons
("considering a common good as their private trash"). When an industry
receives millions in public subsidies then make a patent, that industry
is privatising the common. When Google is putting the Linux kernel in a
phone that cannot be modified easily, Google is privatising the common.
Why do we need expensive electric cars? Because the automotive industry
has been on a century-long mission to kill public transport or the sole
idea of going on foot, to destroy the commons.
We need to defend our commons. Like RMS did 40 years ago. We don’t want
to get rid of RMS, we need more of his core philosophy. We were
brainwashed into thinking that he was an extremist just like we are
brainwashed to think that taking care of the poor is socialist
extremism. In lots of occidental countries, political positions seen as
"centre" twenty years ago are now seen as "extreme left" because the
left of twenty years ago was called extremist. RMS suffered the same
fate and we should not fall for it.
Fighting back
=============
What could I do? Well, the first little step I can do myself is to
release every future software I develop under the AGPL license. To put
my blog under a CC By-SA license. I encourage you to copyleft all the
things!
We need a fifth rule. An obligation to maintain the common to prevent
the software of being privatised. This is the fifth line that RMS
grasped intuitively but, unfortunately for us, he forgot to put in his
four freedoms theory. The world would probably be a very different place
if he had written the five rules of software forty years ago.
But if the best time to do it was forty years ago, the second-best
moment is right now. So here are
The four freedoms and one obligation of free software
=====================================================
- The right to use the software at your own discretion
- The right to study the software
- The right to modify the software
- The right to redistribute the software, including with modifications
- The obligation to keep those four rights, effectively keeping the
software in the commons.
We need to realise that any software without that last obligation will,
sooner or later, become an oppression tool against ourselves. And that
maintaining the commons is not only about software. It’s about
everything we are as a society and everything we are losing against
individual greed. Ultimately, our planet is our only common resource. We
should defend it from becoming a commodity.
Copyleft was considered a cancer. But a cancer to what? To the
capitalist consumerism killing the planet? Then I will proudly side with
on the cancer side.
Disclaimer: I’m aware that Richard Stallman had some questionable or
inadequate behaviours. I’m not defending those nor the man himself. I’m
not defending blindly following that particular human (nor any
particular human). I’m defending a philosophy, not the philosopher. I
pretend that his historical vision and his original ideas are still
adequate today. Maybe more than ever.
Picture of RMS by Frank Karlitschek
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Richard_Stallman_(124442297).jpeg