I had a dream the other evening, in which I was at a large event full of
hackers—funny, that this is the extent of my dreams at the moment; as a
parent of three young kids, I don’t get out much—and, there, I was to
receive an award and give a speech. (I know, I am a ridiculous man,
even when sleeping.) The award was something about free software; it
had the trappings of victory, but the vibe among attendees was numbness
and bitter loss. Palantir had a booth; they use free software, and
isn’t that just great?
My talk was to be about Guile, I think: something technical, something
interesting, but, I suspected, something inadequate: in its place and
time it would be a delight to go deep on mechanism but the moment seemed
to call for something else.
These days are funny. We won, objectively, in the sense of the goals we
set in the beginning; most software is available to its users under a
free license: Firefox, Chromium, Android, Linux, all the programming
languages, you know the list. So why aren’t we happy?
When I reflect back on what inspired me about free software 25 years
ago, it was much more political than technical. The idea that we should
be able to modify our own means of production and share those
modifications was a part of a political project of mutual care: we
should be empowered to affect the systems that surround us, to the
extent that they affect us.
To give you an idea of the milieu, picture me in 1999. I left my home
to study abroad on another continent. When I would go to internet cafés
I would do my email and read slashdot and freshmeat as one did back
then, but also I would often read
Z magazine
,
Noam Chomsky and Michael Albert and Michael Parenti and Arundhati Roy
and Zapatistas and all. I remember reading El País the day after “we”
shut down the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle, seeing
front-page pictures of pink-haired kids being beat up by the cops and
wishing I were there with them. For me, free software fit with all of
this: the notion that a better world was possible, and we could build it
together.
I won’t lie and say that the ideals were everything. I think much of my
motivation to program is selfish: I like to learn, to find out, to do.
But back then I felt the social component more strongly. Among my
cohort, though, I think we now do free software because we did free
software; the motive sedimented into mechanism. These are the spoils of
victory: free is the default. But defaults lack a sense of urgency, of
the political.
Nowadays the commons that we built is the feedlot of large language
models, and increasingly also its waste pond. The software we make is
free, but the system in which it is made is not; Linux Magazine 1, Z
magazine 0.
All of this makes me think that free software as a cause has run its
course. We were the vanguard, and we won. Our dreams of 25 years ago
are today’s table stakes. Specifically for my copyleft comrades, it
seems that the role of copyright as a societal lever has much less purchase; taken to its conclusion, we might find ourselves siding with
Disney and OpenAI against Google.
If I had to choose an idea from the 90s to keep, I would take “another
world is possible” over the four freedoms. For me, software freedom is
a strategy within a broader humanist project of liberation. It was
clever, in that it could motivate people from a variety of backgrounds
in a way that was on the whole positive for the humanist project. It
inspired me as a meaningful way in which I could work towards a world of
people caring for each other. In that spirit, I would like to invite my
comrades to reflect on their own hierarchy of principles; too often I
see people arguing the fine points of “is this software free” according
to a specific definition without appreciating the ends to which the
software freedom definition is a means.
Anyway, it turns out that I did win something,
the Award for the
Advancement of Free
Software
,
for my work on Guile over the years. My work on Guile has waxed and waned,
and in these last few years of parenthood it has been rather the latter,
but I am proud of some of the technical hacks; and it has been with a
heart-warming, wondrous delight that I have been a spectator to the rise
of
Guix
, a complete operating system built on
Guile. Apart from its quite compelling technical contributions, I just
love that Guix is a community of people working together to build a
shared project. I am going to the
Guix
days
in a month or
so and in past years it has been such a pleasure to see so many people
there, working to make possible another world.
In my dream, instead of talking about Guile, I gave a rousing and
compelling impromptu invective against Palantir and their ilk. I
thought it quite articulate; I was asleep. In these waking hours, some
days later, I don’t know what I did say, but I think I know what I would
like to have said: that if we take the means of free software to be the
ends, then we will find ourselves arguing our enemies are our friends.
Saying that it’s OK if some software we build on is made by people who
facilitate ICE raids. People who build spy software for controlling
domestic populations. People who work for empire.
What I would like to say is that free software is a strategy. As a
community of people that share some kind of liberatory principles of
which free software has been a part, let use free software as best we
can, among many other strategies. If it fits, great. If you find
yourself on the same side of an argument as Palantir, it’s time to back
up and try something else.
Every time I get stuck, I’m forced to read more carefully. Every time I ask a question, I learn something I wouldn’t have learned alone. Every mistake shows me how the system actually works, not how I assumed it worked. The struggle is uncomfortable, yes, but it’s also doing real work on me.
