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... and this is the problem.

Any license that doesn't help feed the non-free SaaS ecosystem is a non-free license.




I agree. SaaS isn’t a loophole, it’s one of the legitimate things you can do with software freedom, in letter and in spirit.

Software is not services, and attempting to conflate them is, at the very least, logically flawed.


The structural economy we're creating is one where privacy, autonomy, and software freedom are only for nerds. Everyone else uses services and surrenders all privacy and usually control of their own data.

That's because making software usable is extremely difficult and expensive. If software must be free but services are paid, all the funding goes to make services usable and not software. This results in an ecosystem where only highly technical people can own their own compute.

Is that what we want?

You have to think in a whole-systems way not in terms of single isolated issues. We're making free bricks to build a prison and reasoning that this is fine because bricks should be free and people should be free to build prisons with them.

It might come down to the question of what open source is about. If it's about creating a software ecosystem for nerds to have freedom, I'd argue that it's been successful in that endeavor. If there is any goal of freedom for the rest of humanity, it has been a failure.

Are we a guild that cares only for ourselves and our profession?




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