Post by @MaddieM4@raphus.social

2026-11-08 21:36 UTC

I think - hear me out - that it makes sense for a coalition to exist in favor of software freedom. There would be many groups with more specific values, who could find common ground on there, and be able to work towards common goals *without* leaving their values at the door. I think in such a coalition, it's likely that the current movement toward socially responsible software would be highly influential, and GNU would be there, but the weird kid in the corner. What we have right now is a situation where GNU is trying to declare itself the organizational figurehead of the free software coalition, recasting it in terms of community to impose an illusory amount of values cohesion (and importantly, move some values out of scope, like aversion to slavery), and maintain this "community's" legal dependency on GNU/FSF resources. And we've seen how well it goes with them "in charge." Gross. Not a fan of that. But at least we can learn some lessons from the grossness. 2/2

Replies (2)

@Lady@glitch.cat.family 2026-11-08 22:44

@MaddieM4@raphus.social the problem with a coalationist framing of open source is that a political coalition requires broad agreement on and submission to a political system or arena. for example, agreeing on United States constitutionalism as an avenue for securing gun rights. but the crisis (and success) of open source is in a large way derived FROM its assent to the political/legal framing of contemporary neoliberalism. we have built coalitions already, across many disparate groups, on the understanding that a freedom‐ and licence‐based definition of open source is a good and sufficient avenue for advocating our interests. the issue at hand is that open source has reached an inflection point where this is no longer the case; the political architecture of neoliberalism has failed us (as it was always going to do). so the question at hand now is not “how do we build coalitions”, but more “how do we build a new politic with·in which coalitions might form”. this is a much more radical project. and i think an emphasis on community is in fact important, in that all politics are originally and fundamentally community politics, and the idea of building a cross‐community coalition is unimaginable when there does not even exist a community politic with·in which that coalition might be framed and situated.

Open ##5509183
@MaddieM4@raphus.social 2026-11-08 21:48

Epilogue, I guess. I think this might be really useful to un-wedge a lot of current discourse, where: 1. It's very easy to get people to agree that FOSS has failed humanity, because it conceptualizes the Four Freedoms as apolitical and politics out of scope. 2. Getting people to agree what to do instead is a difficult organizational problem. What terms to use? What standards to hold? So, I say, we organically let people bind together into small groups of closely aligned values. You doing MOSS? Cool! You prefer to call what you're doing Convivial Software? Heeyyyy that's cool too. We can build coalitions on top of that substrate, owned by no specific group or person, based on things we can find common ground on, without making the old mistake of trying to make everyone conform to the same super-specific values.

Open ##5510121