this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2024
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Our civilization demands that I be profitable to a parasite who leeches a majority of my labour’s value in order to accumulate obscene levels of wealth.
Without exorbitant amounts of time spent maintaining that profitability, I will end up poor, homeless, and eventually dead from exposure. This leaves vanishingly little time to spend on open source work, regardless of how intellectually and ethically attractive it may be.
If you look at property rights, the contrast is even stronger. The employer owns 100% of the property rights to the produced outputs and owes 100% of the liabilities for the used-up inputs. Meanwhile, workers qua employee receive 0% of both. This is despite their joint de facto responsibility for producing those results violating the basic principle of justice.
We need to move towards a copyfarleft model that considers the rights of both software users and developers unlike copyleft
Kind of in the vein of what Redis attempted to with its relicense to SSPL
Far left as in explicit restrictions on capitalist firms using the software without paying for it while still allowing full software freedom for worker coops, which don't violate workers' rights.
Copyfarleft should set up a whole family of licenses of varying strengths and its own alternative ideology from the FSF. The first principle is an almost complete rejection of permissive open source licenses as enabling capitalist free riding @programming
I'm just picking on a point that's not relevant to your comment's core idea, I'm not saying we shouldn't share software or other goods and services with worker coops:
Under capitalism worker cooperatives will also violate the rights of its workers even if less than traditional companies, because that's what capitalism demands for their survival on the market.
I think it's kind of challenging to legally define what makes a party "worthy" of making use of the software or digital work. I think you would need to go on a case-by-case basis, but at that point it probably makes more sense to just make software source-available and actively encourage people to reach out to you to get permission to use the software and to modify and redistribute it.
I have a specific theory of rights in mind. This theory of rights proposes worker coops as the only rights respecting way of organizing labor relations based on the inalienability of responsibility. I'm not using rights in a general vague sense to refer to harm.
Worker coops view workers differently than capitalist firms. They see labor as a fixed factor e.g. worker coops cut wages not jobs during economic, downturns.
The theory of rights I have in mind can fit in a license @programming
I have a huge soft spot for SSPL. I believe the FSF is too ideological and the OSI has conflicts of interest and that's mainly why it wasn't accepted. It's unfortunate, because a new, stronger AGPL that closes more loop holes would've been amazing.
I wouldn't say FSF is too ideological. They just don't have a political strategy for how they will bring about the changes they desire. To really change things towards a new mode of production, you need a way for people in the new mode of production to earn a living. Also, their ideology is wrong in its lack of emphasis on software workers' rights and the relations of production
But open-source doesn't always mean working for free, nor does it mean people do it for purely ethical (or socialist?) reason.
There are lots of reason why open-source is attractive after discounting ethics and money. I imagine being credited for being a major contributor to a popular open-source project would mean better job opportunity in the competitive tech job market. The gig doesn't directly offer you money, but it does gravitate the right company that has the money to fund your work they find very valuable. In a sense, this isn't that far from how capitalism work -- credits are due to the people who brings most value to the society, whether the source of the software are open to all or not.
This is of course a very superficial statement to make, but I remember Eric Raymond wrote about this in more a detailed (and more convincing!) manner in The Cathedral and the Bazaar.
So... it pays in exposure?
big flashback to my freelance days.
fuck working for free in the hopes the project magically becomes super relevant overnight, and all the people who defend this.
if you want me to take on more responsability than i want to, you better be paying me.
Sponsorship brings goal conflicts, and locks both sponsor and sponsee into a death spiral of software like a dog with one true master and a master who can never get a new dog until this one is dead.
So what? The point of open source is that you get the source to do with what you want, not "give me shit for free".