Post #4480017

2026-08-07 05:06 UTC

This #FOSSY has further solidified my belief that we invest far too much time into writing software and licenses. We need to connect the four freedoms to material issues in people's lives. People hate tech right now. Absolutely despise it. AI data centers and Flock cameras are the biggest targets but there are so many. On top of it, the economic system makes production of creative works nearly impossible. Unless we view those types of fights as core FOSS community issues, we're going to be stuck where we are. The problem isn't (just) that you don't have the four freedoms, it's that the system guarantees oppression and misery. The lack of software freedom is a symptom of the problem, not THE problem. EDIT: also, how is age-gating not a red alarm fire in our community?!

Replies (1)

@pointlessone@status.pointless.one 2026-08-10 06:26

@wwahammy@social.treehouse.systems at this point I’m convinced that 4 freedoms directly contributed to the problem. FLOSS gives a great boost to all the extractive tendencies and while big tech becomes more and more evil FLOSS has no mechanism to withdraw from all the awful use of it. 4 freedoms are indiscriminate so whatever FLOSS produces it will inevitably be co-opted by the evil of the day. We have to stop giving our work to causes we do not agree with. This means some sort of discrimination. You oppose AI? You probably don’t want your work to be used for building more AI. You want to contribute to fixing climate crisis? You probably don’t want your work to be used by fossil fuel companies. Don’t like war? Probably don’t want your software in murder bots. And so on. FLOSS actively works against your moral imperative. FLOSS came at a time when software availability was becoming a problem. It won, it solved that issue. Now we have different problems that require different solutions.

Open ##4480016