Who is Free Software for?

For a while I have been arguing that maybe there are some issues with the whole “Open*” movements, their founding myths and ideologies (see for example my talk at Fluconf). This criticism comes from a place of love. All the writing on this blog is licensed CC-BY-SA to allow others to take the texts and do something with it: I release my work under those conditions because I believe that we need strong and rich commons to flourish as a society but also as communities, groups and individuals. I’ve also been running my own personal systems (servers, my own laptops and a few other systems) on Linux for more than 20 years now. I am deeply embedded in the space of open culture but also Free and Open Source Software.

This morning I made a bit of an off-hand remark that summarized a few thoughts going on in my head:

Post by @tante View on Mastodon

People within the Open* movements have done the impossible, have created whole encyclopedias, the most successful and most used kernel on the planet and a metric fuckton of custom, optimized operating systems, software libraries, and user facing programs. Have contributed to the commons to a degree that wouldn’t even have been credible within science fiction stories. Some of these systems – and I am not kidding here – should be considered the digital wonders of the world.

So why have we not “won”? Wikipedia might be considered to have won: By now it is the default digital source of information for large parts of the planet when trying to get to mere facts. But Wikipedia is an outlier in that regard.

Using Statcounter’s metrics Firefox – the Open Source browser that is not depending on what Google’s ad department wants to do – currently (March 2025) has a market share of 2.63%. And sure mobile platforms and Apple’s anti-competitive strategies when it comes to mobile have made it harder but even on desktops it’s just 6.3%. That’s absolutely not nothing, it’s millions of people. But not exactly something that shifts any sort of power and influence away from tech giants.

Again using Statcounter, Linux has a desktop market share of about 4%. Which is a lot given how hard the main competitors Microsoft and Apple are making the life of Linux developers and distribution builders. But still not even close to being an actually relevant player in the market for most purposes. Which everyone using Linux feels daily when asking for certain software vendors to release Linux versions of their stuff: “It’s not worth it.”

I got a great response to the Mastodon post I embedded above:

First: R.L. Dane is completely right in their description about how “Open Source” is kind of the corporate version of “Free Software”. “Open Source” tried to strip the little politics that “Free Software” as a concept carried to make the whole scene more digestable to corporate entities (in any meaning of the word).

Second: I believe that they also nailed who Free Software is for. Quote:

What we call #FOSS today was originally for hackers by hackers.

R.L. Dane

For hackers by hackers.

And I am afraid that we haven’t moved enough past that mindset.

That’s 100% not saying that nothing happened. A big deal has happened. Think of Outreachy that tries to get more people from diverse backgrounds internships to work on open source and build a career in software. Think of PyLadies who have put in so much work to give more women the opportunity and a safer path towards becoming active contributors into the Python ecosystem. And there are so many, many activities like that. So much work so many technical communities put into making the path towards becoming a member easier, more inclusive, fairer, etc. Those activities are fundamentally about fulfilling the Open Source promise: To give everyone the ability to have control over the software they use and the tool to build upon what’s already there. Mission … not accomplished but on its way, right?

But what are we doing? What are we trying to help “everyone” with?

We are trying to give more people the opportunity to “become hackers”. So they can profit off of all this stuff built by hackers for hackers. This isn’t a project to free all of us, it’s a project to give everyone a degree of freedom if they join our club. If they assimilate. This is Borg-mode.

We are not meeting people where they are. We expect them to come to us in order to understand why our values matter and are the best. Which – sorry to have to say so – they are not.

In 1971 the black civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer coined the phrase

Nobody’s Free Until Everybody’s Free.

And we have not taken that to heard. Because it does not say “Nobody’s Free until everyone is like us and then we have tools to create some freedoms”.

This is why so many outreach programs don’t work. Because what we are selling isn’t a solution to people’s actual problems but a new identity. And most people already got one of those. Now the solutions we propose might actually help our target audience with a real problem that they are faced with but so often our narratives don’t connect to their realities. We’re stuck in our own heads. Our own mechanisms and traditions.

I keep realizing and feeling this being stuck whenever I talk about moving beyond Open Source and Licenses and all that. I get a lot of responses arguing for example that “if you restrict people to not use your software for war you are no longer compatible with Freedom 0 and are no longer Free Software” as if that mattered. Yeah sure, that’s the legal regiment we’ve built. And where has that got us? Are we happy here? Is that enough?

Is me being able to customize my systems to my needs good enough? I recently changed a lot of my infrastructure to depend less on US companies and service providers for the simple reason that currently hosting stuff in the US (digitally but also physically) does not feel save. I can do that. Can my dad? My neighbors? Is that their fault?

In motherfucking 2013 I wrote:

Telling people to “host your own” when some big company closes or buys a service is very similar to the princess who, when learning that the peasants had no bread, said: “Let them eat cake.”

Hosting your own is a solution for the gifted and wealthy few, for many it’s blatant cynicism.

a younger tante in 2013

I stand by that. We need to get out of our comfort zones and modes of operation. Need to move beyond the seemingly apolitical cyberspace of free licenses. We need to reshape our thinking towards more political goals and values.

Maybe then non-hackers might also give a shit.

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