My trite response is that software freedom is somewhere between "ignore" and "laugh" in Gandhi's stages of nonviolent activism. Feeling hated/attacked by the software industry underestimates just how poorly software freedom, as an ethical concern, is doing. Software freedom is unknown to almost all in the software industry (fortunately its realization is not quite so stunted), nevermind among all software users. That's worth working on correcting.
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I have to sadly agree with @mlinksva. I had thought we were going pretty good. I've recently started looking into interactive fiction and software freedom seems to be unheard of. There isn't a single free IF development system. Free as in gratis? Noncommerical licenses? Verbatim distribution only? All of that, and it seems that's all that the IF community really cares about. I brought up the matter with one of the developers of an IF system & it was dismissed out of hand.
Jason Self at 2013-12-02T22:43:25Z
Mike Linksvayer likes this.
Interactive fiction is probably a good case study, reflected in many other fields: software is appearing everywhere/mediating everything, but software freedom is not, except as an artifact of free software being used. But ethical concepts, zero signal on other side.
That's largely what my talk earlier this year at lfcollab was about, though overly license-centric: http://gondwanaland.com/i/software-eats-commons-linux-collaboration-summit-2013.pdf
That's largely what my talk earlier this year at lfcollab was about, though overly license-centric: http://gondwanaland.com/i/software-eats-commons-linux-collaboration-summit-2013.pdf
Mike Linksvayer at 2013-12-03T02:34:33Z
Charles Stanhope likes this.
I don't disagree wtih you on this, Mike, but I think we also have a lot of cooption going on. We're going through the stages of social justice movements on Internet time in rapid prototyping model, or something.