Paul Cantrell
In the wake of the xz exploit, I quipped, “Free software, eh, fine, whatever. What does •sustainable• software look like?”
I haven’t heard anybody give a more thoughtful or more useful answer to that question than @jenniferplusplus in this blog post, which has not one but •two• crucial insights:
https://jenniferplusplus.com/the-free-software-commons/
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Paul Cantrell
@jenniferplusplus The first insight is her analysis of OSS software as a commons. It’s an insight that feels so obvious it almost seems like it doesn’t need stating, yet when she does state it — when she works out what it actually •means• for something to be a commons — well, for me that was one of those moments with a “before” and an “after” where I won’t inhabit the world the same way again. It made me see things I can’t unsee. Read the post just for that.
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Paul Cantrell
@jenniferplusplus The second insight is that OSS is a socio-legal-technical problem, and we’ve given a lot more attention to the technical and the legal than to the socio-. We’ve been neglecting •governance•, the social systems of project decisionmaking.
As she puts it here: “Commons need long term organized care to sustain them. That's called governance.” Without that, there’s no sustainability. It needs the same kind of thought we’ve given to licenses. More, even.
https://hachyderm.io/@jenniferplusplus/112219129715730988
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Paul Cantrell
That “autonomy” framing un-muddies a lot of muddy waters.
We can view maintainer burnout as a loss of autonomy. We can view private capture and extraction as loss of autonomy. We can view malicious actors injecting vulnerabilities as loss of autonomy.
•All• commons have a form of governance, whether intentional or de facto. Governance is the thing that can protect autonomy or doom it. It’s time for open source to get serious about it.
/end
Paul Cantrell
Open source, she argues, is threatened by both •enclosure• and •extraction•. It’s largely succeeded in defending itself against enclosure, but is failing to fight off extraction.
What’s missing? She writes: “The Freedom promoted by [the open source] movement could also be called autonomy. Proper governance would safeguard that autonomy.”
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Joe B
@inthehands I increasingly think that copyleft licenses are the only good way we’ve got against Extraction, but it will probably also reduce the contributor base substantially.
Paul Cantrell
@joeblubaugh
The point of the blog post, which you should read, is that licenses do not and cannot solve this problem. And I agree. I’m increasingly of the mind that copyleft is a red herring, a non-solution to a whole bunch of problems that’s sucked up way too much air already.
Fish Id Wardrobe
@inthehands @jenniferplusplus This is extremely good. I think you could argue that a commons is exactly what the original "guys with beards sharing mainframe code" that started all this were trying to build, but either way it seems to me it's exactly how we should view it.
Paul Cantrell
@fishidwardrobe @jenniferplusplus
Yeah, I think a commons is definitely an goal that’s been hovering nebulously in the air since before OSS was even articulated as an idea, but people have just completely missed the ball on the importance of “socio-” in “sociotechnical” and we’re now left with dangerously weak human systems surrounding strong technical ones.
Joe B
@inthehands I read the post, and I think that the arguments for improving governance only work for medium-large projects. Like Prometheus and larger. That’s probably also the limit where large-scale extraction happens, and also where licensing works to counter extractive behavior. Licensing probably
Doesn’t change much for smaller OSS projects.
Jenniferplusplus
@inthehands @fishidwardrobe I'm speculating, but to me it feels like a commons is the result they actually wanted, but not the result they thought they wanted.
Paul Cantrell
@jenniferplusplus @fishidwardrobe
Agreed, and well said
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