Notices by Brendan Conoboy (bconoboy@mastodon.social), page 2

@Katja Ooh, yes, and moreover UBI supports a society in which consent can be authentic, free of coercion, because they always have the option to walk away.

In tech years, I'm pretty old. I started using Linux when it was easiest to get as a boot image and root image on the Banjo FTP server, maybe ftp.funet.fi. Later, SLS, then Slackware, then FreeBSD, OpenBSD (co-wrote the IP Filter howto)... then #RedHat bought my company. I've subsequently spent more than half my life working at RH, and most of that time running Fedora, since Fedora was a thing. This is not impressive, I've just been here, and that means I have some perspective on #opensource.

Way back before Free Software, then Open Source were the phenomenon they have become, it was a very different world. Public domain, shareware, home brew computing... software licensing was alien to hobbyests. We relied on vague ownership concepts that didn't even have standing in international law. The #gpl, #free software, later #oss, this was all part of growing up, the result of many iterations of an attempt to control in some ways while sharing in others.

One of the things that really got a hook in me was the idea that software would be used for tyranny, that the people in charge of the software would then be in charge of me. An old friend, 6, quipped that in the future you would need a license to own a compiler. Free software concepts were thus incredibly appealing. I remember when the US government flirted with regulating cryptography domestically. People on Usenet sold "This shirt is a munition" Ts with #RSA code printed. Clipper was a joke.

Many don't realize it, RH did early on: If you work upstream first your development is vastly more sustainable. It sets a higher bar to make change, but it pays off in the end. This is in keeping with the core value proposition of all these software licenses, what made them different from shareware: the once radical idea that it is the #sourcecode, not the binaries that are the bedrock. We later learned that this is the difference between a project and a product, but that's jumping ahead.

It was in this spirit that #Linux distributions took off and the struggle to keep doing this fun hobby in a way that paid for itself became commonplace. Working at #RedHat, who was making ends meet with CD sales, coffee mugs, and the occasional support contract kept those good times going. When #proprietary #unix, by way of SCO, started getting lawsuit crazy, we found the #GPL really did stand up in court. #Groklaw was born, and IP law became something we all learned thanks to PJ, Webbink, etc.

@mattdm @vathpela I find the distinction uncomfortable myself, but that may be solely due to the fact that the differentiator is the same stuff we don't know how to do with community yet.

@vathpela @mattdm sounds like the wrong direction to me.

@doctormo @vathpela @mattdm I tend to think of project as the valuable thing that is shared and product to be the valuable thing that is sold.