Notices by e. hashman (ehashman@toot.cat)

@feditips Blind people aren't the only people who use screenreaders. It's helpful for all sorts of disabilities!

@brennen @joeyh freedom freedom freedom, except to criticise Dear Leader and enablers

@cwebber @lathamgreen there are other cool people on the team building it too. I had no idea @bnewbold had left the IA to work on bluesky until I made an account!

@Suiseiseki it's clear you are not convinced by anything I have to say here. That's fine; I can't imagine it's easy to consider this deeply when you've constructed your identity around free software "extremism". How long have you felt this way?

What are you trying to convince *me* of? That I should care more about the inanimate tool, software, than how it affects the people using it?

@neo how

@neo then why does the FSF list permissive licenses as free software?

So let's drop the "open source vs. free software" debate please. What has it accomplished? Whether it's open source or free software, the software licensing movement alone is not enough to achieve any of these movements' stated goals.

FOSS is necessary but not sufficient to ensure digital autonomy. https://techautonomy.org/

Anyone comparing the philosophy of "open source" to "free software" without acknowledging the harmful stagnation and single-mindedness in the latter community is not making a thoughtful critique in the year 2022.

To the vast majority of people these terms do not mean different things. Semantically, free software and open source mean the same thing and agree on the same software licenses.

The philosophical differences people attribute to "open source" vs. "free software" are usually a combination of development practices (dependent on the individual author) and arguing about copyleft licenses (even though the FSF agrees "permissive licenses" still make "free software").

The FSF and free software movement have failed because they prioritized the hero worship of a single individual over the actual furthering of their ideology. They have had nothing new or useful to contribute to the public conversation in over a decade.

So I can't believe people are still parroting "open source is about efficiency, free software is about ethics" or similar. Free software is about the ethics of one man, it's not a movement. They have spent all their energy alienating new blood.

If I cannot recommend your movement to anyone other than able-bodied cishet white dudes in western countries, and on top of that I have to caveat it with "it's prickly, hostile, and everyone does what Dear Leader says", then who the fuck is it for? That demographic is the *least* harmed by proprietary software.

The manifestos of free software got me in the mindset of serving users and protecting fundamental rights. But the practice of free software is just like open source, with more hostility.

Here's a thought: self-hosting all technology, a common end goal of many software freedom enthusiasts, has nothing to do with freedom. Rather, it's the logical end of hyper-individualism applied to source code.