The following was adapted from part of a talk given at the FSF’s LibrePlanet 2023. Essays adapting the other sections will be posted shortly.

The Crossroads We Stand At

I’m going to be incredibly blunt in this essay, because we are dealing with a situation that is incredibly dire. Our community is currently at a crossroads. The future of not just our movement, but technology as a whole is more uncertain than it has ever been.

Obviously, the proprietary world has their own vision for what that future will look like, and they’ve made it clear they will stop at nothing to realize it. What we can’t take for granted is the future of free-software: if we want to reclaim the future, we have to take matters into our own hands. We have to seriously consider and answer the most basic questions at hand.

What’s our plan? On what grounds are we able to compete? How do we take the fight straight to the heart of those forces which wish to take away our freedom?

The FSF has long provided us with one possible answer: front-and-center on their main page, they display the following quote.

“This community that we have, that we’re building, that does so much, has to grow. We can’t compete with Apple, we can’t compete with Google, directly, in the field of resources. What we can eventually do is head count and heart count. We can compete on the ground of ideology because ours is better.” This quote was taken from Edward Snowden’s keynote speech at LibrePlanet 2016. It caught my eyes for the same reasons I suspect it caught the eyes of many at the FSF. It perfectly encapsulates the sort of game-plan the movement has been banking upon up until now. That as long as we show that we have ‘better’ values, the power of moral persuasion alone will be enough to convince people to make a change."

While there might be comfort in taking this mindset for granted, we should take a moment to ask ourselves if this is actually how things work in practice. Are battles a test of ideology or are they a test of strategic advantage? When we look at the current ‘winners’ of the modern tech world, was their success driven by the ideologies they represented or was it the material factors in their favor (vertical integration, economies of scale, network effects)? Were people really just swayed by Apple’s “brave” ideals of locking down software and sabotaging right to repair?

The fact is that we live in a world that’s perfectly content to move on without free-software and its ideals. When we look in the headlines today, what do we see? Are they tracking the various debates within our community or are they more concerned with chasing every hot new thing out of Silicon Valley?

I bring this up not to be a cynic, but to stress the need for us to be able to reframe our perspective.

A Brief History of the Free-Software vs. Open-Source Debate

For those who have followed the discourse and debates that have long gone on in our community, what I’ve said above should come across as rather familiar. For the past twenty or so years, FOSS advocates have found themselves divided into one of two camps.

On one side, you have those who see free-software as a matter of principle, and its promotion as an essentially ideological task. This is the position explicitly championed by Stallman and the FSF, and it’s the position Snowden was coming from when he gave that talk. Starting from the formation of the GNU project in the ’80s, up until about the early ’00s, this was the dominant position in the FOSS landscape.

For the FSF, software freedom is fundamentally a matter of rights: the right to run a program as you wish, study it as you wish, modify it as you wish, and redistribute it as you wish¹. RMS (Stallman) builds off of this to develop a worldview and strategy in which ethical factors are what take center stage. He concedes that a lot of the software built using the FSF’s model can often be technically or practically inferior to proprietary offerings², but that such practical concerns are secondary in their relevance³ to ethical ones.

It’s because of this he focuses on a model of activism that’s focused on ensuring as many people as possible know what free software is and directly convincing said people that there’s ethical and personal benefits to using user-respecting technologies. More concretely, this can mean pushing people⁴ and organizations⁵ to stop using non-free software, starting campaigns to get non-technical users accustomed to free-software⁶, or by encouraging people to boycott companies which make use of DRM⁷.

This very ideologically-driven approach isn’t without its critics though. On the other side, you have the “open-source” movement and the more pragmatic approach to advocacy it promotes. This side is best represented by the OSI and those who take after Eric S. Raymond. It was around the early 00s, with the success of projects such as Mozilla and the Linux kernel, that this approach really began to gain steam. And twenty years later, in the modern day, it undeniably has become the dominant philosophy governing FOSS development.

The philosophy of the OSI was developed as a direct response to the approach taken by the FSF. Across his writings, ESR stresses the practical benefits of open-access code: distributed peer review, rapid release cycles, and decentralized experimentation⁸. He believed these advantages not only made open software more ethical, but also more practical. He believed there to be an inherent evolutionary advantage to decentralized software development processes, and saw RMS’ uncompromising insistence upon ideals as only getting in the way of this process.

Whereas the FSF took a bottom-up approach to its activism – getting low-level users to convert those around them to free-software usage – the OSI went for the top-down⁹. They concentrated their efforts on crafting an image that would appeal to tech CEOs, gaining recognition in the mainstream press, and sought to do whatever it took to make their flag-bearer – Linux – into a household name. The confrontational approach of the FSF was eschewed in favor of one that was eager to work alongside the market.

In our timeline, this work supplied the missing theory to explain existing open-source practice. Unlike RMS’s free-software crusade, it offered a justification that people could evaluate and accept without having to change their position on whether intellectual property was a good or an evil. This energized the community like nothing had since the GNU manifesto — and, unlike the GNU manifesto, it was an argument understandable to businesspeople and others outside the hacker community. ⁸

Or to put it more concisely, ESR’s overarching criticism of the FSF is that they get too hung up ideological bona-fides to the point of sabotaging their own success.

Most of the damage, though, came from something worse—the strong association of the term ‘free software’ with hostility to intellectual property rights, communism, and other ideas hardly likely to endear it to an MIS manager. It was, and still is, beside the point to argue that the Free Software Foundation is not hostile to all intellectual property and that its position is not exactly communistic. We knew that. What we realized, under the pressure of the Netscape release, was that FSF’s actual position didn’t matter. Only the fact that its evangelism had backfired (associating `free software’ with these negative stereotypes in the minds of the trade press and the corporate world) actually mattered.⁹

RMS responds by criticizing the open-source movement on being too focused on chasing short-term success to the point of uprooting everything that allows the movement to remain anchored in its founding values.

If getting more people to use some free programs is as far as you aim to go, you might decide to keep quiet about the concept of freedom, and focus only on the practical advantages that make sense in terms of consumer values. That’s what the term “open source” and its associated rhetoric do. That approach can get us only part way to the goal of freedom. People who use free software only because it is convenient will stick with it only as long as it is more convenient. And they will see no reason not to use convenient proprietary programs along with it. ¹⁰

Twenty years later, both the generation that was there to witness RMS at his prime and the generation which got to witness Linux explode onto the scene have grown up to become incumbent in their own way. For someone of my age, you enter into this community with the two paths already long-laid out for you: either you’re an ideologue who walks the path of Stallman or you embrace open-source pragmatism. The debates continue on as they always have.

But are these options really enough?

Stallman Was Right… And Wrong

Things are rather rough for the current generation of FOSS advocates, but one benefit we have is that of hindsight. Back in the 00s, a good deal of ESR’s work was not just the development of a theory of software development – it was also an autopsy of that prior 1980s period of hacker culture and its ideals.

Twenty years later, open-source is no longer nascent, nor is it merely a hypothetical. It has completely embedded itself within the world we live. In little over a decade we went from a world in which the majority of open-code was GPL-licensed to one in which OSI-endorsed permissive licenses are applied to a supermajority of projects. ESR’s strategy of winning over Big Tech has become the norm, as Big Tech companies disproportionately make up the largest contributors, both in financing and supplying manpower to these projects. Corporations like Microsoft – who once showed extreme hostility to projects such as GNU/Linux – have since come to embrace such technologies at the heart of their cloud computing business.

In a sense, the OSI’s lobbying worked. They got what they asked for, and the rising titans of the industry followed the advice provided by ESR and his allies. But is our world actually any more free? Does the billions of Android users having access to a technically Linux-based OS make up for it being a platform to shove Google services down your throat? Is it a victory that Netflix runs Apache services that the end-user will never see if it means enabling a flood of non-free JS and DRM to police your viewing? Are all the corporate contributions to open ML frameworks making the proprietary models built off of them any more free?

ESR (leaning on politically libertarian writers like Hayek) draws from his deep-set ideological conviction that decentralized systems are more evolutionarily fit than centralized ones⁸. He took this logic and applied it to both the free-market and open-source development. In doing so, he envisioned a future in which – as long as it’s given a fair shake – open-source development will naturally displace and outcompete proprietary models on the market.

But while open-source may have proven its utility in the market today, the fact is that utility has not led to greater software freedom. The extent to which development has become decentralized and “open” is only true in a very narrow, mechanical sense. The state of the tech industry today shows that, if anything, the free-market has a tendency towards centralization – capital concentrated in the Bay Area, economic power concentrated in a handful of companies, and users all forcibly concentrated onto only a handful of devices, apps, and platforms.

The big hurdle to software freedom wasn’t just a handful of misguided rent-seekers in C-Suites who couldn’t see the value of transparency. The bigger problem was a market that sustains itself off of passive consumption. The ability to actually understand, take apart, modify, and preserve software runs directly counter to the ethos of commodification – which treats every object in existence as an inscrutable black-box that can only ever be interfaced with by inserting money. The real, underlying gripe hackers had with proprietary software wasn’t just how inefficient it was – it’s that its design is actively hostile towards the very people who are expected to use it on a day-to-day basis.

Contrary to ESR’s vision of the open-source movement as “armed and motivated revolutionaries, ready to break out of their ghetto and take on the world”⁸, the movement – for all its mobility – seems to be lacking in any sort of teeth that would make them seem threatening or “revolutionary”.

This is where RMS is most correct: ‘success’ is not a straight-forward term; it only has meaning once we’re willing to infuse it with context. One has to first be able to define the terms in which it’s supposed to be realized before being able to do anything else. Otherwise you may as well be wandering in the dark without a flashlight.

Should we just define success in terms of how many people have installed free-software? That alone isn’t enough, because proprietary programs are constantly installing and uninstalling open dependencies without our knowledge. Tech companies have long been known to embrace open standards only to cut them off once they’re big enough. Should we define success in terms of the amount of FOSS projects spun up or contributed to? Once again, not enough, because companies contribute a disproportionate amount of attention to projects that serve their own industrial needs – not the needs of the average user.

Instead I think it makes more sense to take a less quantifiable approach to success: metrics are the language of the market. This principle holds whether we’re talking about eyeballs for advocacy, quota goals in hiring, or even code commits. As long as you have a number, the Darwinian logic of the market will either find a way to accommodate you or force you to accommodate to it. Markets are able to take numbers at face value because they only care about growth in the most generic sense. But what we as human beings get from those numbers isn’t generic, it requires context to be meaningful. If we allow that context to be stripped away, we lose sight of what we were even fighting for in the first place.

Ideals exist to give us something to orient our goals towards. The current state of the open-source movement is a testament to one timeless truth: the foundations you start with end up selecting for the future you end up with.

But that’s only one half of the equation. Ideals inform our goals, but our goals exist to deliver results. The goal has to bridge these two halves: they can be in tension, but never in contradiction. This is where it’s worth mentioning (despite everything) ESR has provided contributions that have – in their own ways – proven prescient, and frankly, valuable.

He was willing to defend the necessity of even having something Stallman and the FSF have yet to really provide an answer to – a serious plan and roadmap for actually changing the landscape of software. While RMS centered his analysis around abstract moral shoulds, ESR and the open-source theorists returned the conversation back to how software actually functions. Was the strategy he proposed questionable? Absolutely, but there was at least something to work off of.

Scattered across his writings you’ll see attempts to use economic game-theory¹¹ to sketch out a theoretical foundation for how the movement functions, and clearly laid out, detailed battle plans as to the various prongs of attack and strategies needed to best capitalize on the movement’s strengths and shore up its weaknesses. Meanwhile RMS seems to, at best, invoke the self-help book¹⁰ How to Win Friends And Influence People as reference for his arguments.

It should come as no surprise then that the FSF’s long-running strategy seems to be just telling as many people as possible to use free-software and hoping some combination of words will be convincing enough. It may be the ‘default’ strategy for advocacy orgs in general, but is it an effective strategy for the FSF and its goals?

It’s a strategy that reflects the infamous “cathedral” strategy¹² ESR (and the wider community) attributed the failure of the GNU/Hurd to. In contrast to the Linux project, whose release-early-and-often development model blurred the lines between user and developer, the traditional approach of the FSF has often taken their separation for granted.

RMS rightly recognizes that we can’t always count on free-software to be up to feature-parity with proprietary offerings and how that need not act as a discouragement.² But this runs into conflict with his approach of selling people on free-software as an isolated moral choice: it stems from a mindset that’s still implicitly rooted in ‘consumer values’, even if he claims otherwise. After all, it’s not like corporations haven’t been known to use moral appeals (or ‘citizen values’¹⁰ as he would like to call them) to sell their products. If we’re not just looking to simply be ‘better’ than the competition, then we should be striving to be different. That’s why it’s important to identify, sketch out, and take advantage of all the things that make how we do things practically different.

We’re not just looking to change people’s beliefs, we’re looking to change what they use. The technology they already probably hate – but may be forced to use. The technology which is actively altering every other aspect of our society and forcing them to bend to its will. If the problem was just a matter of getting people to believe the right things, then maybe just propagandizing our way to the finish line would work.

There are more places in the world right now with access to Google than clean drinking water. How can that be, when the moral superiority of clean drinking water is so self-evident? If the morality of clean drinking water isn’t enough to outcompete Google, how are we going to expect software morality on its own to fare any better?

Right now, as supporters of free-software, we are losing not just our position in the tech world at large, but even the mantle of our very own movement. We can’t keep sitting around, asking ourselves where the next RMS is. There is no leader charismatic enough, no megaphone loud enough which can rival the voice of the market. We need a new strategy, and one that’s both sustainable and serious. We’re betting the future of our freedom on it.

Yes, we are right to remain anchored in our founding principles and uncompromising in our demands. We are right to demand not just numbers, but a world in which the very habits, practices, and principles of how humanity designs and uses tech are meaningfully transformed.

But if we’re serious about making this goal into a reality – and not just defining free-software as a niche hobbyist enclave off to the side – then we cannot neglect the very practical question of results. Otherwise, the goal we went to such lengths to define may as well be nothing but a hypothetical.

But I don’t think we have to restrict ourselves to just these two options. We don’t have to repeat the past and just hope lightning strikes twice. We can ask the tough, cynical questions about what progress would practically have to look like without moving our goalposts backwards. We can remain, stridently, militantly, in defense of our core values without having to rely on them as our only weapon.

But in order to do that we have to innovate. The strategy that will work for us might not be the first strategy to pop out of the mind of a career nonprofit activist or a career businessman, but that’s fine. We’re different, after all.

Salvaging Stallman’s Concept of ‘Pragmatic Idealism’

So, where do we even start with reframing our perspective. RMS actually does leave us with a bit of a starting point to work with. In the essay “Copyleft: Pragmatic Idealism”, he looks at what was undeniably the GNU Project’s greatest success (the GPL) and outlines the underlying principles at the heart of the strategy.

That’s the basic reason why the GNU General Public License is written the way it is—as a copyleft. All code added to a GPL-covered program must be free software, even if it is put in a separate file. I make my code available for use in free software, and not for use in proprietary software, in order to encourage other people who write software to make it free as well. I figure that since proprietary software developers use copyright to stop us from sharing, we cooperators can use copyright to give other cooperators an advantage of their own: they can use our code. ¹³

History might remember Hurd as an indictment of the GNU Project’s approach, but the GPL acts as a vindication. The ‘advantage’ Stallman speaks of here is a material one: the GPL is by nature a viral license: the more is developed under its terms, the more it spreads. In the ’80s – a time when the foundations of modern computer software was beginning to be laid – having this license protect incredibly foundational programs (such as the GCC) gave it a pragmatic advantage.

The success and workings of the GPL are the kind of model we need to reflect on and replicate if we wish to find where our strategic advantages lie. RMS refers to it as a living example of what he calls ‘pragmatic idealism’: acting tactically in service of a principled goal. Unfortunately, RMS doesn’t expand on this concept of pragmatic idealism as much as you’d hope. He scratches at the surface of it, but we don’t really get a sense of what it means beyond its vaguest contours. The one thing I hope to do with this essay is to salvage RMS’ sketch of ‘pragmatic idealism’ and begin the first steps of turning it into a specific, workable strategy.

The central question which animated RMS’ crusade against the open-source movement was this one of how to avoid what he refers to as ‘ruinous compromises’¹⁰. If you take a too-pragmatic approach, you become too focused on short-term success and lose the subversiveness that made you an agent for change in the first place. This is what’s happened to the open-source movement. But you have to balance this against the fact that if you take a too-ideological approach, your ideals end up losing their relevance.

The “pragmatic idealism” of the GPL offers us a third option: leveraging our results to build a more moral world.

As I said earlier, goals are bridges between ideals and results – they answer the question of how do we translate a “should happen” into a “will happen”. Ideals and results will always be in tension, but you don’t resolve that tension by forsaking one in favor of the other. Instead, you let them stay in tension, using each of them to check each other.

Results challenge us to re-evaluate orthodoxy and ask ourselves whether the ways in which we have connected and applied our core principles are in need of revision. Ideals stop us from settling for the easy way out by taking the status quo for granted. They force us to think outside-of-the-box in terms of what strategies and approaches we can take to deliver results.

The GPL didn’t just make its adoption into a moral choice or option. By its strategic positioning and terms, it was able to forcefully assert itself in the landscape. An individual or a company didn’t have to agree with the GPL and its founding ideology to be subject to its terms.

Our strategy doesn’t have to be an either-or: we can more openly engage and challenge the status quo without compromising. We can be confrontational without becoming isolationist. It was the viral nature of the GPL that led Microsoft’s CEO to declare GNU/Linux a cancer. It didn’t just politely ask you to consider choosing freedom, it hijacked enough of the code out there to force change. What the GPL shows is that we can take a militant approach to free-software.

We should study and appreciate our own side’s competitive advantages and strengths – not to compile in a slide deck for Fortune 500 CEOs – but to optimally weaponize against the forces which constantly put our community under siege. We can make short-term compromises if it materially puts us in a better position to realize our long-term goal. We can embrace mobility without being conciliatory. We can be zealous while recognizing that actions speak louder than words. We can build bridges to other sectors of the community who don’t see eye-to-eye with us if it means expanding our reach. The goal isn’t just to change minds, it’s to change circumstances.

RMS has a habit of talking about free-software as if it’s a civic campaign: that by knocking on enough doors and winning every software user’s “vote” (to use an analogy), the marketplace of ideas will fairly reward our moral case. This fails to account for the fact that we’re dealing with a system that’s rigged against us; the grounds on which the market picks its winners are grounds on which (as per his own admission²) we have already long lost.

Should the main goal of the institutonal face of free-software simply be to “sell” individuals on using free products? Or should it also be locating, connecting, and cultivating talent? What about identifying emerging fields of opportunity and investing in them? Reaching out to and networking various other sympathetic movements in the space and lending the necessary resources to build up their infrastructure? Mapping out the ever-changing terrain of tech (in not just moral, but theoretical terms) and developing analyses others can draw from for inspiration?

The FSF currently has a number of campaigns going on (which a lot of them have their value in their own way, to be clear), but a disproportionate amount of them seem to be focused on either awareness-raising or direct-target conversion. But one thing the open-source movement has shown is that there’s a lot of value in building institutional pillars that will either outsource or implicitly perform that work of user conversion.

Just as the patterns of consumption tend to fall downstream from the dictates of industry production, (just look at how every digital device has been forcibly iPhone-ified) the development, usage, and discussion of free-software has the ability to implicitly raise people up in its ideals. These ideals don’t have to be read in a manifesto or taught in a workshop, but can be intuited from the habits, norms, and patterns of the community and their activity.

What makes GNU/Linux fun isn’t just that it’s Microsoft Windows with the GPL slapped on top of it. It’s that from the bottom up its design, development, and support reflects the old Unix ethos that made it possible: modularity, crowdsourcing, and communal knowledge over technical support.

The rise of torrenting in the early 2000s wasn’t a case of culture/politics leading to usage – it was the process of daily usage acting as a gateway towards discovering on a practical level how real the advantages of software freedom are. That age of open-source and net-era hackerdom was made possible by a crisis in the tech industry as a whole. Market players don’t just look to snuff out free alternatives, they look to snuff out each other too. The World Wide Web and mobile phones displaced the old players and changed the rules of the game. That moment provided a window of opportunity to adapt to, seize upon, and stake a claim before market players wised up.

The titans of today are no more immortal than the ones of yesterday. We are experiencing another period of crisis in the software landscape: search engines are becoming useless, social media sites are getting flooded with spam, overcentralized moderation is becoming a political powder-keg, and APIs are shuttering. Ad revenue is becoming less and less reliable and there’s a growing pessimism across society about technology.

The more these companies wall off their gardens and sabotage their own networks in pursuit of rent-seeking, the less value the web as a whole begins to have to the public. People are looking for an alternative. The persistence of Web3 (and its associated scams) is in part driven by the fact that people are desperate enough to grasp at anything right now. We have a window right now – I can’t say for how much longer it will last – to take advantage of this and provide free-software design as a serious alternative.

But in order to get there, the FSF has to defend its own case to its own movement. Right now, the space is heavily fractured, with people from different sectors or skills not having much cross-pollination. Projects which show promise are getting bottlenecked by development shortages. Long-term maintenance/funding of FOSS projects still remains a widely-discussed unknown. While there is a wide pool of talent, they’re often left to their own devices when it comes to networking. While there are resources to get involved with individual open-source projects, the pipeline to getting involved with the free-software movement at large is much more unclear.

There are concrete steps the FSF can take towards this (which I likely will suggest in another post), but it requires us to seriously reflect on our strategy, trajectory, and situation – but before we can do that we need to, as a movement, be on the same page that this is a problem and this needs to be fixed.