Google posted, today, about a proposal that corporations should collectively try to stigmatize any open-source software for which the maintainers haven't chosen to publish under their legal names.
Fuck that. Personally we think everyone has the moral right to anonymity. If we choose, someday, to publish software via an anonymous anarchist collective, Google won't stop us.
That really is what it's about. Google wants to put open-source software - which in many cases is written by free, by volunteers, as a service to all of humanity - within the system of state power.
*for free. ah well
Today it's become very corporate, but if you go back to the foundations of the free software movement, it was very much about *reclaiming* technology so it can be a tool of the people.
IBM did not want Linux to run on the architecture it designed. Apple didn't want it to run on theirs. Linux was a *hostile* action to corporate power, from the very start, and fundamentally a very powerful one: Let's just build it ourselves.
We live in the world that was reshaped by the FOSS movement. We can't afford to take it for granted, or it'll be merely a historical aberration and not a long-term thing.
A slight correction: Several people have weighed in to point out that we probably have a distorted memory of how hostile IBM and Apple were to Linux. We think the essential point stands that Linux was written out of idealism and with political goals.
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