The Myth of Neutral Code
37 points by FedericoSchonborn
37 points by FedericoSchonborn
Open source is and has always been a philosophically shallow concept which as mentioned in the article was a coined as part of a deliberate rebranding to shed legacy of Free software. The lack of philosophical depth is a feature, not a bug of the open source concept. It is precisely what allows for it to be co-opted by businesses to express an apolitical vibe.
It is almost impossible to read any article of GNU, Stallman or the FSF and come away with the idea that their development practices are not political. Any developer mildly educated on the history of their practice (of which Free software is a massive part) should know this. While many of Stallmans personal view should be viewed as abhorrent, his thoughts with regards to Free software have been proven correct so many times over by now that it almost feels silly to point out once again.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html provides additional context on the distinctions between open source and Free software.
My main problem with Stallman's moral delegitimisation of non-free software — “open source [rather than free software] presumes that distributing proprietary software without source code is morally legitimate” he says (presenting this as untrue) — is that it seems to intuitively break down almost immediately.
It implies that doing nothing is more morally praiseworthy — in all cases — than providing a completely optional service at zero monetary cost if accepting that service comes with baggage, even if the provider grants the service with zero ulterior motives, not even ulterior motives that don't in and of themselves entail harm to the user (e.g. they're not doing it for good PR or as a career booster or something).
I've read some of Stallman's stuff now and again, but I'm not deeply read on him, so maybe he addresses this objection somewhere and I missed it. Anyone know?
(A perhaps interesting side note: open source's philosophical shallowness is also a feature from a religious standpoint, not only corporate; free software makes moral claims that I don't think can be justified, as far as I'm aware, from any major religion's moral principles — at least not mine — and thus stands as philosophical/behavioural competition — what some religions would call an idol or false god.)
Ok, this is an interesting point of view and I share it. I've always considered software to be "political" and not neutral. In Italy there is a podcast called "DataKnightmare" with the motto “L'algoritmo è politico”, in english it literally means “The algorithm is political”, and it expresses the same idea, but for the tech as a whole. This article reminded me a lot of that podcast.
Software is built by people, maintained by people, and hosted on infrastructure funded by people. Much like art, it cannot and does not exist in a vacuum.
This is very true, and sometimes I (and maybe we as a "society") forget that. This is also why software has to exist even if there is only one user, maybe the creator themselves. With LLMs, I think this is the key difference. It happens a lot that I discover a new project and later find out that it is largely LLM-generated, and it feels like a vacuum, because there are no people (or not enough people) behind it.
Something I learned recently is that Conway's Law, "organizations [...] produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations", was published just 3 years after McLuhan's, "The Medium Is The Message". 1964 and 1967. I don't know if Conway read McLuhan, but maybe there was something in the air?
I think McLuhan would have sympathised with this article. I wonder if Conway would too? I think anybody that's ever been employed to write software can appreciate Conway's Law. And that anybody who appreciates Conway's Law would have to see the truth of this article?