remotenemesis @remotenemesis@hackers.town

"Open Source" served a particular purpose for a particular time. It helped to increase the adoption of Free Software by businesses, and thereby also more generally among the customers/users of those businesses.

But today that project is pretty much over, and we won. Nobody except for knuckle-dragging morons seriously doubt that source code should be publicly available. So really it's time to get back to talking about freedom rather than openness. How free are the users of this software according to the usual criteria? A lot of companies don't score well.

The problems of "open source" today are really ones of business culture and economics generally (surveillance crapitalism). The various isms (sexism, racism, etc) are not things which Free Software or Open Source ever set out to fix. The availability of Free Software is a tool, not a catch-all solution to social problems. The problem before Free Software was that only certain people had access to the tools, which were expensive. Now everyone who is willing to learn also does. It's a necessary but not sufficient step towards solving the bigger problems.