One of the early names for FOSS was "copyleft" meaning copy-encouraged. Not copy limited.That is a good way of seeing it. Its a gift which is to all of us which cannot be sold. Because it adds to everybody's wealth, without taking from anybody.
Some corporations want to make open source illegal and impossible, behind the scenes.
They are doing this not only with open source, they feel threatened by dozens of things.
Virtually every good thing that a government could do, regulations that people everywhere expect from governments - to protect them - are under attack.
Corporations frame all those things as thefts or reductions in "their" "freedom" -
They have created a new doctrine of "indirect expropriation" and increasingly sue countries in special rigged courts..
Giving people things which cost more than they are charged for them is now a growing subject of lawsuits by corporations against countries, corporations are suing governments more and more, in a process called investor vs. state dispute settlement, or ISDS.
These cases occur out of sight in special arbitration courts which consistently rule in corporations favor.
Its highly likely that governments will soon be successfully sued under ISDS if they encourage open source. That is coming, we should be ready for it.
These cases, are often not public, like when a French corporation sued Egypt for raising their minimum wage after they had a revolution, or a Swedish company sued the German taxpayer for deciding to stop using nuclear power after the Chernobyl accident made parts of Germany so radioactive that livestock raised there was no longer safe to eat.
Nobody knows how much they got in their settlement.
A parallel can be drawn between encouraging open source and the idea of free public education.
Both are "public goods" that hurt nobody. Both are now being framed as a theft from corporations of profits they're alleged to be "entitled" to.
Some historical context..
open source software was intended from the beginning to be a business model and that business model is that of a gift to all that could not be sold.
One which was and would always remain owned by
everybody.
Open Source was never intended to be a "business model", so it is not surprising businesses struggle to find ways to monetize it. Open Source is really a model for how people who are normally mere consumers to cooperate in creating community projects.
Open source was intended to be a business model, that of a common good, like education or knowledge.
Like them it is hoped that it cannot be taken away.
But then countries signed agreements which committed them in a binding manner to limit any "measure of general application" (which broadly means any law or policy or change of any kind) "affecting trade in services" to only those which deregulated things, meaning allowed corporations to make more money. By extension that means not help people afford things they can't.
In fact, its quite controversial whether corporations should be allowed to privatize essentials like a country's water supply.
Unfortunately, although people expected that the natural wealth of countries was in some way a shared wealth, in most of the developed world they never got it in writing, so starting around 1990, with NAFTA between the North American countries and the WTO, corporations started workin hard on turning their agenda into international law. And their agenda was torpedoing the concept of states protecting people from excesses of greed by corporations.
"in sectors where specific commitments are undertaken, each Member shall ensure that all measures of general application affecting trade in services are administered in a reasonable, objective and impartial manner". Sounds innocuous.
Later on, they attempted to spin their agenda as helping poor countries. but there is virtually no evidence that these policies do anything other than hurt the poor everywhere. Still, "they persisted".
You can read more here:
http://unctad.org/en/docs/edmmisc232add31_en.pdfFurthermore, at least one large economic giant pushed hard for a much broader opt out approach that would prevent discussion of these sensitive issues
by just including everything by default. So called "negative list"
Any act or policy or rule or law or non-action that could effect "measures tantamount to expropriation" of investors investments could become a subject of an investor versus state suit in a special arbitration court.
Thats a policy which is unashamedly so in conflict with the gift to everybody concept inherent in open source that one has to see it as literally a war on the very concept of a public good.
"negative list" as its called frames public goods as "discrimination" against corporations. It also contains a ratchet which freezes any expansion of the government as protector model in a binding manner.
"the agreement should cover substantially all sectors and modes of supply and provide for the absence or elimination of existing discriminatory measures and/or the prohibition of new or more discriminatory measures. This should be without prejudice to the possible exclusion of a limited number of services sectors from the liberalisation commitments. As in the (previous agreement), the .... shall not take commitments on audiovisual. The Agreement shall not cover
services supplied in the exercise of
governmental authority."
The best the people could realistically hope for under these conditions is that each new set of politicians elected did nothing.
Things they do to bring about some policy goal must be done in the most minimally trade restrictive way possible if any public money is involved. In services a database is even being set up by the OECD to tell countries what best practices they pursued would be likely to attract an investor state lawsuit and which would not.
The message is, things governments do cannot be too good at solving problems that some corporation would make money on. Or help any more people than the bare minimum, and them, only in a way which makes as much money as possible for somebody, for example, trades away business as a sort of payback to other countries. Virtually nothing they might do is excluded. Which is where the potential clash with FOSS comes in.
Open source is a highly optimized solution, as its what communities of makers optimally do themselves to create the best tools. Were it not being given away or had open source not existed before 1994, it might already be illegal. Precisely because it likely would be seen as
too good of a tool for people to be given.
To illustrate how this concept works, a similar dynamic exists with health care in the US and its described in the neoliberal concept of "crowd out". The new body of law its spawned is broadly called competition policy.
Open source software is often of extremely high quality, and it encourages a diverse flexible solutions for problems. It doesn't lock people in to closed ecosystems or limit their knowledge.
Its an intentionally shared wealth.
Its not passive, its people making their own future.Open source originated within the government and it represents the best aspect of government. This is the concept of government of by and for natural (human, flesh and blood, not juridicial) people that existed before state capture by corporate special interests and lobbyists.
The key idea is we all own it. Of course, businesses are always hoping to find "free stuff" to make a profit out of. So companies' idea of Open Source is often "there is a way to get people to work for you free" they are all for it. Of course, when it comes to giving back to the community (and potential competitors) it's "no way!" and they actively find ways to prevent others' benefiting, aka "tivoisation".
Companies have plenty of existing ways to fund their operations and extract profits from the community, while letting others pay for the environmental damage they cause, it would be really nice if they could avoid fucking up Open Source.
Richard Stallman's vision of the future has been much denigrated but that is exactly what is happening.
the very concept of general purpose computing is under attack. What the biggest multinational corporations want is profitable surveillance and content delivery platforms, enabling wealth extraction.
Cell phones are a good example of what they want. Is what they want a walled space where you can't do anything without intentionally or not, buying their stuff? There is a very real risk of that happening, I think.
But it could go either way, depending on how much we are aware of the underlying issues. Their proposals wont stand long if the light of day is shone upon them.
Computing should not be turned into a pipeline to indebtedness or prison where every motion you make will expose you to or incur one new cost or another. or record something you do, some tidbit of knowledge about you which can then be sold to somebody. For example, health insurers who hope to soon use variations in peoples health status to jack up "medical risks" (their name for people who have a higher risk of illness) peoples prices driving them away or dumping them off coverage.
Thats where we are going in that area. Technology of all kinds will be abused more and more by increasingly large and ruthless powerful corporations to enslave people by debt or otherwise, on the path we are on now. Thats the default. Unless we wake up now - they are trying to make these changes irreversible.
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Contrast that with electronics and free software. Its clear that these two areas are tremendous positive forces but also viewed as massive failures by some parts of the corporate world, despite the wealth they have in many ways created. They see their relative lack of the most oppressive effects of hierarchy as a problem.
So we should be thankful that we've gotten where we are in the world of electronics and computing but we need to be aware of the changes that are occurring. We urgently need to stand up more for the values of democracy and open source and the concept of the public good and access to knowledge as bringing wealth to everybody. Corporations are emphatically not people and people need governments of by and for actual flesh and blood feeling human people to temper the otherwise terrifying, nightmarish potential for sudden economic change. Simple changes can occur which can leave millions of people jobless within years or soon, possibly even months. But they push for more and more irreversible privatization and deregulation. But, its the human people not the juridicial ones that deserve protection, but corporations- are demanding changes to the social contract which should be totally impossible. its as if they are engaging in a preemptive strike against the people of the planet so people cant and wont have the futures we deserve, all of us. Instead they are trying to capture that future for themselves.
This is completely evil. They are doing this by means of so called 'trade and investment agreements' that do an end run around democracy. they attempt to make these changes permanent and impossibly costly to change by voting.
A series by you tube user "New Thinking on Investment Treaties" is informative.
You'll see that the world is being stolen by deception. Its an attempt to 'future proof' the future for corporations to the exclusion of human rights.
We all need to see through what amounts to a big con game and be the best people we can and rise above their static and speak up for what we care about.
Open source is really a positive force, perhaps the best new development of the last two decades, standing in stark contrast to the forces arrayed against it, and attempts to denigrate it are lacking in substance.
Lets call them out and speak up for the things we see as important, or we'll lose not only them but everything else as well.
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