On 7/1/19 12:12 PM, Paul Boddie wrote:
Should people be OK with harmful organisations as long as they throw code over the wall or parcel out gifts to Free Software developers occasionally? Is it acceptable for communities to be bought or bribed by corporate generosity that often comes at the expense of those communities and wider society?
I agree with this, which is the point Christian Imhorst is also making: Companies like Google and Facebook may contribute lots of software which is in principle free software, but they don't do it in the *interest* of Free Software, or of software freedom.
Take Android. AOSP may exist, but it's practically impossible to get a phone with it, and more and more of it has, over time, been taken out and transferred to the proprietary Play ecosystem. Google does not contribute to software freedom, it *uses* software freedom for its own ends; and these ends are: Monitoring and controlling users through proprietary software, at historically unprecedented levels of detail and scale. That's more or less *the opposite* of what free software is supposed to achieve.
Take Facebook. Yes, they made some cool stuff - at least some people think React is cool (the front end people at my job think it's a untractable monolith). But once again, what they're doing is controlling their users through proprietary JavaScript and constantly nagging them to install proprietary "smartphone" apps.
For both companies, the same thing is true: They do *use* free software, and they (epecially Google) are also intelligent enough to give their developers considerable freedom to engage with communities, and they also benefit from software freedom, mixing the work of e.g. the Linux community with their own effeorts. But they, as a company, do this in order to *take away* users' freedom in order to fulfill their business model. Which is why both companies have often been caught messing around with privacy settings or lying about the consequences of their software's algorithmic surveillance of their users; which *also* is why both companies are normally *very* secretive about their operations and why *all* of their consumer-facing offerings are proprietary (I recognize Chromium as a good piece of free software, but for the masses that's not what they're promoting - but Chrome, the proprietary counterpart).
I think that the free software movement - we, as a movement - should know our friends, but to do this, we should start by knowing our enemies. And corporations that insist upon using and disseminating proprietary software in order to control their users, *are* enemies of free software, not friends. They may have sympatethic individuals working for them (obviously they do!), but that doesn't alter the fact that these companies, by their very operations and their very business model, are deeply hostile to ordinary users' freedom to use, inspect, change, share and generally control their own software.
Best Carsten