@bohemianchic

#HighJean...

At the #Risk of being one of those #GodsAwful #ReplyGuys; your #MastodonFeed remains one of my #MostFavourite...

Your #Candour is a #Joy to #Behold...

Rarely a #DayGoesBy when I'm not #Delighted we "met" (albeit #Virtually) via the #MastodonSpyBalloon...

#Strength and #Longevity to you (and Heidi)...

🧡🐺🧡 | 🎈

#promptodon

Much has been lost to the world through the rise of political power and the obfuscation of rules for the privileged few.
#Candour has fallen by the wayside, taking with it honesty and integrity.
What we are to suffer at their hands is of our own making and will endure for as long as we do nothing.

#OGResquire

Very interesting perspective, @shusha.

I think that looking at the #FreeSoftware Manifest as a feminist document is a slightly projective of your own culture, but your criticism is very clever and I think that @ondiz and @mcp_ might like it a lot.

In fact, I think that #RMS missed the point of Free Software (🤦‍♂️ 🤷‍♂️ ), but not because of his condition (and btw it's well known he is autistic since he was a kid) but because of the influence of his mother-culture: he grown up in the USA in the middle of Cold War.

So he slightly misinterpreted the nascent #hacker movement (and his misunderstanding got spread in a powerful global feedback loop).

He founded Free Software on the value of #freedom instead of the value of #curiosity, which is in fact more fundamental: the reason while freedom alone is not enough, and you need #communion (protection from enclosures) and #candour (honest sharing of one's perspective).

Hackers are ALL about acquiring more knowledge.
A sort of modern #philosophers... but more hungry.
As such we NEED to share what we learn or create, so that other can build on top of it, and teach us what they learn in exchange.
And OBVIOUSLY, you need freedom to explore and hack (even because, it's since Icarus that people of power are scared by hackers http://www.tesio.it/2020/09/03/not_all_hackers_are_americans.html )

Hackers are weird but they are not born weird: we become weird (one way or another) because we are too curious and we slowly move outside the mainstream.

But the reason we do so, is not because we are evil, just because we want to learn more, more deeply, we struggle for (some kind of) knowledge, we care about aspects most people do not give a shit and so on.

Thus, by design, we are interested in EVERY perspective we do not have access to, the farthest from the mainstream, the better.

That's why an autistic like Stallman might feel at home.
And why no hacker would attack other people for what they think or say (as long as they do not lie), just for what they do.
More likely, we are going to engage in endless debates, trying to understand the others' perspective and trying to explain the other our own, different, perspective on the matter (something that to non-hackers looks like people trying to outsmart each other, while we are just trying to understand in a very direct and effective communication protocol).

But you are very correct on this: "it is all about protecting a social practice (of programming). But the solution it takes, in form of the GPL, is acting on the level of the product of that social practice, not the social practice itself"

I think I could not explain it better than this.

In fact, one of the limit of #GPL (and any other #copyleft I know) is that it only protects the software artefact, NOT the hacking community.

Even with a strong copyleft, there are way to NOT give back to the community the knowledge they ought to obtain (think of the cloud and software as a service).

Also, the Free Software movement never cared about EXTENDING the hacking community (in part, due to the elitism and focus on product and meritocracy that #ESR spread thanks to O'Reilly, that poisoned what was not elitist at all)

Indeed another criticism I have over Stallman is that he didn't focus on teaching people how to program and kept Free Software simple enough to be readable for everybody.

So this is something that, IMO, we should fix in Free Software.

And for sure, this is NOT the direction that corporations want the Free Software to take.