Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2016/02/19/kuhns-paradox.html

I’ve been making the following social observation frequently in my talks
and presentations for the last two years. While I suppose it’s rather
forward of me to do so, I’ve decide to name this principle:

Kuhn’s Paradox

For some time now, this paradoxical principle appears to hold: each
day, more lines of freely licensed code exist than ever before in human
history; yet, it also becomes increasingly more difficult each day
for users to successfully avoid proprietary software while completing their
necessary work on a computer.

Kuhn’s View On Motivations & Causes of Kuhn’s Paradox

I believe this paradox is primarily driven by the cooption of software
freedom by companies that ostensibly support Open Source, but have the (now
extremely
popular) open
source almost everything philosophy.

For certain areas of software endeavor, companies dedicate enormous
resources toward the authorship of new Free Software for particular narrow
tasks. Often, these core systems provide underpinnings and fuel the growth
of proprietary systems built on top of them. An obvious example here is
OpenStack: a fully Free Software platform, but most deployments of
OpenStack add proprietary features not available from a pure upstream
OpenStack installation.

Meanwhile, in other areas, projects struggle for meager resources to
compete with the largest proprietary behemoths. Large user-facing,
server-based applications of
the Service
as a Software Substitute variety, along with massive social media sites
like Twitter and Facebook that actively work against federated social
network systems, are the two classes of most difficult culprits on this
point. Even worse, most traditional web sites have now become a mix of
mundane content (i.e., HTML) and proprietary Javascript programs, which are
installed on-demand into the users’ browser all day long, even while most
of those servers run a primarily Free Software operating system.

Finally, much (possibly a majority of) computer use in industrialized
society is via hand-held mobile devices
(usually inaccurately
described as “mobile phones”). While some of these devices
have Free Software operating systems (i.e., Android/Linux), nearly all the
applications for all of these devices are proprietary software.

The explosion of for-profit interest in “Open Source” over the
last decade has led us to this paradoxical problem, which increases daily
— because the gap between “software under a license respects my
rights to copy, share, and modify” and “software that’s
essential for my daily activities” grows linearly wider with each
sunset.

I propose herein no panacea; I wish I had one to offer. However, I
believe the problem is exacerbated by our community’s tendency to ignore
this paradox, and its pace even accelerates due to many developers’ belief
that having a job writing any old Free Software replaces the need for
volunteer labor to author more strategic code that advances software
freedom.

Linksvayer’s View On Motivations & Causes of Kuhn’s Paradox

Linksvayer agrees the paradox is observable, but disagrees with me
regarding the primary motivations and causes. Linksvayer claims the
following are the primary motivations and causes of Kuhn’s paradox:

1. Software is becoming harder to avoid.
2. Proprietary vendors outcompete relatively decentralized free
   software efforts to put software in hands of people.

The latter may be increasing or decreasing. But even if the latter is
decreasing, the former trumps it.

Note the competition includes competition to control policy,
particularly public policy. Unfortunately most Free Software activists
appear to be focused on individual (thus dwarfish) heroism and insider
politics rather than collective action.

I rewrote Linksvayer’s text slightly from a comment made to this blog post
to include it in the main text, as I find his arguments regarding causes as
equally plausible as mine.

As an Apologia for
the possibility that Linksvayer means me spending too much time
on insider politics, I believe that the cooption I discussed above means
that the seemingly broad base of support we could use for the collective
action Linksvayer recommends is actually tiny. In other words, most
people involved with Free Software development now are not Free Software
activists. (Compare it to 20 years ago, when rarely did you find a Free
Software developer who wasn’t also a Free Software activist.) Therefore,
one central part of my insider politics work is to recruit moderate Open
Source enthusiasts to become radical Free Software activists.