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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2016/01/25/fsf-conservancy.html

[ This blog was crossposted
on Software Freedom Conservancy’s website. ]

I’ve had the pleasure and the privilege, for the last 20 years, to be
either a volunteer or employee of the two most important organizations
for the advance of software freedom and users’ rights to copy, share,
modify and redistribute software. In 1996, I began volunteering for the
Free Software Foundation (FSF) and worked as its Executive Director from
2001–2005. I continued as a volunteer for the FSF since then, and
now serve as a volunteer on FSF’s Board of Directors. I was also one
of the first volunteers for Software Freedom Conservancy when we founded it
in 2006, and I was the primary person doing the work of the organization as
a volunteer from 2006–2010. I’ve enjoyed having a day job as a
Conservancy employee since 2011.

These two organizations have been the center of my life’s work. Between
them, I typically spend 50–80 hours every single week doing a mix of
paid and volunteer work. Both my hobby and my career
are advancing software freedom.

I choose to give my time and work to these organizations because they
provide the infrastructure that make my work possible. The Free Software
community has shown that the work of many individuals, who care deeply
about a cause but cooperate together toward a common goal, has an impact
greater than any individuals can ever have
working separately. The same is often true for cooperating organizations:
charities, like Conservancy and the FSF, that work together with each other
amplify their impact beyond the expected.

Both Conservancy and the FSF pursue specific and differing approaches and
methods to the advancement of software freedom. The FSF is an advocacy
organization that raises awareness about key issues that impact the future
of users’ freedoms and rights, and finds volunteers and pays staff to
advocate about these issues. Conservancy is a fiscal sponsor, which means
one of our key activities is operational work, meeting the logistical and
organizational needs of volunteers so they can focus on the production of
great Free Software and Free Documentation. Meanwhile, both Conservancy
and FSF dedicated themselves to sponsoring software projects: the FSF
through the GNU project, and Conservancy
through its member
projects. And, most importantly, both charities stand up for the
rights of users by enforcing and defending copyleft licenses such as the
GNU GPL.

Conservancy and the FSF show in concrete terms that two charities can work
together to increase their impact. Last year, our organizations
collaborated on many projects, such as
the proposed
FCC rule changes for wireless devices, jointly handled
a GPL
enforcement action against Canonical, Ltd.,
published the
principles of community-oriented GPL enforcement, and continued our
collaboration on copyleft.org. We’re
already discussing lots of ways that the two organizations can work
together in 2016!

I’m proud to give so much of my time and energy to both these excellent
organizations. But, I also give my money as well: I was the first person
in history to become an Associate Member
of the FSF (back in November 2002), and have gladly paid my monthly
dues since then. Today, I also signed up as an
annual Supporter of
Conservancy, because I’m want to ensure that Conservancy’s meets its
current pledge match — the next 215 Supporters who sign up before
January 31st will double their donation via the match.

For just US$20 each month, you make sure the excellent work of both these
organizations can continue. This is quite a deal: if you are employed,
University-educated professional living in the industrialized world,
US$20 is probably the same amount you’d easily spend on a meals at
restaurants or other luxuries. Isn’t it even a better luxury to know that
these two organizations can have employ a years’ worth of effort of
standing up for your software freedom in 2016? You can make the real
difference by making your charitable contribution to these two
organizations today:

• Conservancy’s Supporter program
• FSF’s Associate Membership program

Please don’t wait: both fundraising deadlines are just
six days away!