Congenital Defect of opensource (Sat, 5th November, 1630 hrs).

TOPIC
Congenital Defect of opensource (Sat, 5th November, 1630 hrs).

MOTIVATION
Free software spearheaded by the indomitable idealist Richard Stallman was a disruptive force in the idea of software construction where strangers who never met each other would agree to pour their enthusiasm, love and technical skills in building something together all for the four vital freedoms.

Legions of GNU popped up all over the world (with the occassional black sheep) who contributed in myriad ways in pushing forward the vision of 'free society and free culture'.

While the message was packaged in creational, hacker and moral terms, the underlying principles were on sound footing ie.

• unilateral usage of copyright law
• blending with contract model
• legal terms of software license
• conditional grant of rights
• violation criteria vis-a-vis revocation
• remedies

As is usually the case, when idealism (software freedom principles) has established the foundation then comes opportunism (opensource marketing) with its equivocation and smoothing the friction tactics in order to make everyone look good in the group photo.

In the last decade enough evidence has accumulated that shows

• free software has no future in the country of its origin
• software freedom and social capital are the names of vulture capitalist companies
• software delivery over network (SaaS + cloud) effectively neuters freedom clauses
• change of software licenses is rampant for short-term commercial gains
• contributors who gain value when their contribution is enjoined with other contributors are at the losing end
• community and contributors are used until the project gains critical mass and then are treated like a liability
• dual-licensing where one option is proprietary license (with leading commits) are effectively a switch and bait model that pushes the prosumer to proprietary license
• programming languages which form core infrastructure have been maimed by forking/patent blocking on key ideas/algorithms
• ethically wrong ElasticSearch vs AWS OpenSearch
• profit maneouvers while abandoning the community

We will discuss multiple in-depth case studies of FOSS projects about various scenarios that have played out, their pathologies, dangers ahead not to speak of country-of-origin issues, embargo, export controls, extra territorial sanctions and other models of economic coercion.

Your active participation is solicited and appreciated during the session.

ONLINE
We use JITSI which has Audio, Video and Chat integrated in a single interface. Since JITSI is free software based service and has open interface, it is easily accessed using Browser or as a Android app.

JITSI
https://meet.jit.si/SoftwareHub

DAY
Saturday

DATE
2022-11-05

TIME
1630 hrs Ankara, Türkiye

LANGUAGE
English

As a community that believes in Software Freedom, all our sessions are FREE-of-CHARGE.

Code of conduct applies. RSVP is required !

Tüm Türkler davetlidir.