Nothing left. (#283)

Apparently⸺I am consciously out of the loop⸺, hot in academia nowadays is reacting to the societally desastrous questions raised about the indivdiual and their rights in the advent of profitable NLP; inventing some notion of anonimity. A tough sell when for years one perfected methods to reconstruct uniquely identifiable traits out of any­thing which wasn’t true noise.

At FOSDEM’24, A. Kergon⁠¹ claimed that telemetry would be necessary in the pre­sent day with free soft­ware (in the original MIT sense exempt of monetary obligations) extinct and open source fools run­ning out of spending power. He postulated industry-accepted anonymisation practices may lead to a synthesis of keeping certain parts of the free soft­ware promise while alleviating the de­vel­op­ment bur­den for underfunded teams by supplying them with data about how to ef­fec­tive­ly allocate their resources.

When we have reached a point where open source is in its se­man­tics being stretched wide enough to al­low flat-out telemetry on the operating system level, I have to seriously ask: What is there left?

Free soft­ware existed for as long as it existed on the fringes: hard­ware support was for decades lagging five or ten years be­hind and has in modern times on­ly been solved by including proprietary blobs di­rect­ly into the kernel. Free soft­ware never interoperated well with the proprietary formats required to look into the fabric of re­al­i­ty, forever more banishing it to its fringes.
For years I have been silently lamenting the seemingly omnipresent and never-halting urge popular projects seem to feel to be­come lacklustre copies of profit-interestedly successful products: Gnome copies Cupertino, KDE copies Redmond. AppImage copies Remond in pro­gram dis­tri­bu­tion who copy Cupertino in soft­ware indexing which is copied by FlatHub, a joint venture of Gnome and KDE. Modern open source is barren of any invention, barren of any identity ob­serv­able from within the prod­uct.
Interwoven with its identity is putting up with mediocre func­tion­al­i­ty kept alive by an intrinsically political, quenchless hope for a morally acceptable usage of com­put­ing.

And yet, with arguments to now cater to the usa­ger incompétent (cf. #271, #265), demolishing this last pillar is entertained.

But who truly is this usager incompétent who installs open source? I claim they don’t exist: when Thunderbird, one of the larger projects which is avail­able around both Redmond and Cupertino, proudly counts around eleven mil­lion users⁠²⁠³, I claim the principals I thought to fractionally share are being abandoned for a group comprised of no one.

Free soft­ware is dead. There is nothing left.