Ah, I see the gnu people are up in the discourse again. Lovely.
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@mhoye the other day I formulated it as: FOSS has won. Yet not the people creating it.
For "public" and the extent to which transparency applies, there is I think more nuance to make.
In FOSS there's notion of "working in public" and "radical transparency". Meanwhile this happens almost nowhere in society, not online or offline.
For FOSS the code MUST be public, decision-making around the code SHOULD be public, and day-to-day project activities MAY be public. Plus public is not the same as how easily accessible it is to e.g. "the enemy", for whom working in public is a gift and who is able to act on it better.
Social coding commons extends working in public with "working in commons", to better hold the enemy out.
Wrt law-making analogy. The law must be public, as well as convictions etc, as you say. But on the investigation one should have the right to privacy. I am often surprised how US police bodycams are put on social media, convicting people for life.
Hi @mhoye
a misunderstanding is, that #FOSS isn't in any way liberating for the illiterate. Which is 95% of the audience.
The way out is #frugality according to your (community's) own skill level.
@mhoye What an absurd version of reality.
If anything has been proven over the last two decades, it's that the vast majority of people simply don't care about their software freedoms and have no desire to understand the software they're using.
However, everyone who does has been liberated to such an enormous degree that I'm honestly wondering what planet you're writing this post from. We're living the FOSS dream today, compared to 25 years ago.
@raucao @mhoye I don't and have never cared about software freedom that is limited to only people who "care about their software freedoms" sufficiently.
I care about software freedom as an extension of freedom within society, in a society that has incorporated software as a fundamental backbone.
I only value Firefox as a Free Software browser, as an HTTP(S) User-Agent that advances freedoms, to the extent that its users, as a category of citizen, can modify, reconfigure, recompile, and respond to novel challenges in ways that express and extend their Agency, as a User.
As a social experiment it's obvious by now that "classic" FOSS has failed.
That is, on the terms of the Free Software nor Open Source movements - either one, in a practical sense it has not turned out to be a difference that's mattered at all - the fundamental argument that access to the text of the software will be liberatory for the people subject to the decisions made in that software has proven, with some rare and privileged exceptions, to be false.
The question is what do we do next.