wingolog

I had a dream the other evening, in which I was at a large event full of hackers—funny, that this is the extent of my dreams at the moment; as a parent of three young kids, I don’t get out much—and, there, I was to receive an award and give a speech. (I know, I am a ridiculous man, even when sleeping.) The award was something about free software; it had the trappings of victory, but the vibe among attendees was numbness and bitter loss. Palantir had a booth; they use free software, and isn’t that just great?

My talk was to be about Guile, I think: something technical, something interesting, but, I suspected, something inadequate: in its place and time it would be a delight to go deep on mechanism but the moment seemed to call for something else.

These days are funny. We won, objectively, in the sense of the goals we set in the beginning; most software is available to its users under a free license: Firefox, Chromium, Android, Linux, all the programming languages, you know the list. So why aren’t we happy?

When I reflect back on what inspired me about free software 25 years ago, it was much more political than technical. The idea that we should be able to modify our own means of production and share those modifications was a part of a political project of mutual care: we should be empowered to affect the systems that surround us, to the extent that they affect us.

To give you an idea of the milieu, picture me in 1999. I left my home to study abroad on another continent. When I would go to internet cafés I would do my email and read slashdot and freshmeat as one did back then, but also I would often read Z magazine, Noam Chomsky and Michael Albert and Michael Parenti and Arundhati Roy and Zapatistas and all. I remember reading El País the day after “we” shut down the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle, seeing front-page pictures of pink-haired kids being beat up by the cops and wishing I were there with them. For me, free software fit with all of this: the notion that a better world was possible, and we could build it together.

I won’t lie and say that the ideals were everything. I think much of my motivation to program is selfish: I like to learn, to find out, to do. But back then I felt the social component more strongly. Among my cohort, though, I think we now do free software because we did free software; the motive sedimented into mechanism. These are the spoils of victory: free is the default. But defaults lack a sense of urgency, of the political.

Nowadays the commons that we built is the feedlot of large language models, and increasingly also its waste pond. The software we make is free, but the system in which it is made is not; Linux Magazine 1, Z magazine 0.

All of this makes me think that free software as a cause has run its course. We were the vanguard, and we won. Our dreams of 25 years ago are today’s table stakes. Specifically for my copyleft comrades, it seems that the role of copyright as a societal lever has much less purchase; taken to its conclusion, we might find ourselves siding with Disney and OpenAI against Google.

If I had to choose an idea from the 90s to keep, I would take “another world is possible” over the four freedoms. For me, software freedom is a strategy within a broader humanist project of liberation. It was clever, in that it could motivate people from a variety of backgrounds in a way that was on the whole positive for the humanist project. It inspired me as a meaningful way in which I could work towards a world of people caring for each other. In that spirit, I would like to invite my comrades to reflect on their own hierarchy of principles; too often I see people arguing the fine points of “is this software free” according to a specific definition without appreciating the ends to which the software freedom definition is a means.

Anyway, it turns out that I did win something, the Award for the Advancement of Free Software, for my work on Guile over the years. My work on Guile has waxed and waned, and in these last few years of parenthood it has been rather the latter, but I am proud of some of the technical hacks; and it has been with a heart-warming, wondrous delight that I have been a spectator to the rise of Guix, a complete operating system built on Guile. Apart from its quite compelling technical contributions, I just love that Guix is a community of people working together to build a shared project. I am going to the Guix days in a month or so and in past years it has been such a pleasure to see so many people there, working to make possible another world.

In my dream, instead of talking about Guile, I gave a rousing and compelling impromptu invective against Palantir and their ilk. I thought it quite articulate; I was asleep. In these waking hours, some days later, I don’t know what I did say, but I think I know what I would like to have said: that if we take the means of free software to be the ends, then we will find ourselves arguing our enemies are our friends. Saying that it’s OK if some software we build on is made by people who facilitate ICE raids. People who build spy software for controlling domestic populations. People who work for empire.

What I would like to say is that free software is a strategy. As a community of people that share some kind of liberatory principles of which free software has been a part, let use free software as best we can, among many other strategies. If it fits, great. If you find yourself on the same side of an argument as Palantir, it’s time to back up and try something else.