Forward from: 🔊 Intuitive Social Software • Intuitive Public Computer • Intuitive Social Tech • IPR •••
https://cooperativetechnology.codeberg.page/ Before I saw the manifesto, I had written a draft list of aspects beyond licensing and contribution that determine the social good of your project: https://libranet.de/display/0b6b25a8-3060-61f6-28df-cae554943983 The conversations that led directly to the creation of the manifesto: https://social.polymerwitch.com/@polymerwitch/105934078911643041 https://fosstodon.org/@be/105952735879246194 [0] https://opensource.com/article/18/2/coining-term-open-source-software [1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.en.html [2] https://fosstodon.org/@be/105952960559032774 Towards A Cooperative Technology Movement In response to the surprise, undemocratic reinstatement of Richard Stallman to the board of directors of the Free Software Foundation after his resignation in September 2019, the Free and Open Source Software movement is in the midst of a reckoning. The authors of this document recognize and honor the contributions Richard Stallman has made to this movement while unequivocally condemning his harmful behavior which has pushed many capable, dedicated people away from the movement. Regardless of what happens in the Free Software Foundation, we believe it is time to reflect on the shortcomings of our advocacy so we can grow into a more effective and inclusive movement for justice. Towards this end, we believe the movement will benefit from new terminology to describe what we do and what we aim for. Richard Stallman authored the free software definition in 1986. This term has always created difficulties communicating the ideas behind it because of the different meanings of the word "free" in English. Moreover, it is not the freedom of machines we are concerned with, but the freedom of humans. In response to this and other issues, in 1998, the term open source was promoted using an adapted version of the Debian Free Software Guidelines. The history of computing in the past 23 years have validated critiques that the term "open source" is insufficient for communicating the values behind it. The term "open source" and the ecosystem of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is today used by powerful companies, governments, and other institutions to harm people on enormous scales through surveillance and violence. These institutions use FOSS to minimize economic costs by benefitting from decades of work done by others, much of which was done by unpaid volunteers motivated by curiosity, passion, and the ideals of the FOSS movement. We believe a significant reason for the failures of both "free software" and "open source" to prevent this cooptation is that the men who coined and initially promoted these terms did not and do not critique capitalism. Richard Stallman has generally dodged the question of whether free software is opposed to capitalism. In the historical context of the United States in the 1980s, that may have been a wise decision. But that was then, and now it is 2021. The promoters of "open source" emphasize its compatibility with capitalism and go out of their way to distance "open source" from critiques of capitalism. We believe we need to build on the FOSS movement with an explicitly anticapitalist political movement which proactively collaborates with other movements for justice. We propose the term "cooperative technology" for this movement. By "cooperative technology", we mean technology that is constructed by and for the people whose lives are affected by its use. While this builds on the Free and Open Source Software movement, we aim to apply the same principles to hardware as well, although the criteria by which we evaluate hardware and software will of course not be identical. It is not sufficient to narrowly focus on the people who directly interact with computers. Cooperative software which is run on a server should not be controlled solely by the administrator of the server, but also by the people who interact with the server over a network.
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