The founders of the Software Liberation Front are a pair of Free/Libre/Open Source Software enthusiasts and part-time activists. They were for years content to make use of the
FLOSS software that was available and occasionally give back in the form of development, community-based support, random and mood-motivated advocacy, and documentation. Increasingly, however, they chafed under the false dichotomy created by the Free Software and Open Source community split, unfulfilled by both the ethically neutral Open Source approach and the reactionary Free Software approach.
Unsatisfied with being reviled for their outre political beliefs, and feeling that they weren't sufficiently on the edge of insanity with regard to software, Ren and Ogre embarked on a mission to piss off the entire free software movement by attacking the FSF for being
too corporate oriented. Not content with tilting at political windmills, our intrepid heroes took aim at "Free Software" licensing for being too restrictive.
Ogre's statement:
"The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair."
– H. L. Mencken
I'm here because Ren pointed out that the
GPL has some severe technical flaws, and I like poking at orthodoxy wherever it can be found. The FSF had a great idea at first — that people should be free to share the fruits of their intellect with one another — but the FSF has become dogmatic about things I don't see as being in the best interest of that intellectual freedom.
I'm involved in this project because the FSF has such potential to be a force for good, and is instead tied up in an ideological struggle for goals that end up hurting what I perceive to be their actual cause. If I have misjudged their actual cause, and they really intend the consequences of this ideological struggle, then I oppose the communistic ethic that enforces these imposed costs they've created for people who may merely wish to help the
FLOSS movement.
After spending years wasting time and money on things that are large and unimportant, I'm now looking to waste time and money on things that are almost unnoticable and very important. The goals of the
SLF are unnoticable because, frankly, the FLOSS movement is beneath the horizon of 97% of humanity. They're very important because I do truly believe that the spirit of cooperation through which FLOSS works represents the best hope for humanity to advance. The combined power of millions of minds at work is awe inspiring to contemplate, and I can't think of anything more philosophically important than to stand opposed to anything which threatens the freedom of those minds to work together in the most effective way possible.
Ren's statement:
"That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property."
– Thomas Jefferson
One of my greatest disappointments with the
FLOSS community is its almost complete failure to produce a subcommunity that is ethically dedicated to FLOSS for the liberation of the intellect from the proprietary claims of information protectionists without devolving into an extremist, factional orthodoxy hell-bent on destroying the village to save it. There are, for the most part, only two politically correct positions in the world of free/libre/open source software: that of the Free Software Foundation zealot whose only interest in the freedom of software is a near-religious obsession with all source code being irrevocably committed to irresistible redistribution even at the expense of people who just want to use the software, and that of the Open Source pragmatist whose only interest in the openness of software source code is the engineering benefits provided by the open source development model.
Both of these approaches to the question of the openness and freedom of software only incidentally address the matter of the actual rights and liberties of the people using and developing the software, if they address it at all. In the case of the
FSF orthodoxy, the fact that their flagship license, the
GPL, in fact
violates certain logically consequent requirements of the FSF's own Four Freedoms of software seems to be of little interest in the crusade against purveyors of proprietary software. Meanwhile, the very business-oriented approach of the
OSI and those of like-minded opinions on the matter entirely omits any concern for ethicality with regard to the freedom of software, its users, and its developers. They would, it seems, be just as happy with purely proprietary, closed source software if the same engineering benefits as available through an open source development model could be had in a closed source development environment. The most common definitive statement made by advocates for the OSI view in fact seems to be that closed source proprietary software and open source software can coexist peacefully in a magical happy land of corporate profitability and chewy centers.
Meanwhile, nobody's really standing up for the guy who just wants to be able to use software, pass it on to his friends, and tinker with its insides if he feels the urge, without worrying about whether he'll be hauled off to court for failing to provide source code when asked two years later, or for violating an obscure clause in an End User License Agreement prohibiting reverse engineering. That is, in large part, what I'm doing here at the Software Liberation Front: standing up for you, assuming you're neither zealot nor morally bankrupt project manager with a hard-on for process efficiency at all costs. I support neither the Democrat's approach of socialistic community property, nor the Republican's approach of fascistic state-enforced corporate ownership of everything, including the contents of your own minds. Instead, I support the idea that you own what you possess, and what you give or sell to others is theirs to do with as they please without having to ask your permission. Period.
I'm a multiply-certified (who cares?) IT consultant who has, to date, primarily worked in disaster recovery, network architecture and implementation, tech writing and technology industry analysis journalism, and web development, with an emphasis on open source technologies. I'm a co-founder of the Software Liberation Front, and typically have no problem sharing my unpopular opinions on just about anything — as if you couldn't tell.