TLDR:Software geeks, parents, educators and lawmakers should get their common priorities straight and start to seriously work together to achieve what matters the most in an all-digital world. Here is what, why, and how.
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One-paragraph introduction to Open Source for readers who may not know it yet: Free/Open Source Software, or FOSS for brevity, is software whose full source code is legally available for everybody to study, modify, reuse and redistribute, even commercially. These possibilities make it much easier to find and fix software bugs, and make locking users into any FOSS software application almost impossible. Some form of FOSS has been around since when computer were invented, but FOSS was formally defined forty years ago, and tirelessly promoted since then, by people who strongly (and 100% correctly) believe that freedom of software is extremely important and the basis of many other freedoms.
Successes and limits of FOSS
These days, one may argue that the FOSS advocacy by the sincere defenders of freedom who have been promoting it for decades has been extremely successful. even for the billions of people who benefit from FOSS daily but couldn’t define or recognize it.
FOSS is, without doubts, what makes the whole Internet possible; Android, the operating system that powers almost every mobile device that’s not Apple, is (almost entirely) Open Source; the most successful FOSS product, the GNU/Linux operating system, reached 10 per cent desktop usage in North America this year (more details here), and some versions of Linux and LibreOffice should soon replace Windows and Microsoft Office on government desktops all over the world, from China to Netherland.
And yet, in spite of all this, and thanks in no negligible part to the very availability of FOSS...
FOSS is used to make the perfect police state, because freedom rightly means one cannot restrict uses. Facial recognition systems or automatic communication scanners used for mass surveillance in China and other countries surely use FOSS components. Even in the allegedly greatest democracy of the “First” world, the Flock cameras that remain a civil liberty threat function thanks to a modified version of Android.
People are dumbed down and alienated by software products, from social media to AI personal “assistants” of all sorts, that could have never been built so quickly and so cheaply without using FOSS.
We are all infested by software incompatibilities that should have never be allowed to exist, because they are the opposite of innovation, and create tons of really ridiculous frustrations and wastes of money. I could make thousands of examples here, but I’ll stop to the two that bug me most this particular week (add yours in the comments please):
car repairs that cost much more than they could because cars have become “smart”
“smartphone-afflicted parenting”: many posts on online forums for parents trying to protect their kids from online dangers in all ways but the right one specifically ask for solutions suitable for “an Apple family” or “an Android family”, as in “we’d love to give each family member the cheapest smartphone that would best fit their actual needs, but making two brands of software communication platforms communicate is too complicated”.
Free as in “free from censors and easy automatic spying” email is dying, and this is much more serious than you may think, because email is all but “obsolete”.
Systems like WhatsApp, Instagram, Signal, Telegram, Mastodon, X, BlueSky... are all very primitive, because someone with e.g. only an Instagram account cannot communicate directly with someone who only has one of the other accounts. That is, those systems all lock people into using the same maker and model of software device if they want to communicate, which if you think about it is as stupid as if smartphones from different makers couldn’t call each other, or if each radio station could be received only from its own brand of radio. Not to mention the idiocy of using phone numbers as account names, which I won’t rant about just because I already did, eight years ago.
Truth is, the only digital communication system that already exists, is already scalable to the whole planet and was already free from such cretin limits in the past century is email. Everybody can get all the email addresses they want, with any email provider they want, or even self-host their full email system, and still be able to communicate with anybody having any other email address from any other provider.
In spite of this, we’ve all managed, thanks to lack of adequate information campaigns, to let self-hosted, that is FREE email halve in the last decade: today, Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 together receive almost 40 per cent of the Internet’s inbound mail. In plain English, that means that just two for-profit companies, both (theoretically) subject to the same not-entirely-trustable government get to decide which email is delivered and which isn’t, worldwide. It also means that those two companies already have all your email even if you are not using the email accounts they provide, since at least 2014.
Who is at fault here?
Nothing you just read is the fault of FOSS as such. In and by itself, FOSS is as great as it is necessary, and those problems are FOSS working exactly as intended, because freedom is freedom to do (almost) anything one wants, and for good reasons.
Those bad things have happened, and will continue to happen, because the overwhelming majority of both the general public and of lawmakers still have no clue about which measures would be needed to fix those problems. It is that ignorance that keeps regulators and parents worldwide chasing dead ends like age limits for social media, useless “data portability”, break-ups of companies that wouldn’t accomplish anything, lawsuits that let Big Tech keep doing whatever they want or (in Europe) digital sovereignty plans that look a bit too much like “let’s just ape the Americans, but without their money”.
Those who bears the greatest responsibility for the current state of things are, of course, the people in charge, that is lawmakers and government officials around the world. But they aren’t alone.
As far as FOSS goes, my actual and only issue with almost all traditional FOSS advocates is that, even if they surely have the knowledge to see both the real nature of certain problems, and to propose real solutions, they haven’t done, for decades now, all they could and should have done to lessen the general ignorance around digital issues that were both bigger and (in the last two decades at least) more urgent than how to write and license software. In the long run, exclusive, laser-like focus on the freedom to write, modify, reuse and share software code can only backfire... just as it is already doing.
What should happen instead
Concretely, here are the first things (add yours in the comments, please!) on which I think FOSS advocates, parents, teachers and lawmakers should start to seriously work together in order to make the world an actually better place that still gets all the real benefits of advanced digital technology:
immediately end access to general purpose AI chatbots for the general public. The real problem with AI today, after the childish, sociopathic minds of its creators of course, is letting it loose on masses absolutely unprepared to handle it
mandatory adversarial interoperability for all digital platforms, from social media to “smart home” systems
prohibition of infinite scrolling and other addictive features in social media platforms
mandatory use of open document formats by public administrations
prohibition for every public official, from the White House and Bruxelles to the most remote villages, of the really dumb and dangerous practice of communicating primarily through social media, instead of official websites and RSS feeds
Open Data by default for and by (at least) all Public Administrations
Personal Cloud policies that make possible for everybody to have what I first proposed about 14 years ago; really portable, personal clouds with PERMANENT DOMAIN NAMES
What all the proposals above have in common:
That’s easy: technically and legally speaking, none of them, except the last one, requires FOSS. But I’m sure that, had FOSS done more in the last 20 years to help lawmakers and voters to understand and consequently demand policies like those... by now we’d surely have both much more freedom in everything digital than today and, as one side effect, also much wider adoption of FOSS than today. So the sooner FOSS advocates, parents, teachers and regulators start to cooperate for real as I outlined in this post, the better for everybody.
As I said, I am available to work, speak and teach on these topics: if interested, please email mfioretti@nexaima.net.
(*) For the record, I didn’t just wake up to certain problems this week…
I have been saying for two decades now that FOSS is wonderful but the canonical way to promote it is guilty of leaving the most urgent software problems we all have today grow undisturbed. Here are just some of the proofs:
2006: Seven Things we’re tired of hearing from software hackers
2015: The “Free Software icon” that we need most... said 15 years ago
2018: What Linux needs to target to get more users is their PAST
2018: Personal Clouds to replace corporate-controlled-platforms
2019: This year’s “Year of Linux Desktop” still misses a crucial issue
2022: Linux has become a mess of incompatible software packaging formats