Why Do We Need Open Source?

Published: 2024-02-09T19:30:00+01:00

Why do we need open source? Why do we need to control our own data? Why do we need free and interopable standards?

I think we are entering a new age of decentralization. After over a decade of the internet transforming from a mostly decentralized place into a few well-known services controlled by large corporations that do not have user interests at heart, regulation is finally starting to catch up to this new world. We owe this change to the efforts of thousands over multiple decades. And ultimately, it all comes back to the tenets of open source and free software.

The Digital Markets Act

The Digital Markets Act of the European Union is the main driver of this change, forcing the large companies like Facebook/Google/Apple to open up their services in such a way that they are interoperable or able to have actual competition.

The Fediverse (the social media sites built on ActivityPub and related protocols) is poised to become a defining trait of this next era of the internet. And it was all made possible by open source and open standards.

Open source software and open standards serve many purposes. But one of the most important ones is that they can and do serve as a bulwark that protects user interests against the interests of the large corporations that are only interested in barely-legal and mostly unethical data harvesting to increase profits. It can definitely be argued that open source has not always been successful in this regard: many people view the open source movement as an obscure fringe group in the world of computing (and they're not entirely wrong). But those people also tend to forget about the success of projects like the Linux kernel, the GNU userland, and Mastodon et al.

The Power of Free Software

Licenses like the GPL and AGPL are a strong shield that protect user interests over the long term, and the GPL has been demonstrably successful in this regard. The “extreme” rules of the (A)GPL have also spawned a host of weaker-but-still-compatible licenses that allow developers to build on the work of others in a permissive manner, for both private and commercial purposes. These other licenses have their ideological roots in the tenets of the GPL, although many of the licenses were created because of an explicit disagreement with the GPL.

Without the ideas behind the GPL, user freedom would likely be compromised to the point of non-existence. When even a company like Meta/Facebook enters the ActivityPub space, the ideas of the Open Source and Free Software movements are working (Arguments against Meta implementing ActivityPub not withstanding). I believe all of the lobbying, drafting, proposals, and effort that have finally brought us the Digital Markets Act eventually are all blossoms that come from the seed of free software and open source.

Free software must continue to exist, and continue to push for the rights of the user, so we do not lose them.

Filed under: open source, ideology

License: CC-BY-SA-4.0.

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Written by: @[email protected]