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+Title: Three Spirits of Libre Software
+Author: bnewbold
+Date: 2019-05-19
+Tags: free-software
+Status: draft
+
+Individuals associate with social movements for many reasons: [frustration with
+the status quo][tyranny-book], aspirational self-identity, peer-pressure,
+cultural overlap, attraction to a romantic vision, et cetera. In trying to
+clarify and organize my own support for the FLOSS movement (Free, Libre, and
+Open-Source Software), I've come up with three underlying narratives or
+"spirits" that motivate me.
+
+<div class="sidebar">
+I'm going to toss "free", "libre", and "open" around with abandon in this post,
+instead of using the FLOSS acronym consistently. I'm only using them
+intentionally when Capitalized.
+<br>
+"Hacker" and "Maker" cultures also have overlap FLOSS.
+</div>
+
+One motivation for writing these up is that discussion and critique of the
+FLOSS movement is counter-productive if there isn't a shared understanding of
+the goals and vision members are pursuing. I feel like I spend a lot of time
+re-telling my own version of "what we're really trying to achieve here" and
+disclaiming strawman arguments. Sometimes these discussions are with critics,
+but just as often they are with disillusioned contributors who feel like they
+are loosing the fight. Having these in a written form is something coherent to
+point to, and also gives me a framework to gauge progress (or lack there of) in
+the future.
+
+I'll acknowledge right up front that a strong fourth category of interest is
+social and cultural: I really love hanging out with hackers and Free Software
+people, hearing about their projects and weird ideas, visiting their spaces and
+events, earning respect and recognition, and so forth. But, at risk of
+underselling that special something of this particular community, these
+motivations exist in any group or movement, and here I'm addressing the values
+and narratives unique to FLOSS.
+
+[tyranny-book]: https://openlibrary.org/works/OL927028W/The_True_Believer_Thoughts_on_the_Nature_of_Mass_Movements
+
+
+## Enlightenment Ideals
+
+This is the most direct argument for libre software: that the individual
+freedoms to read, inspect, and understand the technology we use are first-order
+values and worth pursuing in their own right. That all human beings should be
+respected as peers and contributors to our intellectual infrastructure, not
+relegated to a class of passive users and consumers. This spirit is Romantic:
+it's not a utilitarian argument or narrative story, but appeals directly to
+principles and ideals (though utilitarian arguments can and are often made to
+support these principles). When I think "this is just how it *ought* to be", I
+know I'm feeling this spirit.
+
+<center>
+<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Philosopher_Lecturing_on_the_Orrery">
+  <img src="/static/fig/2019/painting_philosopher_orrery.jpg" alt="A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery" title="A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery" width="750px">
+</a>
+<br>
+<caption><i>"A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery" by Joseph Wright of Derby</i></caption>
+</center>
+
+The most notable and coherent defenders of this spirit historically has been
+Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation. Stallman makes an explicitly
+moral argument for "Four Freedoms":
+
+0. The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose
+1. The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your
+   computing as you wish
+2. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor
+3. The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others
+
+Historically, advocates of "Open Source Software" did not think that making a
+moral or ethical argument was an effective strategy in our society, and a
+schism formed despite both groups sharing many concrete goals. Those advocates
+framed Open Source as an economic strategy and a superior software engineering
+process: emphasizing "this will work better for you" instead of "it's just the
+right thing to do".  While some of the Open Source arguments are compelling,
+I'm skeptical of the broader claims (eg, I think a lot of open source software
+is of relatively poor quality) and am motivated more by the value-based
+arguments.
+
+A movement based on ideals align well with other "egalitarian" institutions and
+cultures. How can we have high-quality public education and learning without
+the ability to read source code and share derived experiments? Doesn't
+scientific knowledge production require transparency and freedom to tinker with
+our tools?
+
+Challenges and counter-balances to this spirit are often political economic
+arguments. Who underwrites these ideals? Don't we need to incentivize creators
+and capital-holders? Some market maximalists argue that treating non-rivalrous
+goods (like software and ideas) the same way we treat physical property will
+increase utility for both producers and consumers, and that we would be
+dangerously naive to treat them otherwise. Personally, I don't find these
+arguments rationally compelling: markets are *often* effective for
+coordination, and some form of regulation or redistribution *is* likely needed
+for "creators" to live less precarious lives, but I believe artificial
+enclosure ("intellectual property") has been a failure by it's own standards in
+the software sector.
+
+There are also some weak points to this narrative as a pragmatic activist
+philosophy.  It is hard to advocate for free software ideals when many of the
+most directly empowering and productive software tools are proprietary.  Should
+we ask students and scientists to use an inferior tools on principle?  This
+spirit is often invoked in universal terms ("all software should be free and
+open on principle"), but the principles apply more strongly to some software or
+"fields of endeavor" than others. For example, most individuals in society are
+probably willing to accept proprietary book-keeping, industrial controls, or
+airline-ticketing software, because these are considered private-sector or
+professional tooling, not part of the public sphere. Environmentalists face a
+similar challenge rallying public support to protect pest and insects, even
+though they are just as ecologically important as apex predators and
+"charismatic megafauna".
+
+
+## Hedging Authority
+
+<!--
+Another set of narratives around libre software focuses less on positive ideals
+and more on resistance to consolidation of power and market exploitation. In
+this world view, technology is a huge enabler of authoritarianism 
+-->
+
+Another narrative is that even a small specialist community of radical hackers
+can indirectly increase freedom for everybody. These hackers can tinker and
+work their magic at all layers of the digital "stack", and their tools and
+knowledge are open in principle, though they may be impractical for most to
+take advantage of.  Like armed militias, these anti-authoritarian groups are
+distributed throughout society ("a hacker on every block", like doctors or
+lawyers might be) and keep critical technical power and abilities from becoming
+over-centralized and exploited. They serve as watchers ("trust but verify"),
+activists, and liberators.
+
+<center>
+<a href="https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=2062">
+  <img src="/static/fig/2019/netv_insides_sm.jpg" alt="netv" title="netv" height="150px">
+</a>
+<a href="https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/23/16812834/edward-snowden-haven-guardian-project-laptop-phone">
+  <img src="/static/fig/2019/snowden_verge.jpg" alt="snowden" title="snowden" height="150px">
+</a>
+</center>
+
+The tools and alternatives built by this community give everybody leverage
+against centralized power and monopoly: the existence of even an inferior and
+unpopular alternative makes it harder for a monopoly to exploit its position.
+
+People with this mindset tend to concentrate on strategic "bottleneck"
+technologies that could be abused for social and economic control: compilers,
+bootloaders, 3D-printers, kernels, browsers, media players and interfaces (DVD,
+blueray, HDMI). They also love powerful debugging and development tools that
+can be used to inspect or reverse engineer systems (hardware or software): JTAG
+debuggers, disassemblers, electron microscopes, software defined radio
+transceivers, and logic analyzers.
+
+The GNU project has a bit of this spirit. The original goal was to ensure that
+the early community of hackers would always have the tools they needed to write
+software, and wouldn't be beholden or fractured by external proprietary
+software companies. This played out with a particular focus on developer
+toolchains and "completeness" (having a free/libre implementation for every
+component in the system). A project prioritizing direct public impact might
+have prioritized user interfaces accessible to beginners, and might have been
+willing to compromise on some of the back-end details, but GNU's focus has been
+a success on their own terms in that today it is possible today to run a
+free/libre operating system at all. Another success (to me) is the Tor project:
+not a tool most people use every day, but it's there when we need it, and it's
+very existence means that 100% surveillance (distinct from 95% surveillance) is
+not viable.
+
+A lot of folks see libre software projects as failures when they struggle to get
+even a fraction of the users as well-funded proprietary alternatives.
+Developers and maintainers are often criticized for not prioritizing broad
+popular adoption. Part of this spirit to me is that having even
+one-person-in-a-thousand using libre software can be taken as a big win: this
+is more about what is *possible* than what is popular or common. A weakness of
+this spirit is that it can be an excuse to neglect design, and in particular
+accessibility.
+
+
+## Post-Scarcity Economics
+
+The last narrative centers around leveraging modern technology to "solve
+problems" with radically less effort, and thus less need for traditional
+organization or incentives. This is the optimism that individuals in their own
+free time (or loosely organized groups with little or no funding or structure),
+following their own whims and interests, can contribute to a software commons,
+and that solutions from this commons can work so well that most people never
+even realize there was a challenge or friction in the first place. The ur-myth
+of this spirit is the hobbyist who gets frustrated about the cost or poor
+quality of some government or corporate piece of software and writes a
+replacement on a weekend afternoon, that works well enough gain near-universal
+adoption for decades.
+
+<center>
+<a href="https://medium.com/@RickWebb/the-economics-of-star-trek-29bab88d50">
+  <img src="/static/fig/2019/star_trek_city.jpg" alt="star trek" title="star trek" height="150px">
+</a>
+  <img src="/static/fig/2019/burning_man.jpg" alt="burning man" title="burning man" height="150px">
+</center>
+
+Two individuals who exemplify this spirit to me are Fabrice Bellard (creator of
+QEMU, `ffmpeg`, and many other popular low-level software libraries) and Joey
+Hess (creator of `git-annex`, `ikiwiki`, `debhelper`, and others). In reality
+these individuals have structured their lifestyles around libre software work,
+so it feels weird to call their efforts "low resource", but in the big picture
+it's amazing how much they have produced and accomplished as individuals with
+minimal support from traditional institutions.
+
+To me this narrative is at once the most problematic and the most relatable.
+All software exists in a massive superstructure of ongoing maintenance,
+support, and external costs; and yet this narrative doesn't deny that
+superstructure, it's emphasizing how empowering it can be. The stress and
+expectations on unfunded developers whose side projects explode in popularity
+are well documented. This method of production has no accountability (creators
+have no formal obligation or commitment to the users of their software), huge
+bias (who has the means and resources to contribute? whose problems do they try
+to solve?), "race to the bottom" dynamics, etc. At the same time, "the market"
+suffers many of the same challenges, and consumes a whole lot more societal
+resources.
+
+This narrative might be driven as much by the median dysfunction and
+inefficiency of industrial software production as much as the productivity of
+individual developers. The inefficiencies of individual production are
+distributed and less visible.
+
+The definition of success sort of boils down to just popularity, and there are
+undeniably examples of popular free software projects with low initial effort.
+For example, gzip, git, Redis, WordPress, Python, and VLC are all projects that
+got to first releases with (relatively) few contributors, and have become
+widely popular (for their specific use-cases).
+
+Personally, this spirit is often a motivation to *start* projects, but
+dissipates when the reality of effort actually required becomes apparent. Stated
+most hyperbolically, "software is eating the world" and free software might be
+the spearhead of a new post-scarcity political economic order: a form of
+anarchic voluntary contribution to the common-wealth, with corporations,
+capital, and government relegated to bit roles. More realistically, this form
+of development depends on a larger more organized foundation, and can only form
+a small part of the larger economy and ecosystem.
+
+My intellectual hope for a better future lies in organization, norms,
+regulation, and worker-directed collectives, not individual super-productivity.
+At the same time, it's impossible not to have my heart swell of human pride and
+optimism when I see a small group (or single individual) apparently "Solve" a
+problem in their free time, in a way everybody could benefit from forever.
+
+
+## Other Narratives
+
+The three "spirits" above are what I think are core motivations to me, but
+there are other narratives I think about and could be more motivating to
+others.
+
+As mentioned at the beginning, the **general culture of a community** can be a
+strong attractor if it is welcoming, creative, healthy, diverse, challenging,
+supportive, exciting, etc.
+
+Many believe that some combination of common FLOSS development practices and
+open access to source code leads to **better software quality** on it's own.
+This particularly applies to cryptography and privacy/security sensitive
+software (and some would say all software raises privacy and security
+concerns).
+
+There is **labor empowerment** argument that open source is better for the
+careers of developers, because they can show a portfolio of previous work to
+potential employers, and are more incentivized to create tools and high-quality
+software because they know they can bring it along to any future jobs.
+
+For many who **dislike traditional start-up and corporate culture** or
+seek alternatives to capitalism, any alternative means of production is
+appealing in it's own right.
+
+------------
+
+Thanks to [Asheesh](https://asheesh.org) and [Remy](https://twitter.com/remy_d)
+for a long walk and conversation that clarified my thinking, as well as
+Gabrielle Colman's [*Coding Freedom*][coding-freedom], Nadia Egbal's ["Roads
+and Bridges" report][roads-bridges], and Mako Hill's [writings on free
+software][https://mako.cc/] for stimulating these ideas in the first place.
+
+This essay was first drafted in early 2018. Other recent writing on this
+subject includes Steve Klabnik's ["The Culture War at the Heart of Open
+Source"][klabnik-culture-war] and ["Freedom isn't Free"][logic-freedom-free] in
+Logic Magazine.
+
+[coding-freedom]: https://gabriellacoleman.org/Coleman-Coding-Freedom.pdf
+[roads-bridges]: https://www.fordfoundation.org/about/library/reports-and-studies/roads-and-bridges-the-unseen-labor-behind-our-digital-infrastructure/
+[klabnik-culture-war]: https://words.steveklabnik.com/the-culture-war-at-the-heart-of-open-source
+[logic-freedom-free]: https://logicmag.io/05-freedom-isnt-free/
+
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