Having to explain the free software-open source schism to geographers without sounding like an insane person
Or, probably going to end up getting some unhinged emails about this one LOL
So I’m in the shift from writing-as-braindump notes to actual dissertation manuscript. I’m writing basically in reverse chronological order, because some of the web-era stuff is going to be in a journal article I need to submit in a couple of months and I’d like to get the first pass done early, which meant starting with the unbearably tedious topic of the history of open source.
I could be a lot more cavalier with this part of the text—I’m pretty sure most of my committee is familiar with the concept of open source software—if not for two things. One is that I kind of have to explain O’Reilly Media’s part in facilitating a lot of geo tech discourse through conferences and publishing (and also, one of my oral history interviewees Schuyler Erle probably wouldn’t have gotten into geo if he hadn’t moved to Sebastopol to work for O’Reilly and on the side co-founded a wireless ISP through which he found out about GRASS and MapServer, I am serious). The other is that geo is an useful sector for thinking about the business incentives for mainstreaming open source. Imagine a bunch of companies trying to do anything like the Overture Maps Foundation before Google Maps supremacy. Absolutely not!
For both of the above reasons I re-read Evgeny Morozov’s infamous 2013 Tim O’Reilly takedown. I think it’s pretty thorough in terms of tracing O’Reilly’s influence and the limitations of open source, but I really disagree with the framing of free software as this things-could-have-been-different counterpoint, and not just because Richard Stallman’s a creep who has said and done some fucked up things. I also just don’t think that the tech oligarchy we live with today would actually have been all that stalled in a timeline where free software principles won out over open source.
This is how I explain it in the dissertation:
Why, despite the effort of deliberately distancing and re-branding, are free software and open source often conflated? Perhaps because they mainly diverge in affect rather than outcomes. While open source is often perceived as the more business-friendly rebranding of free software, there’s actually nothing about free software that precludes participation in the free market. If anything, free software has proven itself to be remarkably compatible with the project of big tech monopolies. Amazon Web Services is built entirely on the foundation of the Linux operating system, a free software project that uses the GNU General Public License (GPL). Amazon’s use of Linux is GPL compliant insofar as the company publishes the source code of their particular builds of Linux online. In theory, anyone can run or modify Amazon’s Linux code. Any other questions of “freedom”—say, of the press as it pertains to Jeff Bezos’ Amazon wealth curtailing it at The Washington Post, or freedom to organize as it pertains to Amazon fulfillment centers—are immaterial to free software. Where free software has a half-baked theory of power that basically stops at “information asymmetry in software is bad”, open source essentially doesn’t engage with power at all—which is maybe worse in the sense that it’s vacuous, but is at least intellectually consistent.
Admittedly, I think about this stuff quite a bit because my partner is a co-author of the Anti-Capitalist Software License. Hilariously, the Free Software Foundation summary of the ACSL implores readers “please don’t use this license, and we urge you to avoid any software that has been released under it.” I entirely expect this blog post to bring out some RMS diehards who will try to tell me why I’m very wrong or why these narrow political constraints are good, actually, which will be annoying. Imagine making this your entire personality in a world full of so many other beautiful and interesting things!
This isn’t to say I have beef with the idea of freely sharing and collaborating on code. I love that! I think it’s very cool that happens, and it’s how I learned everything I know about coding. It’s more the kind of person for whom free software or open source is basically the only axis around which they define politics. The norm of freely sharing and collaborating on the computer (with regard to code or art or conversation) is, today, under a new kind of digital enclosure moment where large language models are turning all those interactions into a financialized asset that, at its absolute best, might produce extremely minor efficiency gains for a subset of laborers while eating aquifers and justifying the buildout of new gas and coal power plants. It’s just a very malnourished way of thinking about the world.
I don’t know if my committee actually needs to understand this particular narcissism of petty differences in the depth I’m providing it (a little over 1,000 words). But I guess if I have to engage with the “GIS wars” literature of the 1990s they can engage a little with this.