Interesting but also very vague. Maybe worth looking at again in a year or so.

Yes, it just got out of closed beta, but I don't spend enough time at the OS level to dream up my own use case. Since there's been very minimal write-up / dissemination work, my sense is that the entire community is folks who've hacked on Apptron with nonzero success. This impresses me.

This is fantastic. The links and citations are so rich too.

Really well written post. It makes explicit something I’ve been confused about. This new criticism of open source doesn’t really resonate with me.

Yet if open source code alone could change the world, it would have happened by now. When Microsoft suddenly turned OSS-friendly in the 2010s we triumphantly proclaimed "open source has won!", but what have we got to show for it? More technology does not on its own correlate with better quality of life.

This desire that software licensing (of any sort, open source, fair source etc) changes the world as a whole for the better is not something I share.

Perhaps I’m being pessimistic in that. But I see the ability of corporations to take advantage of open source and gain more power from it as not a failing of open source, but as a fact of the political structure of the corporation. If we, collectively decided to move to a fair source (or any of the alternatives I’ve seen proposed) model, my belief is that too would end up benefiting corporations (particularly large ones) disproportionately to the rest of us.

I definitely think there is more that I disagree with here. But I really think this gets to the heart of where the rest of those disagreements come from.

My worry, is that because I believe this is true, these efforts to restrict, or draw boundaries, will exclude some who would have had access otherwise, and will just give more tools for corporations to further consolidate their power.

The way I see it, and what resonated most with me, is the idea that ~open source (shared, source available, whatever it is) is a precondition for any kind of commons around software.

I guess that regresses to "do we expect commonses to change the world for the better?" which in my case I would say yes, but that is a site of argument too.

Jimmy Miller I share a similar sentiment, licensing as the only theory of change seems unlikely to materially change things. I think this essay articulates it the best I've seen.

There's history that tends to lack in these conversations as well. For example the open source movement didn't form around a politics to create a software commons resistant to enclosure or labor exploitation, it formed around trying to reframe the free software movement into something that is beneficial to commercial interests.