https://boyter.org/posts/the-three-f-s-of-open-source/

Better attitudes towards open source and free software.

hobbyist software

One way of framing "open source" and to a lesser extent free software is as hobbyist software. Generally speaking, this is true (with the exception of course of corporate open source development).

I think some of us would initially recoil at the name due to a connotation of hobbyist projects being in some way inferior. A great deal of open source "hobbyist projects" are far superior (in terms of correctness, efficiency, and obviously ability to tinker and fix yourself) to their "professional" and usually proprietary counterparts. In many other industries or fields of study this is not the case. You wouldn't expect a hobbyist airplane to be up to the same standards, let alone far surpassing those of professional airplane manufacturing. Part of the reason for this I think is that many hobbyist programmers are also professionals by day or at the very least are trained to the level of being able to obtain a software engineering job. They also tend to be writing the software for a good reason and are very passionate about achieving a good result. In comparison to doing just enough on the boring and useless project at work such that you don't get fired.

The organizational structures are also much more natural with far fewer or zero artificially derived hierarchies. Open source developers tend to work on whichever features are important to them and for as long or as little as they feel is needed. Since they also have a far better understanding of the code and structure than some manager interested in making money, this tends to result in much higher quality code. Specifically, maintenance issues are dealt with quickly because avoiding them makes the code "painful to write". Whereas in professional development maintenance is avoided is it will not add new "features" in the next release and does not directly correlate to an increase in "revenue" (similar to how critical infrastructure is seldom maintained under capitalism). In fact these same pressures and forces would also apply to our hobbyist airplane manufacturing, but the huge difference is that they don't have the resources to test and try out hundreds of different designs, run fancy wind tunnel simulations, and whatever other expensive shit goes into it I have no idea. In software development the differences between "professional" and "hobbyist" tools and resources are very minor. You don't even need a fast computer! A slow one is better for writing good software anyway.

One of the advantages of framing open source as "hobbyist software development" is it'll maybe make those corporate freaks stop bitching and moaning about the "software supply chain" and other insane bullshit they've made up to try and get us to do their work for them for free. Simply put, if you've setup your business to rely on hobbyist software you don't get any fucking warranty from us. Perhaps you can pay us a few grand and maybe we wont close your issue right away.

But that's just it! If they don't rely on stealing our work they wouldn't be able to stay afloat at all. First of all the companies that DO continue to steal our work will out compete those that do not, but additionally if they ALL were forced to stop they would not be able to release ANY of the software everyone is used to using. Anyway this is why copyleft is a good idea. Not perfect though because when push comes to shove the laws written by capitalists apply to us much more than they apply to them. Github's copilot is a perfect example of this. They pretty blatantly violate copyright on a mass scale, but wont get in trouble for it because they're primarily stealing from us proles and not anyone important.

gpl

A copyleft license for fighting copyright. Not ideal, but probably the best option for now.