The free software movement is a political movement

One of the most successful piece of misdirection in history (and the most in the history of computing) has been the redescription of free software as a question of methodology, that is, "open" development and faster bug fixes. However, the movement was political from the beginning, because the question it asked was political: who controls the software that mediates your life, you or the owner of the machine's legal fiction?

The word free here was never a matter of engineering method or taste or anything else, it did not mean "open development tends to produce fewer bugs." It meant freedom in the older republican sense: the freedom of the user to run, study, modify, and share the software that governs his/her work, his/her communication, his/her reading, his/her finances, and now, increasingly, his/her entire social existence.

That question is political because software no longer sits beside the world as a tool, if it ever really did, software is administration, communication, finance, and surveillance. It decides who is approved for a loan, whose résumé is filtered before a human sees it, whose face is recognized at a border, whose tractor will start in the morning. Once a thing occupies that place in life, control over it becomes a question of power, and power is politics, whether engineers like the word or not.

Proprietary software is a political arrangement. It creates an asymmetry between the user and the vendor one side may inspect, modify, withhold, revoke, surveil, degrade, or abandon and other side may click "agree." That is a relation of domination, and is why I find it irritating when people talk about free software as if it were just one engineering taste among others, just like if it sat beside tabs versus spaces or static versus dynamic typing. No. A program that the user cannot study or change is a different style of software production, it is software that places the user in a position of dependence. I argue that the technical form matters precisely because it encodes a social relation.

The later, more recent, even more popular, "open source" rebranding should be understood partly as a depoliticization campaign. Whatever good came from it tactically, and some certainly did, its rhetorical function is as follows: remove the embarrassing moral language, remove the talk of freedom, remove the conflict, and replace all of it with business-friendly language about collaboration and better development models, and so on. In other words, keep many of the practices, but amputate the politics that gave them meaning. This was much more acceptable to corporations because "open source" can be integrated into capital accumulation without much discomfort and a company can release some code, benefit from community labor, recruit prestige, reduce costs, and still maintain the underlying structure of domination elsewhere, and they get a bonus, many members of the community thank them for such a goodwill! "Free software", by contrast, keeps asking an impolite question: who rules the computing environment, and by what right?

Again, this question is political in the same way labor politics is political. It concerns authority, ownership, autonomy, class power, and the everyday organization of dependence. If your employer forces you to use software you cannot inspect, if your school requires platforms you cannot modify, if your government communicates through systems you cannot audit, if your devices refuse to obey you because another institution claims final authority over them, then you are not looking at a consumer preference problem.

And yes, this means the free software movement belongs to the same moral universe as other struggles over who gets to control the conditions of life. It is not identical to labor struggle, anti-imperial struggle, or struggles against censorship and surveillance, but it certainly intersects with them. A population dependent on opaque systems owned elsewhere is easier to monitor, discipline, manipulate, and lock out. This is also why the movement has always attracted mockery from people who think politics begins only when uniforms appear. They imagine that licensing arguments are too nerdy to be political. But property law is political, as is contract law is political.

But also control over communication systems is political and the right to inspect the systems that organize social life is political. What exactly politics is, if not disputes over power, rights, and control?

Anyone who tries to remove that political core is not clarifying the movement, but is domesticating it. #Programming #Politics