Free and Open Source Software is quite political in some respects; it engenders radically different relationship between people compared with proprietary software.
Proprietary software is centrist, created (typically) by a multinational company (MS, Apple, to some extent Google). In the language of the day, it's made by the 1%, and the 99% can affect it very little. For now, the effects have been subtle and obscure — things like NSAKEY, DRM, the restrictions of the Apple app store — but they may well be bell-weathers, signalling more substantial effects down the road. After all, could not a SOPA-like arrangement apply to operating systems?
FOSS is a lot more egalitarioan in terms of power. Sure, you need skill to affect it — but that's all you need. The organisations and leaders that exist do so at the sufferance of the community; if the community feels they're not doing a good job, the leaders are replaced, sometimes with breath-taking swiftness (as Oracle found out some months ago with OpenOffice.org) and with very little impact on the software or everyday users. It's made for the 100%, by the 100%.
(There's also the copying thing, and RMS was right about that, but that's minor if this is in fact the scheme of things.)
⇦ Scientific Consensus | ⇨ On #riotwombles |
