in which our protagonist dreams of laurels — wingolog

in which our protagonist dreams of laurels I had a dream the other evening, in which I was at a large event full of hackers—funny, that this is the extent of my dreams at the moment; as a parent of three young kids, I don’t get out much—and, there, I was to receive an award and give a speech. (I know, I am a ridiculous man, even when sleeping.) The award was something about free software; it had the trappings of victory, but the vibe among attendees was numbness and bitter loss. Palantir had a booth; they use free software, and isn’t that just great? My talk was to be about Guile, I think: something technical, something interesting, but, I suspected, something inadequate: in its place and time it would be a delight to go deep on mechanism but the moment seemed to call for something else. These days are funny. We won, objectively, in the sense of the goals we set in the beginning; most software is available to its users under a free license: Firefox, Chromium, Android, Linux, all the programming languages, you know the list. So why aren’t we happy? When I reflect back on what inspired me about free software 25 years ago, it was much more political than technical. The idea that we should be able to modify our own means of production and share those modifications was a part of a political project of mutual care: we should be empowered to affect the systems that surround us, to the extent that they affect us. To give you an idea of the milieu, picture me in 1999. I left my home to study abroad on another continent. When I would go to internet cafés I would do my email and read slashdot and freshmeat as one did back then, but also I would often read Z magazine , Noam Chomsky and Michael Albert and Michael Parenti and Arundhati Roy and Zapatistas and all. I remember reading El País the day after “we” shut down the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle, seeing front-page pictures of pink-haired kids being beat up by the cops and wishing I were there with them. For me, free software fit with all of this: the notion that a better world was possible, and we could build it together. I won’t lie and say that the ideals were everything. I think much of my motivation to program is selfish: I like to learn, to find out, to do. But back then I felt the social component more strongly. Among my cohort, though, I think we now do free software because we did free software; the motive sedimented into mechanism. These are the spoils of victory: free is the default. But defaults lack a sense of urgency, of the political. Nowadays the commons that we built is the feedlot of large language models, and increasingly also its waste pond. The software we make is free, but the system in which it is...

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