CPP Task: Add public contact point under Transparency and Fairness
CPP Task: Find a sensible alternative to invite reviewing applications - On-boarding process
Indeed, we insist on “free software” because we agree it’s important to make a point in supporting software freedom, and not just the practicality of open-source. Stating “free software” explicitly places us in the domain of the Commons. We’re looking for social transformation, and understanding the ethical dimension as part of the technical roots reflects our values. This has nothing to do with “purity”, where one should use free software exclusively: we know it’s impossible, but that does not mean we don’t want to see proprietary software and the practices that come with it gone, that were embraced by the open-source world, especially extracting value from, and capturing community value.
I think that if you run free software in production, sooner or later you will stumble across a problem you cannot solve on your own, and then reach out to that software’s community. By doing so, you’re already contributing to help other people solve a similar issue by providing good feedback, bug reports, a bit of documentation, etc. Using free software properly means that when you hit an issue, you solve it using community knowledge: sooner or later, as your experience grows, you will contribute something that is not there yet. It’s more a state of mind than a hassle, IMO.
Sure, and that’s a valid concern. When you do not have a choice, why making it a problem? Let’s consider a typical datacenter: it runs routers, disk managers, and all kinds of appliances beyond our control. But let’s say GreenHost develops an open hardware solution to replace a proprietary solution by the fearsome Cheezco: we would certainly prefer such a solution, and put more effort in testing and documenting it, than say, document AWS setups. Again, it’s a question of steering our efforts towards what we want to achieve, and not be a sect of black&white zealots. We know the world is complex, don’t you?
We have nothing against hobbyists and informal collectives.
[*] Proposal: Librehosters can be non-profits, collectives, individuals, businesses The updated proposal is now in post #20 CPP: Commitments, Policies and Processes - #20, collectives or other legal forms.
Putting ‘collectives’ away from ‘or other legal forms’ makes it clearer that we include informal collectives to inform the network. An individual is hardly a legal form itself. Moreover ‘businesses and other legal forms’ confirms that ‘businesses’ is the associated keyword here.
I think this is a larger discussion we should have with more people. So we should open a specific proposal for this and link that topic.