Re: On the good neutrality of free software

[Lorenzo L. Ancora]

        This was an interesting one. I'm positively impressed.

> What I was trying to imply was also that by extension you could also
> include political systems, some of which have huge influence on the way
> human interaction work and on the relationship between people. [...]
> So it would be really hard to draw a line with a criteria that is that
> vague as your more narrow definition of political.

Where is the logical flaw here? :-)
You are diluting the concept of politics in order to affirm "everything 
is part of politics, therefore politics is acceptable always and 
everywhere", which is a conclusion from false premises.
You are mixing pears and apples, obtaining bananas as conclusion.

To make an example:

"Flamingos are pink, hippos sweat is pink, so all hippos descend from 
flamingos". This is obviously false.

"Political programs in France take into account free software, there is 
a piece of software which encourages that, so all software development 
derives from politics or is related to them". This is obviously false.

We know that the correct, official definition of politics is:

Politics are the activities of the government, members of law-making
organizations, or people who try to influence the way a country is
governed and, by extension, someone's opinions about how a country
should be governed.

...and, if you extend it, hence basing your deductions on a larger set 
of concepts, the probabilities that a subsequent reflection will be 
supported by part of those concepts increases. This, however, does not 
happen because you are using better concepts, but because you are basing 
your reflections on more concepts which happen to be also more 
heterogeneous. This brings you farther from a logical, valid conclusion, 
obtaining a fake truth value.

> > The line of thinking you are expressing tends to justify using
> > software for purposes other than solving end-user problems, which
> > obviously turns software into a political tool.
> Indeed. I even specifically advocate to do that in the larger sense of
> political.

I advocate the opposite, because in my opinion the line of thinking you 
expressed damages the majority of the free software community. Politics 
and software development should remain as separated as possible.

> > By the way, at a first glance your paragraph looks true ("IF (A AND
> > B) THEN C") but analyzing it for a few minutes reveals some
> > incoherence. Let's see why.
> > ""free software itself is political as it takes a stance on Freedom""
> > Why Freedom is in title caps here? mmmhhh
> I often make typos and spelling mistakes in probably all the languages
> I speak.
> > There are many types of freedom and personal freedom does not 
> > necessarily correspond to political freedom. In other words, you are 
> > oversimplifying the concept of freedom, which is not unitary and is
> > not absolute.
> I indeed didn't specify what freedom meant here, and it doesn't always
> apply in the same way in all cases. I also did it not to go in too much
> debates about that as it's a complicated concept with many aspects.

Mmmhhh, but your answers are always crafted carefully.
To be frank, what you did here is called demagogy: people might be 
tempted to approve vague statements because their interpretation tends 
to be arbitrary and arbitrary interpretation tends to be optimistic.

You wrote "Freedom" so the reader would associate the titled word with 
the fundamental software freedoms you are now using in the next 
argumentation, even if the discussion is related to them very loosely 
and their importance is far long overshadowed by the weight of the 
"politics" keyword. This makes me suspicious that you already had a plan 
on where to steer the discussion from the beginning; also you took the 
chance to cite certain software, probably to draw the interest of the 
readers towards them.

Clever, I didn't saw that from a while, I'll play along. ;-)

> In any case, with free software, freedom isn't only personal: you also
> have collective freedoms too (Freedom 2 and 3):
> > Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute and make copies so you can
> > help your neighbour. 
> > Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your
> > improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so
> > that the whole community benefits.
> They enable things like building communities around software or other
> works under free (software) licenses. And in my definition of politics
> which is very broad, the way communities are run is political.

In your extended definition of politics this is surely true, but only 
inside of it and only if we accept that all free software communities 
exists thanks to the aforementioned freedoms.
I will simply argue that not all free software communities know of the 
fundamental freedoms and yet manage to sustain and thrive; I will argue 
that you cannot prove the linking between the statements of those 
freedoms and the birth of the free software communities; I - and this is 
more a personal comment as an individualist - will argue that a 
collective freedom isn't really a freedom, because if an individual 
requires the cooperation of others to keep a certain right then this 
right is aleatory because it exists solely on the basis of the absence 
of conflicts of interests, which raises inevitably.

> > In addition, you are implicitly classifying people into an arbitrary 
> > group, because you are giving by assured that all who publish/develop 
> > free software are part of the free software movement or related to
> > the FSF or to GNU.
> I'm rather trying to classify projects based on their statements and
> or affiliation to free software politics (software freedom,
> anti mass-surveillance, etc).

Free software politics do not (and must not) exist. Those you are 
referring to are ideals, actually unrelated to any particular 
organization or government.
In fact, you can easily prove that the members of those project have 
those ideals, but you cannot prove that all members of those projects 
have political aims and/or involvements. In particular, you cannot even 
prove that what they do is not selfish, in other words that what each 
member of those community does is to improve the society and not to 
protect themselves or for other personal social interests.

In addition, an individual cannot judge a human group, and this implies 
that he/she can neither classify it: any attempt at classification will 
always be incorrect due to being ephemeral and approximated. To make an 
example, attempts from individuals to classify groups have lead to 
things like racism, antisemitism, xenophobia and homophobia.

> I agree with that. [...]
> The reality is that projects sometimes have to interact with "politics" in one 
> way or another because politics of states and companies do affect free software projects 
> (in good or bad ways).

Literally anything in a civilized society interacts with politics, the 
key difference you are missing is whether this interaction is active or 
passive. An active interaction is doing or criticize politics; a passive 
interaction is respecting or accepting politics.
If an interaction is passive, then the subject of such interaction has 
nothing to do with politics, like the majority of free software 
developers and free software projects; if, on the contrary, there is 
some kind of political statement, an explicit, clear statement which 
actively aims to change or criticize society, then - and only then - we 
are talking about a politicized software developer and/or of a 
politicized software.

> As for your definition of politics, I don't think it would be a good
> idea to discriminate against that on the only basis that it's
> political. 
> I think that extremely specific criteria could be worked on instead if
> some real issues arise, otherwise, if applied such criteria would be a
> can of worms. And if no issue arise I don't see why spending time on
> such criteria.

Nobody is, nor will ever be able to judge whether there is a "real 
problem" or not, because that individual making the judgment should be 
demonstrably neutral. However, there is no way to prove that a person is 
neutral or that they will remain neutral over time. Consequently, it is 
best to reject proactively all software which is suspected to have 
political side endings, because this is the ethically correct course of 
action under the definition of software: software exists solely to solve 
an end-user problem.

> It's way more complicated than that. Take a tractor for instance. The
> way the tool is made and its dependencies is deeply political.
> To make it work you need oil, which has geopolitical implications. With big 
> tractors, you can't farm small lands, so you kind of need to adapt your land to 
> mono-culture, etc.
> So the tool itself (independently of the software that is in it) has
> already some huge impact on its environment and on politics.

You cannot prove that the choice of a tractor is for political purposes 
or that a tractor is built in a certain way to challenge or support a 
certain policy, all you know is whether the tractor complies with the 
law or not.
On the contrary, if the tractor has a Nazi flag on the door, probably 
there is some political agenda behind. Also, a later buyer of such 
tractor would likely replace the door with a clean one... :-)

> With free software, tools can very easily include or exclude group of
> people:
> - There are efforts to translate free software in many language to make
>   it more accessible
> - People with visual issues or blind people can be denied the
>   ability to use free software because it wasn't made to take that
>   into account. In some case free software programmers wanting free
>   software to be more inclusive have to struggle to get their patch
>   included and maintained.
> - An encyclopedia like Wikipedia has a huge impact and it's not
>   completely neutral even if they try very hard to have a neutral point
>   of view. For instance just the fact that is an encyclopedia brings
>   many biases. Other form of knowledge also have different biases. If
>   you take Wikidata for instance, you can't really express what is
>   music in a database. But it's super useful for many things. The free
>   software directory is itself somewhat similar to a database of
>   software, with some free text fields.
> - People probably need to know how to read to use most free software.
>   so it has political implications as well.
> The nice thing with free software is that in all these cases, we have
> way way more leverage to fix these things. With nonfree software it
> would be almost impossible to have it fixed.

Sadly, this paragraph is incontestably true. There is clearly a lack of 
sensibility toward the disabled and the mentally ill and this is caused 
by the fact that those "special" software improvements are not 
appreciable be the majority of end users. The disabled are always a 
strict minority and for minorities its always a struggle to be 
remembered and recognized, especially if the effort also requires 
uncommon skills and wealth.

The Free Software Directory is meant to be a public searchable database 
of metadata about free software. It should remain neutral, fulfilling 
only its main tasks, as they already fit within the business purposes of 
the FSF and nothing more is needed, nor convenient, nor productive in 
the optic of doing the interests of both the company and the end users.
Being popular is helpful, being popular for the wrong things isn't.

> Games can also be (ab)used to become tools, and some of them are.
> There isn't just political games like the one we discussed before. We
> also have several free software programming games like gnurobots or
> Colobots[1]. These are also tools and games.
> There is also educational software like tuxmath, gcompris,
> tuxtyping, etc which fit both categories. And There are also games to
> train your memory, etc.
> So as usual the real life situations don't fit well single categories.
> And I didn't look yet at Gcompris in details but what it teach or
> doesn't teach to kids probably has some political implications somehow.

Games can have multiple purposes, but remains mere works of art.
A statue can be designed to also be a coat hanger, then it is a coat 
hanger or a statue? Both, yet remains a work of art, because it is meant 
to induce catharsis and satisfy our need of self-fulfillment.
All popular works of art sooner or later are forced into politics, it is 
their nature and we should accept it. Eventually, a political game has a 
plot which makes evident any political affiliation, so it is not a side 
ending and there is no reason to reject it.

> > "Positive changes" is a relative concept. Anything related to
> > politics falls into a grey area for me, because all humans - with the
> > notable exception of saints - always do their own interests either
> > directly or indirectly: nobody is really capable of expressing a
> > really selflessness political opinion.
> One way to do that is to try to understand what opinion you would get
> if you are in other situations that you are or if you were someone
> different.
> The issue is that you might not be aware of all the situations that
> exist. Learning about these situations in ways that really
> represent the people in them could help reducing this issue.

Nobody is capable of truly acting against his/her own interests and 
selfishness and, even when one struggles to do so by using imagination, 
his/her actions can be inevitably conducted to his/her interests at a 
chemical or social level. People who is really keen on doing "daily good 
deeds" is numerous yet hardly noticed. Anyone who proclaims his/her 
capacity of acting selflessly is only self-convincing or trying to 
appear "good" at the eyes of the public. Despicable and worthy of suspicion.
There is only an inevitable series of changes we choose to ignore from 
time to time at our pleasure and discretion in the desperate attempt to 
justify our flaws, but neither of the changes we choose to consider or 
ignore is totally positive or negative. Changes are only changes, and 
politics cannot bring absolute improvements, only changes which will 
help someone at the expenses of someone else.
When someone says "positive", it is an immediate red flag: "positive... 
for who? when? at what price? whose are the interests in that?".
If someone seems to have no interests in doing something and yet it does 
it, then there is something behind or the aim is towards a future gain 
under the same semantics.

> > If someone wants to express political opinions, a blog is a more 
> > appropriate place than free software websites and repositories. 
> These are different tools. A blog can't create Bitcoin for instance.
> And bitcoin has huge political implications. [...]

The cryptocurrency ecosystem is immense and each investor may not share 
the same ideology of other investors, this is obvious.
As a consequence, you are just assigning an arbitrary political 
statement to an instrument that is naturally devoid of it. 
Cryptocurrency is only a technology and the software linked to it 
remains software unless there is a politic statement clearly - 
explicitly - attached by the developer. People wants more money and so 
invests in Bitcoin exactly like barrels of petroleum and gold. Economy 
cares only about profit, don't attach arbitrary politics to it, because 
any economic concept is always related to a large group that you, as an 
individual, cannot properly judge.

> [...] If you push the reasoning very far, we would probably end up with no
> software at all as it would be really hard to draw a line without
> extremely precise criteria, especially when having computers (and
> software) has also many political consequences (like the tractor).

Good... then stick to what you can judge clearly: if something is 
clearly linked to political statements then it can be considered 
political, otherwise it isn't until proven otherwise.

If an FSD administrator wants to reject a software he/she must also add 
a valid motivation in the edit summary and that means explaining the 
specific reason for deletion. Nobody's going to reject a software on 
suspicion, approval can be delayed but at the end the FSD only approves 
edits based on facts (and this is a good thing for everyone).

Best regards,
Lorenzo

Il 01/09/21 17:19, Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli ha scritto:
> On Tue, 31 Aug 2021 18:52:41 +0000
> "Lorenzo L. Ancora" via <directory-discuss@gnu.org> wrote:
>
> > Denis Carikli (Replicant) <GNUtoo@cyberdimension.org>:
> > > If you see politics as a system that regulates the interaction
> > > between people and the world we live in, you can see every
> > > interaction between humans beings and with the world as political.
> >
> > Politics are the activities of the government, members of law-making
> > organizations, or people who try to influence the way a country is
> > governed and, by extension, someone's opinions about how a country
> > should be governed: in this thread I am referring exclusively to
> > statements that fall within this classic definition and are therefore
> > clearly political and designed to have a political impact.
> What I was trying to imply was also that by extension you could also
> include political systems, some of which have huge influence on the way
> human interaction work and on the relationship between people.
>
> For instance the repatriation of goods and statuses and their
> justifications in a given society often affect personal relationships in
> one way or another. The economical systems also do impact personal
> relationships, etc.
>
> And there isn't only one way to organize human relationships, and even
> in a given system, you can find many smaller systems within bigger
> systems where that are organized in one way or another.
>
> For instance free software communities aren't necessarily organized
> in the same way than states, but most of them somehow fit more or less
> within the bigger political structures (through copyright law,
> 501c3 associations, etc).
>
> And the issue with software or things in general is that everything
> doesn't fit in categories that easily.
>
> For instance in France there is software made specifically for
> pressuring elected people to take into account free software in
> their political programs.
>
> And there is even (different) software to follow what representatives
> (including European ones) voted for or against. The later main
> deployment(s) are done to pressure elected people to vote for free
> software, against software patents, against Internet surveillance etc.
>
> So it would be really hard to draw a line with a criteria that is that
> vague as your more narrow definition of political.
>
> > > In a more narrow sense, free software itself is political as it
> > > takes a stance on Freedom, so it wouldn't be a good idea to reject
> > > all free software if we use "political" in that sense.
> >
> > The line of thinking you are expressing tends to justify using
> > software for purposes other than solving end-user problems, which
> > obviously turns software into a political tool.
> Indeed. I even specifically advocate to do that in the larger sense of
> political.
>
> > By the way, at a first glance your paragraph looks true ("IF (A AND
> > B) THEN C") but analyzing it for a few minutes reveals some
> > incoherence. Let's see why.
> >
> > ""free software itself is political as it takes a stance on Freedom""
> > Why Freedom is in title caps here? mmmhhh
> I often make typos and spelling mistakes in probably all the languages
> I speak.
>
> > There are many types of freedom and personal freedom does not
> > necessarily correspond to political freedom. In other words, you are
> > oversimplifying the concept of freedom, which is not unitary and is
> > not absolute.
> I indeed didn't specify what freedom meant here, and it doesn't always
> apply in the same way in all cases. I also did it not to go in too much
> debates about that as it's a complicated concept with many aspects.
>
> In any case, with free software, freedom isn't only personal: you also
> have collective freedoms too (Freedom 2 and 3):
> > Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute and make copies so you can
> > help your neighbour.
>
> > Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your
> > improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so
> > that the whole community benefits.
> They enable things like building communities around software or other
> works under free (software) licenses. And in my definition of politics
> which is very broad, the way communities are run is political.
>
> > In addition, you are implicitly classifying people into an arbitrary
> > group, because you are giving by assured that all who publish/develop
> > free software are part of the free software movement or related to
> > the FSF or to GNU.
> I'm rather trying to classify projects based on their statements and
> or affiliation to free software politics (software freedom,
> anti mass-surveillance, etc).
>
> > This is obviously false, because a developer could choose a free/open
> > development model with the exclusive ending of quickly boosting
> > software popularity or only to reduce the development costs or even
> > for the simple satisfaction of sharing and networking, without any
> > political aim. Countless are the individuals who share their code due
> > to social pressure or with simple social aims.
> >
> > So, developing free/libre/open-source software does not automatically
> > imply taking a certain political stance, it only means using certain
> > development models and/or certain licenses to accomplish the act of
> > software development in a certain way.
> I agree with that.
>
> What I was trying to explain here is that the free software *movement*
> is itself political (in the broad sense) as it takes stance on freedom.
>
> And some people at least are working on FLOSS to advance that
> (broad) political goal. And sometimes that is reflected in the projects
> statements / websites / documentation, which are often influenced by
> the goals of the free software movements.
>
> I don't think it would be a good idea to discriminate against
> projects as part of the free software movement because they engage in
> "free software politics" or "Internet politics" or "computer politics",
> as most of them are very useful projects, because most free software
> would somehow be excluded as most somehow engage in that in some for or
> another.
>
> And if you assume that Tor is political, not adding Tor in a browser
> would then also be political as people not doing that somehow
> (willingly or not) support the surveillance of the network.
>
> And there isn't only software like Tor.
>
> The Replicant project also made political statements against
> surveillance through smartphones and tablets, and it even took position
> against the Radio directive of the European Union, it also interacted
> with the French telecommunication regulator (ARCEP), and it also
> interacted with people working for the NGI fund of the European Union
> as we have some funding through that. And some of that is reflected in
> code as we even have scripts to shut down the modem (to avoid
> surveillance) that are in the Replicant images.
>
> Various Wikipedia instances also protested against laws that threatened
> Wikipedia. Some national Wikipedia associations probably interact with
> Museums, schools and various parts of states too. Long time ago, even
> GNU retaliated against SCO by removing support for its unix due to
> attacks against free software by that company. So again here you have
> action in code.
>
> The reality is that projects sometimes have to interact with "politics"
> in one way or another because politics of states and companies do affect
> free software projects (in good or bad ways).
>
> As for your definition of politics, I don't think it would be a good
> idea to discriminate against that on the only basis that it's
> political.
>
> I think that extremely specific criteria could be worked on instead if
> some real issues arise, otherwise, if applied such criteria would be a
> can of worms. And if no issue arise I don't see why spending time on
> such criteria.
>
> > Hence, while we can say that
> > certain free software developers use/abuse free software for
> > political endings, free software itself cannot be associated to a
> > political stance more than an hammer could be associated to carpentry.
> It's way more complicated than that. Take a tractor for instance. The
> way the tool is made and its dependencies is deeply political.
>
> To make it work you need oil, which has geopolitical implications. With
> big tractors, you can't farm small lands, so you kind of need to adapt
> your land to mono-culture, etc.
>
> So the tool itself (independently of the software that is in it) has
> already some huge impact on its environment and on politics.
>
> With free software, tools can very easily include or exclude group of
> people:
> - There are efforts to translate free software in many language to make
>    it more accessible
> - People with visual issues or blind people can be denied the
>    ability to use free software because it wasn't made to take that
>    into account. In some case free software programmers wanting free
>    software to be more inclusive have to struggle to get their patch
>    included and maintained.
> - An encyclopedia like Wikipedia has a huge impact and it's not
>    completely neutral even if they try very hard to have a neutral point
>    of view. For instance just the fact that is an encyclopedia brings
>    many biases. Other form of knowledge also have different biases. If
>    you take Wikidata for instance, you can't really express what is
>    music in a database. But it's super useful for many things. The free
>    software directory is itself somewhat similar to a database of
>    software, with some free text fields.
> - People probably need to know how to read to use most free software.
>    so it has political implications as well.
>
> The nice thing with free software is that in all these cases, we have
> way way more leverage to fix these things. With nonfree software it
> would be almost impossible to have it fixed.
>
> > > A lot of free software games have that kind of "politics" and/or
> > > "political messages" in them. It's also up to the people using and
> > > working on free software to define what kind of games we want.
> > > Though it also requires time to work on that. [...]
> >
> > Here we are referring exclusively to software tools.
> >
> > Games are not software but works of art. In fact a game is not aimed
> > at solving any specific problem for the end user.
> Games can also be (ab)used to become tools, and some of them are.
>
> There isn't just political games like the one we discussed before. We
> also have several free software programming games like gnurobots or
> Colobots[1]. These are also tools and games.
>
> There is also educational software like tuxmath, gcompris,
> tuxtyping, etc which fit both categories. And There are also games to
> train your memory, etc.
>
> So as usual the real life situations don't fit well single categories.
>
> And I didn't look yet at Gcompris in details but what it teach or
> doesn't teach to kids probably has some political implications somehow.
>
> > "Positive changes" is a relative concept. Anything related to
> > politics falls into a grey area for me, because all humans - with the
> > notable exception of saints - always do their own interests either
> > directly or indirectly: nobody is really capable of expressing a
> > really selflessness political opinion.
> One way to do that is to try to understand what opinion you would get
> if you are in other situations that you are or if you were someone
> different.
>
> The issue is that you might not be aware of all the situations that
> exist. Learning about these situations in ways that really
> represent the people in them could help reducing this issue.
>
> > If someone wants to express political opinions, a blog is a more
> > appropriate place than free software websites and repositories. :-)
> These are different tools. A blog can't create Bitcoin for instance.
> And bitcoin has huge political implications.
>
> Some people are for Bitcoin, other people are against it, because of
> its political implications. And different people have different
> understanding of the tool and all its implications. And that tool is
> global so it doesn't affect the same communities and people in the same
> way, and many people have a very partial view on that.
>
> So as usual it becomes very complicated to understand its effects and
> to position yourself for or against it, and some people also find
> binary positions too limiting and probably have completely different
> ideas / approaches / positions on topics that are that political.
>
> And the moment you start discriminating against things like that as
> part of the free software movement at large (for instance by banning
> such software from the directory), you would probably end up having to
> discriminate against software promoting the status quo too as it's also
> political.
>
> If you push the reasoning very far, we would probably end up with no
> software at all as it would be really hard to draw a line without
> extremely precise criteria, especially when having computers (and
> software) has also many political consequences (like the tractor).
>
> That however doesn't prevent people from doing various form of activism
> through free software or outside free software for or against specific
> software or ideas implemented by software.
>
> Notes:
> ------
> [1]Note that Colobots probably needs to be patched (if possible
>     upstream) to add more characters choice to be more inclusive:
>     The version I installed (through Guix) only has white males
>     character choices, so it somehow discriminates against non white
>     males. It also somehow promotes colonization. We have a successful
>     example of modifications with the "singularity" game where at the
>     beginning it was a game that simulated the attack of computers. It
>     was modified to make the player character an AI probably to not
>     promote the attack of computers.
>
> Denis.

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