Re: (Really) Free Software future

[Alexandre François Garreau]

As showed Alfred, what’s prevent you from forking are economical reasons, not legal, juridical, that is not purely social and political reasons. If you were a company as big, you could do that, because it’s free software. If it were not free software, even by being a company as big, you could not: the better case is if you were good enough to do reverse-engineering (which is non-trivial and uncomplete by nature) and to be more powerful than the State (or being the State, and not respecting laws, or twisting them in your favor), which is nowadays a corner-case. That’s the difference between free and proprietary software.

 

Then you could argue that the fact the company is rich and their employees paid full-time while you are in your free time makes them powerful, and makes them exert power over you. And that may be true, but that’s an issue completely orthogonal to free software: be it for other reasons, a powerful and rich entity might work to try to incapacitate you. That’s the property of the plutocracies we live in. It’s not related to software.

 

You might also notice, on a theorical extreme, that anyway, without money and jobs, if for any other reasons, a lot of other people were developing software a lot more big and a lot bigger than you ever could by being alone… well you can’t do anything to it. That’s homeomorphic to the case of the child who agrees with nothing, then wants to do everything again but on per own way, and claims the rest of the world is non-free because he finds a hard time competing with it: no, it’s not non-free, it’s just that you’re alone.

 

And that’s the core idea: freedom is not necessarily individual. It doesn’t mean that you have to be able to do anything individually. That individualistic thought is more to be found in open source. But free software is less about free individuals, than about free society.