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authorOwen Jacobson <owen@grimoire.ca>2020-01-28 20:49:17 -0500
committerOwen Jacobson <owen@grimoire.ca>2020-01-28 23:23:18 -0500
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treea2af4dc93f09a920b0ca375c1adde6d8f64eb6be /wiki/dev/gnu-collective-action-license.md
parentacf6f5d3bfa748e2f8810ab0fe807f82efcf3eb6 (diff)
Editorial pass & migration to mkdocs.
There's a lot in grimoire.ca that I either no longer stand behind or feel pretty weird about having out there.
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-# The GPL As Collective Action
-
-Programmers, like many groups of subject experts, are widely afflicted by the
-belief that all other fields of expertise can be reduced to a special case of
-programming expertise. For a great example of this, watch [programmers argue
-about law](https://xkcd.com/1494/) (which can _obviously_ be reduced to a rules
-system, which is a programming problem),
-[consent](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2e5a7k/could_the_blockchain_be_used_to_prove_consensual/)
-(which is _obviously_ about non-repudiatable proofs, which are a programming
-problem), or [art](https://github.com/google/deepdream) (which is _obviously_
-reducible to simple but large automata). One key symptom of this social pattern
-is a disregard for outside expertise and outside bodies of knowledge.
-
-I believe this habit may have bitten Stallman.
-
-The GNU Public License presents a simple, legally enforceable offer: in return
-for granting the right to distribute the licensed work and its derivatives, the
-GPL demands that derivative works also be released under the GPL. The _intent_,
-as derived from
-[Stallman’s commentaries](http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.en.html)
-on the GPL and on the social systems around software, is that people who _use_
-information systems should, morally and legally, be entitled to the tools to
-understand what the system will do and why, and to make changes to those tools
-as they see fit.
-
-This is a form of _collective action_, as implemented by someone who thinks of
-unions and organized labour as something that software could do better. The
-usual lens for critique of the GPL is that GPL’d software cannot be used in
-non-GPL systems (which is increasingly true, as the Free Software Foundation
-catches up with the “as a Service” model of software deliver) _by developers_,
-but I think there’s a more interesting angle on it as an attempt to apply the
-collective bargaining power of programmers as a class to extracting a
-concession from managerial -- business and government -- interests, instead. In
-that reading, the GPL demands that managerial interests in software avoid
-behaviours that would be bad for programmers (framed as “users”, as above) as a
-condition of benefitting from the labour of those programmers.
-
-Sadly, Stallman is not a labour historian or a union organizer. He’s a public
-speaker and a programmer. By attempting to reinvent collective action from
-first principles, and by treating collective action as a special case of
-software development, the GPL acts to divide programmers from non-programming
-computer users, and to weaken the collective position of programmers vis-à-vis
-managerial interests. The rise of “merit”-based open source licenses, such as
-the MIT license (which I use heavily, but advisedly), and the increasing
-pervasiveness of the Github Resume, are both simple consequences of this
-mistake.
-
-I’m pro-organized-labour, and largely pro-union. The only thing worse than
-having two competing powerful interests in the room is having only one powerful
-interest in the room. The GPL should be part of any historical case study for
-the unionization of programmers, since it captures so much of what we do wrong.