🐧 A Word about RMS, GPL and the Free Software Movement

If we talk about the world of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), two popular but conflicting methodologies tried to battle it out in the early to mid 90s - the GPL and Free Software Movement propounded by Richard Stallman, and secondly, the more "liberal" and commerce friendly Open Source Movement propounded by Eric Raymond (ESR).

Because the West is predominantly a Capitalist System, it's the ESR's movement that ultimately won the industrial battle. Most software projects in the FOSS world today are licensed under the liberal or "open source" licenses such as Apache and MIT, not the commons or free software license i.e. GPL.

But on the other hand, the idea of GPL isn't without merits, it was an ingenious attempt by RMS to use the copyright law itself in order to ensure that software freedom and its control stays in the hands of the people who use it (Commons) and not the proprietary companies who are essentially driven by a profit motive and nothing else. RMS foresaw decades ago that when software controls the user and developer controls the software, it opens whole new flood gates of authoritarianism in terms of how the software works and what it does. To a great extent, this is exactly what is happening today with most of the software (especially popular browsers and operating systems), they are controlled by this small group of conglomerates which we call "Big Tech".

Because of how things work in the tech industry, I don't think this situation will change much in the near term unless lot's of folks somehow realize the importance of Free Software and Commons meritocracy, and how "open source" is destroying its interest. Little peasants like us can do our bit by releasing all software under GPL but even that is getting difficult day by day. The more libraries, frameworks or other components your software uses, you must agree to their own license depending on how tight the integration is - which in all likelihood will be an Apache or MIT, not a GPL.

Going forward, I hope more and more software will be written in GPL, especially the infrastructure software like coding languages, frameworks, libraries, IDE, etc. which is used to create application software. But way things are going presently, I'm more pessimistic than optimistic. I have very little faith in GenZ. But eventually, at some point, GPL and Free Software should win because it's a better methodology and has merit.