With free software you can validate the code quality and tweak and share code as you wish. With AI slop becoming more prevalent this means choosing quality software is much easier. This is especially true given that many proprietary software companies are switching to AI which will harm them in the long run.

In short, free software is human focused. It doesn’t have economic incentives for the most part so it will always be as good as the community around it.

  • John ColagioiaEnglish
    6·
    11 天前

    Here’s the real question, though, in my eyes: How do we get and keep it centered on that community? Because it hasn’t been, historically. Free Software (and all the related movements) have mostly centered two aspects that got us here.

    • If you don’t like it, then just fork it.
    • It’s actually wonderful that [Insert FAANG Company] exploits our labor to boost their massive profits and sometimes gives us back pizza money.

    And we get this bizarre “rugged individualism” out of it, where there isn’t really any community to speak of. They’re happy to see occasional cheerleaders, but once there’s criticism, then they don’t even know who these agitators are, trying to undermine their freedoms.

    If you think about it, we should have community groups checking quality (through testing and formal verification, maybe) so that it’s not on each of us to review every line of code running on our machine out of many millions. When there’s an outcry among users and rank-and-file developers that we don’t want to sacrifice quality or code provenance (or that certain people are too toxic to run things), then that should get more than a “stop being so mean to people” blog post.

    The answer is “organize,” I guess, but I don’t know if that’s feasible when almost every established voice in the field insists that Freedom is something that you do on your own…

    • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
      3·
      11 天前

      I feel we used to have a bit more organization and human aspect in the past. Back when Linux used to be more complicated and you pretty much had to talk to people to get some crazy stuff set up. I also remember going to Linux user groups, meetings… Participating on internet forums which were a bit less anonymous and transient as modern day internet…

      • John ColagioiaEnglish
        3·
        10 天前

        It’s definitely possible. I always filed those groups more under the cheerleading (and technical support) column, but it’s entirely possible that (especially with much less money in the ecosystem) they exerted some power in the community. I’ve been thinking a lot about how we lost “the funnel,” recently, with even the Software Freedom Day people now strongly recommending against using events to try to sell people on Free Software…