I will not be participating in open source for the foreseeable future. Maybe at some point I'll come back. It's been my hobby for a long time. But it is clearly no longer a community that wants me here, or that has a shape where I would like to participate in.
I'll probably go touch some grass, too. Social media has been a lot.
RE: https://toot.cat/@zkat/115850353329435324
My conclusion so far after this really great discussion: We need to stop leaning on licenses almost entirely, and refocus our attention on collective power and collective action.
Organize as developers of Community Software and start finding ways to exert influence on bad actors by having knock-on effects: you misbehave with one project, you get shunned/unsupported/blocked by the entire community.
To do this, we would need to stop acting as isolated islands of individual projects, and more as One Big Faction. We need to talk to each other. We need to make decisions together and have the difficult discussions about what we'll accept and what we won't, and how far we're willing to go to do something about it. There's even opportunity to share and pull resources and time.
Community Software would need to be a big Covenant that we hold ourselves to, that all are welcome into until they threaten the good of what we have built together.
thinking about foss stuff, and I know I've groused about licensing stuff before, and how I feel like my only way out is to just Parity7 everything and fall into obscurity but...
...I think we need a different movement around open source, with new terminology, that clarifies the intent and opens doors to more pro-social behavior and capabilities (up to and including the potential for "ethical licensing").
I've been spitballing the terms Common Software and Community Software. The core idea is that things that count as Community/Common Software can't enter the realm of the proprietary (so, strong copyleft a-la AGPL and Parity, virality not necessary). What's the difference from "Free Software"? We get rid of "freedom zero", aka "the freedom to run software for any purpose". Common Software licenses may have Non-Commercial clauses, Anti-Particular-Industry clauses (such as anti-MIC stuff), etc.
I think "freedom zero" was a grave mistake. I get where it came from--a desire to remove discrimination--but what it resulted in was a hijacking of Free Software by the corporate "Open Source" wing to exploit an otherwise healthy community of people openly sharing their creations... for an enormous profit that we can't even quantify right now.
We need a strong return to copyleft, and we need to gather together and grow its existing ecosystem, away from the MIT/BSD poison that our world has turned towards.
Your thoughts are welcome on this. I want to have a conversation about this stuff and maybe eventually record all this in a longer-form blog post. If you know folks who have had similar thoughts please link them so we can chat, too.
UPDATE: I've sketched out an initial conclusion based on today's discussion over at https://toot.cat/@zkat/115852520380684438