Why We Need Open Source (Food Poisoning for Thought Reprint)

(*Reprinted from Food Poisoning for Thought as part my ongoing process to unify my web presence.*)

I have said before that the most important qualification for considering oneself free is the ability to walk away. if one cannot choose not to participate then one is a slave.

With the rise of the Internet, digitization on information, and the rise of the 3d printer, we can see at the copyright industry has lost all natural sources of leverage. Information can be shared freely without restriction and without border. This destroys the leverage which the middle men who run the copyright industry once had and makes them very very scared. As such the copyright industry has gone into the surveillance business. they have lobbied and bribed and bought politicians and they have been behind a large part of the rise of surveillance culture in the modern era in an attempt to enforce copyright. The concern regarding governmental surveillance culture is obvious but what surveillance culture and copyright monopoly does in the modern digital age is less immediately obvious. In essence licensing agreements and digital ownership with always online connections transforms the world into a rental culture. Everything can be taken away at the whim of the copyright holder. We are living borrowed lives.

Purchases can be rescinded. Access withdrawn. Nothing you own is truly yours. Copyright itself must be attacked to be sure. But that is likely to be a long and hard battle.

Better to outflank. Make them irrelevant. Open source culture provides a means of outflanking them. Open Office as an example, provides a way to step around Microsoft's stranglehold on word processing with Microsoft Word.

We need more things like this more things released into the public domain and copied for things shared more free alternatives that cannot be taken away because no one owns them.

As technology makes it possible to obtain more goods for free, the vultures of commerce will attempts to bar the gates.

Our slavery has been invisible in the first world for more than one hundred years. Now that technology makes freedom a viable possibility, our chains will become a lot more obvious.