Gregory's ServerA phrase I heard and loved when I was in a committee room in the UK Parliament this evening, for an Open Source event - “Open Source is the Right to Repair, for software.” 👏🏻 such a perfect way of describing it, I wish I'd been the one to say it!
Andy Piper
13 comments
Daniel
@andypiper It also seems to tie in perfectly to the Post Office / Fujitsu Horizon saga that's bubbling up currently. Had that been Open Source software it could have prevented so much pain and suffering by the affected sub-postmasters / -mistresses
Thor A. Hopland
@andypiper I made a local pirate party representative a bit happy with the phrase "encryption should be a human right". Because encryption should be a human right. The right to keep secrets, if you will. There is in no way you can guarantee me that backdoors into encryption is a good idea. They can be broken and then everyone gets compromised. Pedophiles and terrorists won't use it anyways, whereas law abiding political organisations, journalists, political dissidents, all come under threat. 
Justin
@hopland @andypiper hopefully we can grab a bit of the politicians bank accounts as our first act as without uncomprimised encryption we'll have bank data quite easily.
Thor A. Hopland
@justin @andypiper Yee olde "transparency for me, but not for thee" - or the "I'm so important I get those priveliges". It should be obvious why politicians should not have access to all people's data, but also that the politicians are the ones who shouldn't have anything to hide.
cwjohan 🎸
@andypiper Open Source effectively gives one the right to repair, but one doesn’t buy it or own it like other software. 
Adrien Plazas
@andypiper It's an interesting way of seeing it but it's so incomplete I don't think it's worth using. Open source is the libertarian reappropriation of the librist movement that seeked to build intellectual commons. And it's because the commons are "cheap nature" that the capitalists are so interested by it, even more so as the intellectual commons are made of crystalized labor. The right to repair is a consequence of the fact we are handling with the freedom of the commons. 
Martin Geisler
@KekunPlazas @andypiper Yeah, I think the actual phrase should have been "free software gives you the right to repair". The distinction between #freesoftware and #opensource software is often forgotten these days, but as I understand it, the free software movement seeks to protect the freedom of the user. The Tree Software Foundation (#fsf) will of course have much more on the topic: https://www.fsf.org/about/what-is-free-software
Martin Geisler
@andypiper Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that #freesoftware gives you the right to repair? With #opensource software, the end product is often proprietary and you have no way of fixing a bug in the final binary. A free software license like the #gpl is there to prevent taking away this freedom. 
Alec Muffett
@andypiper to take a contrary position, I hope that never catches on because (not least) it's a terrible model and some regulators would assume it literally. It ignores software as creative expression, as speech against power, as solution engineering, as creativity. The community aspects are isomorphic to RTR, one can see that, but it is not a fit paintbrush with which to describe the entire movement. |
@andypiper I heard Donald Becker at an event circa 1988 in San Mateo describe it as free pencillin