{"id":44973,"date":"2018-10-08T01:00:53","date_gmt":"2018-10-08T05:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=44973"},"modified":"2018-09-18T10:30:39","modified_gmt":"2018-09-18T14:30:39","slug":"qotd-the-closed-source-software-dystopia-we-barely-avoided","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/10\/08\/qotd-the-closed-source-software-dystopia-we-barely-avoided\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The closed-source software dystopia we barely avoided"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thought experiment: imagine a future in which everybody takes for granted that all software outside a few toy projects in academia will be closed source controlled by managerial elites, computers are unhackable sealed boxes, communications protocols are opaque and locked down, and any use of computer-assisted technology requires layers of permissions that (in effect) mean digital information flow is utterly controlled by those with political and legal master keys. What kind of society do you suppose eventually issues from that?<\/p>\n

Remember Trusted Computing and Palladium and crypto-export restrictions? RMS and Linus Torvalds and John Gilmore and I and a few score other hackers aborted that future before it was born, by using our leverage as engineers and mentors of engineers to change the ground of debate. The entire hacker culture at the time was certainly<\/em> less than 5% of the population, by orders of magnitude.<\/p>\n

And we may have mainstreamed open source just in time. In an attempt to defend their failing business model, the MPAA\/RIAA axis of evil spent years pushing for digital \u201crights\u201d management so pervasively baked into personal-computer hardware by regulatory fiat that those would have become unhackable. Large closed-source software producers had no problem with this, as it would have scratched their backs too. In retrospect, I think it was only the creation of a pro-open-source constituency with lots of money and political clout that prevented this.<\/p>\n

Did we bend the trajectory of society? Yes. Yes, I think we did. It wasn\u2019t a given that we\u2019d get a future in which any random person could have a website and a blog, you know. It wasn\u2019t even given that we\u2019d have an Internet that anyone could hook up to without permission. And I\u2019m pretty sure that if the political class had understood the implications of what we were actually doing, they\u2019d have insisted on more centralized control. ~For the public good and the children, don\u2019t you know.~<\/p>\n

So, yes, sometimes very tiny groups can change society in visibly large ways on a short timescale. I\u2019ve been there when it was done; once or twice I\u2019ve been the instrument of change myself.<\/p>\n

Eric S. Raymond, “Engineering history”, Armed and Dangerous<\/em><\/a>, 2010-09-12.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thought experiment: imagine a future in which everybody takes for granted that all software outside a few toy projects in academia will be closed source controlled by managerial elites, computers are unhackable sealed boxes, communications protocols are opaque and locked down, and any use of computer-assisted technology requires layers of permissions that (in effect) mean […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[831,41,15],"tags":[109,1235,93,92],"class_list":["post-44973","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-quotations","category-technology","tag-computers","tag-esr","tag-opensource","tag-software"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-bHn","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44973","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44973"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44973\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44974,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44973\/revisions\/44974"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44973"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44973"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44973"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}