I am looking for works about free software or based on this philosophy, there are books like “Free software for a free society” and documentaries like “Linux code”, but I would like to know what other works there are related to free software and this philosophy, there are things like snow crash, which talks about the decentralization of the internet from a fictional and futuristic story, these types of works are also valid.
Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.en.html
Off the topic of my head, maybe these can get you started:
Hackers, by Stephen Levy
The Hacker Ethic, by Pekka Himanen
True Names, by Vernor Vinge
Free Culture, by Lawrence Lessig
A Fire Upon The Deep (SF novel), by Vernor Vinge
How about this?
The Cathedral and the Bazaar : Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary by Eric Raymond,
It’s from 1997 but addresses some of what you mentioned. Things have changed a lot since it was written though, so just keep that in mind.
On a similar note:
Raymond is a fucking fascist.
CW racism
He’d call himself a libertarian, but he’s the kind of libertarian that wants to bomb muslims for hating our freedoms and thinks black people are just naturally more criminal because they have the crime gene or something, and no I’m not making this up.
Plus he’s one of the “open source” rebrand types, so as not to scare the
hoescorporations with too much scary “free software” hippie communism.First time hearing this and at face value he sounds like an asshole but I don’t see how it’s relevant to free software. The book itself is a classic which is still worth reading.
FOSS attracts a lot of strong personalities. Stallman is a weirdo but everyone still uses GCC and I’m still personally using emacs.
Raymond is so much worse. Since you apparently aren’t convinced I pulled some quotes:
CW racism, homophobia, Islamophobia
Black people are stupid and violent:
In the U.S., blacks are 12% of the population but commit 50% of violent crimes; can anyone honestly think this is unconnected to the fact that they average 15 points of IQ lower than the general population? That stupid people are more violent is a fact independent of skin color.
Again:
What’s keeping women in general from occupying the vast middle of the programming field is not general intelligence. On the other hand, the average black American has an IQ about 85 and that is pretty much a disqualifier right there. Only the cohort of their bell curve above 3 STDs from median has much hope of matching the capability of the average white programmer.
Police should shoot black men (calls them “males” like they’re animals), that’s just rational:
Police who react to a random black male behaving suspiciously who might be in the critical age range as though he is an near-imminent lethal threat, are being rational, not racist. They’re doing what crime statistics and street-level experience train them to do, and they’re right to do it.
Homosexuality and pedophilia are connected:
If the prevalence of homosexuality in the Catholic priesthood is the elephant in the sacristy, the homosexuality/pederasty/pedophilia connection in gay culture is the elephant in the bath-house. No amount of denying it’s there is going to make the beast go away.
They hate us for our freedom:
Al-Qaeda would not hate us any less; it is not, at bottom, U.S. policy that enrages them, it is the fact of our wealth and freedom and refusal to submit to the One True Way of Allah.
Muslims are barbarians that need to be civilized by force to prevent the white genocide:
If there’s no way short of straight-up imperialism and nation-building all over the Islamic world to prevent a holocaust on American or European soil that would make 9/11 look like a garden party, then that’s what we’re going to have to do – civilize the barbarians at the point of a gun.
Nuking civilians is good actually:
The U.S. burned essentially every major Japanese city except Kyoto to the ground with incendiaries during World War Two and then atom-bombed two of them. This seemed to help.
Deliberate cultural genocide is what we need:
How dare I argue that the U.S. has the right to commit deliberate cultural genocide?
There’s a big hole in the ground in Manhattan. That’s my argument.
Those quotes are heinous and I agree he sounds like a piece of shit. It’s also true that the book he wrote is worth reading.
I still read HP Lovecraft too even though he was an irredeemable racist POS.
Sorry if it’s OT, but I wanted to thank you! I thank you for this post, because it helped me identify one of our racist users who had replied to you and who had nested in our instance. Unfortunately we hadn’t noticed him because he only wrote in English and only on the communities of other instances 😁. Posts like yours can also be used like luminol to find traces of biological fluids to eliminate…😁 😄 🤣
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If “Snow Crash” counts, you probably want to look into the novels “Daemon” and especially its sequel “Freedom” by Daniel Suarez. Probably also the novel “Walkaway” by Corey Doctorow.
“The Internet’s Own Boy” is a documentary about Aaron Swartz that I suspect would also scratch your itch. (Available on Archive.org)
Edit: Almost forgot The Public Domain by James Boyle. I haven’t read that one yet, but it’s high on my list.
Also Doctorow’s novella “Unauthorized Bread”.
The biography of Richard Stallman is a good read
Don’t forget the GPL itself.
One of the best quotes about Free Software, was how it is essentially using the same principles as Judo, use the opponents momentum against them.
The way Free Software uses full, restrictive copyright to create a permissive, free sharing-based copyright is an excellent example of the technique within many Judo throws.
I can’t remember where this quote was from, and a quick search found nothing. Maybe someone else can pinpoint it.
Pretty sure that’s also from Raymond, who is racists af, see my other comment.
Revolution OS(2001) was maybe the earliest documentary about Free Software.
This was great to view at LinuxConf2001, seeing many of the names you’d only read about previously.
Warning: It interviews various people discussed in this thread, but also contains plenty of Stallman being right.
snow crash, which talks about the decentralization of the internet from a fictional and futuristic story
I don’t remember it prominently featuring a plotline like that. That was the one with\
spoiler
the nam shub or whatever? And hacking people’s brain’s with, basically, NLP?
Well if that counts, then Neuromancer by William Gibson fits in that it’s about\
spoiler
removing DRM (“Turing Locks”) from AI—legit AI too, not the hallucinating parlor tricks of today. ::: 😏
At first, I wasn’t going to mention snow crash, since it doesn’t have much to do with it, but I made the mention to make room for stories that don’t have much to do with free software, but have things that can be related to philosophy, an example of this could be right to read, of course, ignoring the author’s notes
PS Please do tell how to read the “:::”.
Thanks!Those are supposed to be part of the spoiler tag, but many lemmy clients don’t support those yet.
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There needs to be a film about the FOSS movement that matches the vibes of 1995’s cyberspace masterpiece Hackers.
