Since I have nothing better to do, I decided to finally write a rant about between democracy and open source movement.
I believe democracy is a flawed form of government—because people are flawed. There are two main problems here: first, the fact that people are mostly ignorant and don’t think about the decisions implemented by their representatives; second, people don’t often vote how they want. Yes, there’s a difference here—in the former case people don’t have an idea what their representatives do (nor care about the fine details of the legislation passed) and vote for somebody for such profound reasons as “I voted this way last time” (or even “we’ve always been voting for this party”), “at least it’s not X”, “just for fun”; in the latter case people may know what they want from the candidate and yet keep voting for the wrong person consciously. The reasons in that case may be even sadder: “I want to vote for a winner” (i.e. voting for the candidate who’s most likely to win because that candidate is most likely to win), “that guy controls the main business in our town so we have to vote for him”, “that guy gives out freebies” or “all media claim that’s the best possible candidate ever”. Side note: I’ve heard all the excuses listed here and not just in the recent news about USian elections. Essentially it boils down to two things: people either lacking control (over the information, or even over their own income; the mostly forgotten distributism movement had a lot to say about it) and people not caring about it at all (but still voting for some reason). And it seems to me that open-source movement is a lot like this.
Initially Free Software (free not as in “free beer” but rather like in Stallman’s speeches) was targeting the audience that understood it, namely the programmers and hackers that values the software freedoms and could exercise all of them (yes, including modifying source code and compiling the library/program). Nowadays though there are many users that actually do not care about the software they use as long as it solves their needs (and if not, they’ll either look for an alternative or start pestering the developer to fix it for them, instead of doing it themselves). Like with democracy, people are so used to its presence that they not realise why it matters and don’t care if something happens to it.
The second aspect is the lack of control. I develop software in the old way: I make it useful for me and provide the sources for the curious zero people who may do with it whatever the AGPL license permits. But most developers have to play by the rules of infrastructure providers in order to get their software noticed. In an exaggerated form, if your project is not on GitHub and does not have at least a thousand stars then it does not exist.
And if you got your software popular and included into some kind of distribution or package repository, that means kowtowing to the distribution (or package repository) maintainers. As one of the core libav developers I could observe the interactions between that project and certain Linux distributions. All I can say is that with the recent USian Securing Open Source Software Act and European Cyber Resilience Act they essentially get the same treatment as the developers got from them (but at least it’s more formal).
If you wonder why either is important in the first place, the answer is freedom. Without democracy you have no way to affect what’s forced onto you, without open source you have no chance of getting software for your needs instead of the vendor’s needs (which are usually diametrically opposite to your needs—like having full control over your hardware, wallet and all personal information they can siphon out of you and sell to the highest bidder).
If you wonder what can be done about it, there are two obvious solutions. People may actually start to think about what they’re doing (or choosing) and collect all available information beforehand. And not such utterly improbable solution involves global (thermo)nuclear war—no people mean no problems (or at least survivors will be more occupied with surviving instead of competing who has the latest iPhone model). The chances of the latter are rather good, let’s do nothing and wait.