i'm very interested in weird, artistic ways of playing with computers.
maybe like, 15 minutes before i started typing this up, i discovered prosaic, a "cut-up poetry generator" that creates/generates poetry based on mashed, cut-up text you feed it. for example, you can throw it a bunch of public domain text and see what you get. there's also trunkless by the same author, which seems to be a successor to prosaic, but i am interested in both.
in the midst of the AI bubble, i've increasingly looked at the niche parts of artistic and poetic computing. things like live-coding, indie web stuff like the internet phone book (i got my copy recently and look forward to reading the essays), and these weird little github projects. i like to see how computers can be used to create something truly human, in ways that LLMs can never mimic, despite the best efforts of the deeply evil men at meta and openAI and such.
with that said, there is the elephant in the room of open source and its philosophy. earlier today, i read this blog post, introducing the forklift certified license by aria.dog. i had a small discussion about it on discord with my friends, chatting about the viability of the licenses proposed in the post over the standard GPL or MIT or whatever. we all agreed that none of these licenses are proven to be enforceable, that they present some dangerously shaky legal ground for something that should be protecting your work, in a way.
but at the same time, i referred back to the post, how the author argues that... a lot of the discourse on software licensing is kind of just bullshit. and that aligns closely with my outlook on open source licensing and OSS (open source software) as a whole: that all of this is just a crock of shit.
i believe strongly that open source died a long time ago, and that it was broken to begin with. open source ideology was founded on a hippie-optimistic view of the future, that we could code our way to freedom, to a fair and technologically-driven world. this is at least the open source that i have learned through osmosis; after all, i wasn't around for OSS culture in the 1990s or 2000s, i was busy being not alive or only a toddler for most of that.
i'm 21 years old and have adjacently grown up in the world of tech; that is to say i have had a passing interest in tech and computing for most of my life, but i didn't really delve into it until high school. but as i learned more over the years, i kind of just looked at the OSS diehard types, and thought... why are people fighting for such a dated view of the world?
maybe i'm just too young to have known how this all went in practice. but to me, it appears that a lot of FOSS ride or die types seem to swear by a philosophy that either no longer exists, or is no longer relevant. we live in a world where open source maintainers and contributors get paid in github stars more than real, tangible money that they can support themselves with. it blows my mind that so many open source people seem to think that this is not only an okay model to predicate an entire philosophy on, but that it is viable and self-sufficient.
the subject of burn-out has been well worn in many blog posts, but it's still worth bringing up how the entire XZ utils situation would not have happened if there were any kind of support mechanisms in place for the maintainer of that library. the anubis maintainer, linked above, risks burnout regularly while facing heinous abuse at the hands of these OSS worshipers for daring to offer a white-label form of the software to try to support themself. i myself don't even maintain software, but i run several internet communities, most notably a fanfiction website, and have faced immense levels of entitled abuse from non-users who seem to have a lot to say about my site after a single glance at my rules or the front page.
to bring it back to the aria post on software licenses: why should we still have to strictly adhere to the open source licensing model as we know it, when these licenses seem to do nearly nothing to protect maintainers and contributors from abuse? and by abuse, i don't mean merely user-level; i mean the kind where corporations steal your work so brazenly that you are forced into a corner and made to rug pull your project license-wise, and to that, the spectators from the likes of the hacker news peanut gallery have only nonsense to offer about the purity of open source, how that must be preserved at all costs against, god forbid, proposing some structure to financially and mentally support the maintainers of what is now load bearing infrastructure. what are we, catholic?
sure, i have my reservations about using some of these non-standard software licenses, as linked in the aria post. i already went over those reservations: if any of these can't be legally enforced, then all it amounts to is slapping an MIT license on the project and making it a free-for-all.
but when that's how corporations treat our work anyway— GPL be damned, because we live in a world where mass AI scraping and training has been forced upon us and we only have measly court battles to spectate from the sidelines as all of our work is vacuumed up to provide more fuel for the planet-boiling chat-bots, so they really have no reason to give a shit about the GPL— what is the fucking point of any of this? is it all just theater in the face of the mass power these corporations wield over us?
when i see projects like prosaic and the internet phone book, when i hear the live-coded music of switch angel, there's something human in them, something real and tangible. there's a heart to each of these projects, and i'm going to make the bold claim that projects like these, work by these people, can no longer be covered by the open source umbrella anymore. we are well past the point where open source as a movement was underground yet influential enough to create a protective culture around its participants and the work produced by them (if it ever had that culture at all, granted).
i don't have a proposal for what should come after open source. i'm just a stupid kid in the end, and i'm wildly unimaginative and anti-ambitious to a point where any of my projects getting attention scares the shit out of me.
but i'm tired of seeing people fight for the sanctity of open source, when there are people in the community, or at least adjacent to it, creating things that (in my opinion) supersede the dated definition and ideology of open source.
i'm a stupid kid and none of what i say means anything so that at least leaves me confident enough in calling all of this a bunch of bullshit.
