Yesterday I went to bed too late because I was captivated by the last episode of
The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom, a series by Adam Curtis. Even since I saw
Pandora's Box I've been an avid viewer of his work. The Trap talks about what freedom is, and this morning I realised that many things he talked about can be seen in the OSS world, and more specifically in Debian. I'm certain
Biella can write something much better (and shorter) and I'm still thinking about it, but I wanted to write some stuff down.
One of the main ideas is the modern western culture has been formed to appeal for people thinking like a model in the 'prisoners dilemma': they only case to further themselves. This lead to the idea that life (not only the economy) should be like a free market, and that people should be 'free' to choose what they liked. Of course in practice the rich are 'free' to send their kids to better schools then the poor who are 'free' but constrained to send their kids to worse schools. The program called this
negative freedom: there is constrained freedom. Think of it as Microsoft's vision of freedom, their 'freedom to innovate' (which they don't), your freedom to select which of the N licences of vista is good enough for you. This limited freedom is more stable then the
positive freedom that is actual seeking true freedom, without constraints. This positive freedom was then developed by
Satre,
Fanon and
Shariati into the idea that true freedom could only be gained by armed struggle, to gain freedom but also an identity that transcends the simple individual.
The whole idea of the two freedoms was described by
Isaiah Berlin and he also had the idea that freedom can only be gained by limiting the power of the state over the individual, otherwise both concepts of freedom would become tyrannical because the powers that be would decide what freedom is, and then suppress anybody that does not agree with that idea. Examples are the communists in the USSR, but also how the Americans turned to torture, imprisonment without tribunal to 'liberate the Iraqi people'. Or older still the
Reign of Terror during the French revolution.
All of this has some relevance to OSS and Debian in particular. Don't we search freedom from constraints (licences, absence of source)? Don't we want a revolution in the use of computers? Are we not using disruptive means to get it? The introduction of a samba file-server in a pure MS environment by a disgruntled admin who just wants stuff to work could be seen as being almost a terrorist method of working. Not that we want to terrorise the population, but make them aware that an alternative exists. And this to chance the system. Sometimes the whole mindset does seem to be a little too much confrontational, almost towards having a real conflict. Just think about the many references that some disaster should wipe out the Seattle area. Are we not at risk of becoming tyrannical in many ways? Ignoring any Debian discussions, there is the whole FreeBSD/OpenBSD split, people complaining that wikipedia is removing contents the consider valuable, projects refusing to create howto's and introductions to keep the newbies away etc. OOS does seem to have a tendency to become tyrannical in some aspects. Not that this is always bad, see the benevolent dictators handling the Linux kernel or python.
If I understand the idea's correctly it means that even if we want freedom, from the moment we start using the powers of the project to limit somebody we start the slide towards being oppressive and tyrannical. Somehow I fear that all this will lead to a lot of reading and thinking...
