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Reclaiming Freedom: Who Holds Veto Over Your Data Stack
Richard Stallman, who built GNU (GNU Not Unix - a recursive acronym), came up with GNU to solve a more cultural problem (that later became a huge technical debt). His problem wasn’t with the software but the lock: the mechanism that let someone else decide who could use it, modify it, or build on it.
Unix makes a great analogy for enterprise data platforms today. They work. Genuinely. That’s precisely what makes the control so dangerous. The better they are, the deeper the dependency, and the deeper the dependency, the less theoretical the risk becomes.
Stallman understood that software freedom isn’t about ideology, but more about who has veto power over your work. When a vendor can change pricing, deprecate an API, or simply cease to exist, that veto lives with them. You are building on borrowed ground.
