news
Is 'free' costing us freedom?
...and it stirred me into writing this article. The question was simple: “Why do you think open-source games never took off?”
My first instinct when reading a question like that is that the poster is more interested in the free (as in cost) part of FOSS than the open source part. This is a common thing, and it appears much stronger in the gaming community than the general Linux community.
The free in FOSS has always been freedom, and it was never about cost. Richard Stallman made this very clear and has been saying this for years. Today if you ask most users they will argue that it's free as in cost and they don't really care about the freedom part.
I've spent around 30 years in systems programming, security and reverse engineering. From my point of view we've been eroding the foundations of computing for decades. We humans like to repeat the same patterns of failure. My growing concern is that we're about to hit warp speed. I think free is about to cost us freedom. Let me explain...
It’s no secret that I love Lisp and Unix, so let's take a look at the failures in the Lisp and Unix land.