The ongoing discussions about age-verification and changes in Free and Open-Source Software and GNU Linux and related OSs made me realize a gross misunderstanding on my part. I think many other users may have the same misunderstanding (seeing many comments using the word “traitors”), and it’s important that we become aware of it. We must understand that using or saying “FOSS” or “Linux” does not automatically mean to stand up for human rights, for the community, against corporations, and similar goals and values.
If we read the comments in those age-verification discussions we can see that many developers and possibly also users make statements like “the developers have no obligation towards the community”, “the law is the law, no matter what the community wants”, “we must comply”, and similar. It’s important to realize that many developers work on FOSS not out of consideration for the community, or for human rights, or against corporations. For them it’s just one kind of software development. We may have projects that are FOSS and pro-corporations or pro-surveillance. The “F” in FOSS stands for freedom to modify and distribute the software by/to anyone in the community. It doesn’t stand for “software that promotes / stands up for general human freedom and human rights". But of course there are also developers that work with FOSS because of such values.
So for anyone who, like me, wants to use and promote software as an assertion of, and a stand for, human rights and against corporations, it’s necessary not to stop at “FOSS” or “Linux” but apply more scrutiny and more careful choices. Probably it’s always been like this, but the present times require extra awareness.
I wish there was an acronym or other word that made this moral aspect of some FOSS development clear. This would help users to recognize software projects that share their values, and also those FOSS developers who do work for those values. Is there such a term already out there?
A business is something owned and run by a real human, who may be an evil person but is still at least a person that can potentially be reasoned with and can suffer consequences for their actions. Sociopathic business owners absolutely do exist and are a real concern, but they are a manageable one, at least theoretically, at least when the entire system isn’t stacked in favor of them.
As you say, corporations are different (and they are a significant part of the reason the economy is stacked in favor of sociopaths instead of against them). They are only nominally run by a human, and typically only in a temporally limited or some other limited capacity. A corporation is owned by its shareholders, an anonymous, nameless, faceless mob of pitchforks and torches, a group that is constantly shifting, amorphous and fluid, impossible to solidify into anything that can be pinned down, typically mostly represented by bankers, fund managers and balance sheets that want to look good for their eventual consumer so they can sell financial products to them. They are inherently amoral, and like any mob can quickly turn from vicious to apathetic and back again at the prompting of single individual acts or actors without any logical reason. The sociopaths on the other hand can easily take advantage of this, becoming the single actor or creating the single act to incite the mobs to riot or soothe them into complacency almost at will, and as a result, they control the corporations, and thus the economy.