An inquiry into the failure of the free software movement, and a proposal for recovering its radical soul.
Front Page — Free Software Foundation — working together for free software
The technology overrunning our communities isn't built for the benefit of humanity: it's built so that billionaires can control us. Our lives don't have to be this way. The FSF empowers users with free software, technology built through global collaboration, mutual respect, and above all, freedom. The FSF will always continue to resist the encroachment of nonfree software. We're fighting to protect all computer users and build a better future.
Freedom Now | Polity: Vol 52, No 3
Left-wing politics is resurgent. Self-proclaimed socialists are unexpectedly popular. Proposals like universal health care are a commonplace of Democratic campaigns. But there is not yet a clear, unifying idea behind this political shift. We propose that that idea is freedom. While the left once understood freedom as emancipation from the economy, the right spent the twentieth century neutralizing and appropriating the idea of freedom by reinventing the economy as the true site of freedom. To reclaim freedom as a value of the left, we have to begin with the daily experience of most people: the unfreedom of the workplace. The authoritarian organization of work is not just an offense against freedom; it also helps us understand how freedom requires emancipation both from the economy and within the economy, and why that emancipation requires mass struggle.
Reclaiming the Computing Commons
Resisting the commodification of information is a political struggle, not a technical one.
It’s time to rethink Open Source
Why developers give away valuable work for free — and what can be done to take that money back.
Mx. Aria Stewart (@aredridel@kolektiva.social)
I knew it was this way but it's really hitting me today how much the Open Source movement and copyright maximalism supplanted the idea of free software, and again how much the Free Software movement turned from a close ideological cousin of the remix and open culture movement into a culture of legalism. At the same time, copyright law itself has been extended to be near-immortal copyrights rather than brief monopolies to spur creation by enabling profit from creating works.
What is Free Software? - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation
Since 1983, developing the free Unix style operating system GNU, so that computer users can have the freedom to share and improve the software they use.
I Regret Migrating to Codeberg
A brief comment on Codeberg’s new terms, and why a free-software host deciding which projects are welcome worries me more than the bans themselves.
Pigeonholed: Creative Freedom as an Act of Resistance
Creative Freedom as an Act of Resistance
Unlocking the commons
"The most powerful and interesting media model will remain raising money from members who don't just permit but <em>insist</em> that the product be given away for free."
Pluralistic: The (other) problem with automatic conversion of free software to proprietary software (23 Apr 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Here's an interesting stunt: a project called Malus.sh will take your money, and in exchange, it will ingest any free/open source code you want, refactor that code using an LLM, and spit out a "clean room" version that is freed from all the obligations imposed by the original project's software license:
The Linear Oppression of Note-taking Apps
What we lose when our digital notes remove the freedom to move
Histomat of F/OSS: We should reclaim LLMs, not reject them
A few days ago, I came across a blog post titled On FLOSS and training LLMs that articulates a growing frustration within the free and open source software…
Sorting out the Ethical Licensing Mess
Software developers who give the world, for free, usage rights to the code they write often use open source licenses to make this gift legally explicit. These free usage rights (and then some) are …
I just can't shake this feeling... - We Can Just Do Things
Why is all of this free? What's the plan here? Cui Bono?
Meet Thaura / Your Ethical AI Companion
Big Tech fuels oppression. We fuel resistance. A free AI for a free future.
It is a shame that "democratization" in software has come to mean broader access to products instead of participation in democratic processes — there is talk of LLMs democratizing software production, but I have yet to see social, collective and democratic processes govern the design of software.
