Why Open Source has defeated Free Software

Speaker: Abhijit M

Track: English

Type: Long talk

Room: Kabilar Hall

Time: Jan 28 (Sat): 15:05

Duration: 0:45

The open source “movement” is today led by the big industry. Bit corporates are seriously participating in the open-source model of software development. The licence of choice is not GPL but MIT or Apache, further indicating that the thurst is not propagating freedom but just the code. On one side, this has led to the big proliferation of FLOSS, but at the same time, it has led to more corporate control over how software development actually proceeds, corporate control over programmer control and a practical defeat of the free software movement. The free software movement needs to look at its own ideological failures to understand why this happened. The idealization of the market economy and hence the neglect of the needs of the programmers as workers has been a serious limitation of the free software movement. The talk aims to strike a dialogue on what ails the FSM and the road ahead for FSM, against the onslaught of open-source.