Boris Mann’s Personal Blog

Nov 2021

#BuildSoftwareTogether is a tag I’ve been using to mean that people should collaborate with developers and each other to build software … together.

And support and maintain it over time, too.

That may seem obvious but in many cases the construction of software is all by the maker, with limited input or support by people who use it.

And that in fact, the users of the software should take more responsibility as well, especially in the context of when they aren’t actually buying the software as a product.

My best suggestion on licensing is that non-commercial forms have the best trade offs: usage by those who make money with it fund the maintainers, anyone else can use it at no charge.

This article goes further to say that the corporate form of software itself is the issue:

Quirky, personal software that is aggressively unscalable & focuses on delivering human needs in human time over machine needs in machine time is nicer to write, nicer to use, and difficult for capital to subvert.

A response to:

Open-Source Needs a Reckoning, Greg Kennedy

See, the core problem with all “free” software licenses is this: they are aimed at only protecting the Product, and not the People who make or use it. The goal is to produce the best software, not the best community.