I have a feeling that the FLOSS movement in spirit was constructed in the previous centralised computing paradigm with timesharing systems, and in some sense is left there. I wonder what its corresponding movement of our time would be, now that the pendulum has swung back from the desktop computing paradigm and into dumb terminals over a document format?

@albin As I see it: decentralization.

@alcinnz I think so, but not just that. If they used copyright law and GPL, I think we need to do similar forays into other fields, but I'm still quite fuzzy on the details of what that means.

@albin over and above AGPL?

It's all very code-focused on the GNU side. What people seem to get interested in with cloud services is the fact that commercial exploitation of the code gets monopolised by those cloud services. So we get copyfarleft and weird stuff like the "commons clause" showing up.

Might actually be impossible to fix though.

@lupine For me the code is a means, not an end. The most interesting parts of the free software movement to me were always the slightly utopian visions (and I think they are very clearly widely different) about the societies around and through the code. I can imagine both communal centralised computing and individualised libertarian computing springing from the same roots, just to name two.

Do you have a good source on copy far left?

@Shamar @albin self-hosting is niche, and kept that way by overbearing cloud services with huge advantages. That keeps hacking niche too, of course. Quite how to challenge that without excluding those services from using our code, I don't really know.

Some ideological communities will pick self-hosting as long as it's possible, of course. For email, it's still marginally possible, but I wouldn't bet on it long-term. Usenet, IRC, XMPP demonstrate its fate

@Shamar @albin self-hosting seems analogous to grown-your-own food to me. Niche, and as long as these companies can grow/host anything you can, only cheaper and faster and more conveniently, what could a non-ideological hook be to get people doing it themselves?

One could imagine a crop variety that is insanely delicious, but if you put it in the existing commons, you'll find it in the supermarket the very next day. What other options are available?

@lupine @Shamar However, if it's specifically control and accountability you are after, couldn't that be solved through less heavy means than turning everyone into hackers? Also, I think it's worth thinking about how this translates to other fields. According to the same logic, do I also need to be able to produce my own food, or do biotech or medicine? Or is there something specific to software, and if so why?