The following is a copy of something I wrote recently for FOSS Force, a leading open source journal, as part of their fundraiser.
Giving money to keep something free sounds like a contradiction. It’s something that we as journalists don’t like to acknowledge, and especially don’t like to talk about.
Journalists traditionally keep their eyes and hands away from the need for money. It’s not our job, we say. Separation of church and state, we say. Chinese wall, we say.
But when distribution costs fell to zero, businesses learned to go around journalism. Advertising disappeared. Paywalls just separated us from our readers.
So here we are with the begging bowls.
Every journalism enterprise is begging for money today. To pay writers. To keep the lights on. Daily newspapers that once dominated our lives are closing right and left. Our business model is gone, so we’re left economically naked and afraid.
Most won’t get through this. Most don’t deserve to.
FOSS Force is an exception. Here’s why.
Software freedom isn’t just about free software. It’s not even just about freedom from the tyranny of big tech. It’s about progress, and how progress happens.
Progress happens as breakthroughs become happenstance and are absorbed into something larger. During the Industrial Revolution this happened out of our sight, as engineers and businessmen agreed on standards for making mass production of trains, planes, and automobiles possible.
In the post-industrial era, this happens through open source. The open source process turns what were expensive miracles into commonplace components that you can build on.
No one covers that process like FOSS Force.
We Won, But Did We?
Yet proprietary interests continue trying to destroy it. You might not know about that without FOSS Force.
Proprietary interests have their place. They’re great for creating breakthroughs on the frontier of software. That’s allowed under open source licenses. But that’s not enough for some, who try to twist what open source means to their own proprietary ends.
It happens every day.
FOSS Force covers it, brings it to light, and lets you know what can be done about it. FOSS Force shows developers how to work around blocks, how to manage their open source code base, and how to avoid the rip-offs proprietary managers are prone to.
It’s not easy. Proprietary interests have grown monstrously fat on the benefits of open source in recent years. Each company I refer to as the “Cloud Czars,” and that others call “big tech,” have benefited enormously from open source, even while they ignore its costs and run it down.
They give lip service to it, but they don’t pay their dues, and everyone’s progress is weakened by that.
It’s the same when we talk about covering the technology. FOSS Force is built on an open source basis. But writing, like code, doesn’t write itself. It needs readers willing to support it, as code needs developers willing to subsidize bug fixes.
FOSS Force is the bug fix. If you’re writing code, or just using code, you should support this bug fix as pure self-interest.
Put a little something in and give to FOSS Force’s Independence 2016 Drive.
I know I will, and I’m just a freelance writer.
