Post by @yaxu@post.lurk.org

@yaxu@post.lurk.org

2026-07-30 09:59 UTC

Thinking about earlier days of free software, I guess GPL was designed for a world where you might get a program on tape, floppy disk, or downloaded from a local BBS (probably historically inaccurate, but stay with me..). You might have an address to write to a human to get the source code off them, or find them and ask for it in-person. I guess the code would move slowly, getting improved in different ways depending on the community it reached. In the corporate internet days, almost everything goes through a huge massively centralised, closed source (!) Microsoft AI platform, constantly scraped and IP washed by extractive bots, that's a totally different prospect and completely changes the meaning of the license, and sometimes feels like it makes the whole process of sharing feel inhumane. I'm now thinking about no longer uploading copyleft source code to codeberg etc as well as github, only sharing it at workshops/with friends, and asking others to do the same. Maybe this could be part of the license, but could just be an unwritten social contract.

Replies (9)

@yaxu@post.lurk.org 2026-07-30 10:02

The dynamicland approach to open source really went against the grain, but hits differently in 2026 https://dynamicland.org/2024/Is_Realtalk_open_source/

Open ##4341725
@junklight@mastodon.art 2026-07-30 10:03

@yaxu@post.lurk.org Samizdat software!!! that's what it felt more like in pre-internet days. And even with dial up it was easier to get linux off of floppies than from "online"

Open ##4341734
@esi@merveilles.town 2026-07-30 10:14

@yaxu@post.lurk.org I both hate this and love this. I hate that we are losing the global openness because of corporate abuse, but at the same time I am really loving seeing communities sort of shrink into these smaller but stronger cores where things are shared between a handful of people slowly instead of quickly globally. I am seeing this in personal communication, music, visual art, etc... We have slow food, slow web, small web, etc... Maybe it's time for Small source? slow source?

Open ##5077872
@nasser@merveilles.town 2026-07-30 10:45

@yaxu@post.lurk.org the "tragedy of the commons" isn't that the people using it overconsume, it's that, left undefended, it gets pillaged by antisocial external actors...

Open ##5077877
@yacodes@mastodon.social 2026-07-30 11:06

@yaxu@post.lurk.org Recently stumbled upon a similiar idea/protocol—sneakerweb, which brings collections of websites offline to be shared via physical storage media. https://sneakerweb.org

Open ##5077881
@tiotasram@kolektiva.social 2026-07-30 12:28

@yaxu@post.lurk.org obscurity is not security though, so it feels like you'd end up wanting to run these programs on a non-networked machine or take some other drastic measures to protect against accidental vulnerabilities (like drastically reducing code complexity in some way). On the one hand, if such communities remain marginal, maybe the combination of small size and extra attack effort can protect them. On the other hand, that's still a very flimsy assurance. I'm definitely a fan of abandoning the evangelical imperative.

Open ##5077884
@xan@xantronix.social 2026-07-30 15:20

@yaxu@post.lurk.org i have attempted to produce a license for this specific purpose, but a license feels far too open and inviting for internet Germans to needlessly nitpick, so a social convention such as what you suggest seems more apropos to this endeavour. excellent, inspirational code and ideas can become a matter of oral tradition, not to obscure but to impart in others a sense of agency and mastery over the materials in an interpretation befitting their own personage

Open ##5077885
@fcr@post.lurk.org 2026-08-03 09:17

@yaxu@post.lurk.org Actually, in its early days, the Free Software Foundation charged a flat distribution fee of $150 for mailing tapes of GNU software (such as Emacs) to individuals or institutions who requested them. This makes the whole point of "free as in speech, not as in beer" quite tangible.

Open ##5077886
@tiotasram@kolektiva.social 2026-07-31 10:36

@yaxu@post.lurk.org I think I was extrapolating a bit... But the idea that the code would change differently for different communities via piecemeal distribution would mean that security issues found and fixed in one community would not necessarily make it to others. You could have a centralized, globally-accessible channel for security patches only, I suppose, but it feels like that goes against the spirit of things (and it would be at least one central, public place where anyone could get a copy). If different people working with different versions of the software do have different security patches applied, then an adversary can just get their hands on or reverse engineer a few versions, figure out which patches are missing, and then attack each community based on those. Thence "obscurity is not security" because one argument against that scenario is that an attacker from outside the communities-of-use wouldn't have access to the source code, making it harder for them, but that's just obscurity, not real security. Which led me to thinking: does this kind of slow code even need network access at all? Much of it probably doesn't, so you could mitigate the security risks a bit that way.

Open ##5077902