Licensing will not save us

I enjoy this piece by Erlend Sogge Heggen which argues that we, the open source developers, ought not to freely give away our work because it advantages the capitalists and fascists that are leveraging the fruits of our labor to make untold millions for themselves without giving back to the community they're building off or the world at large.

I've been using the computer long enough to remember how hard it was to get your hands on software that was interesting and useful. Without open source software, I'm certain that computing would not have progressed as far as it has, and that I and many others would not have the careers we enjoy because we wouldn't have found a way in.

The class of business leaders who have built on open source software (and who often started as developers themselves) has taken a heavy toll on the world without returning the value they owe, but I also fear returning to a world where a privileged class of people has access to the source code for every important application, and interested people have to choose whether to break the law to satisfy their curiosity.

More and more developers are playing around with licensing to try and defend themselves from the predatory practices of the tech elite, and I'm here for it - but that cannot be the whole solution.

Only organization and community can protect the fruits of OSS (or a future OSS-like?) labor from explotation. It can't be one community, because there are many different aims, cultures, and viewpoints, but there can be many interlinked communities sharing tools, knowledge and practice.

The sooner we start building the practices, habits and (less importantly) software to make it easy to build, maintain, and own communities of practice, the sooner we will make it possible to share the fruits of our labor in a less-destructive manner. Licensing alone won't save us, we need to build stable social organizations and learn how to empower them.