Sparkling Gems and New Releases from the world of Free and Open Source Software
FOSSPicks
This month we explore the top FOSS, including the latest version of the KDE app ecosystem and Firefox browser, a font downloader, and an orbital game that's out of this world.
The End of History?
The Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) is an annual conference held at the Université libre de Bruxelles (aka ULB, in Belgium). This year's opening keynote, "FOSS in times of war, scarcity and (adversarial) AI," was delivered by Michiel Leenaars, Director of Strategy at the NLnet Foundation.
Leenaars' opening remarks were particularly poignant because he described the optimistic spirit of the 1990s when the Iron Curtain had fallen and the spread of liberal democracy seemed inevitable, leading to predictions that this would effectively be the end of global ideological conflicts. Looking at that era, it's easy to see why developers were optimistic that open source development would inexorably lead to a freer, more equitable digital commons.
Instead, Leenaars argues, the "cloud-first" strategies of many organizations have perverted those ideals into what he calls "strategic computer rental and anchoring to proprietary services" (SCRAPS). If we rent capacity from platforms and build businesses atop their APIs, we can't be too surprised if we only get the scraps that remain once the provider has extracted value by utilizing FOSS for its own ends. The solution, according to Leenaars, is not more venture capitalists or "predators," but backing social entrepreneurs who build and run services as a public mission, not for profit.
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