Open source licenses were merely an initial approach to accomplishing those goals, specifically attacking the problem through *legal tools*. What I’m proposing is that if you look at the practical implications of the current landscape, I think the fundamental nature of software has sort of evolved to strongly, and perhaps even inescapably, emergently express these properties on all on its own. (2/🧵)
IOW, software systems used to lend themselves to naturally hand control to creators, and now the opposite seems to be the case, users seem to by default have easy and automatic mitigations to all the technological tools of enforcement. (3/🧵)
Fir example, regardless of legality, the actual vehicle of jailbreak suppression was the inherent difficulty of creating jailbreaks. They were so difficult that nations would pay large sums of money for them, and could practically expect to be able to keep them secret. Under this context, laws get to coast on the underlying natural friction of the system, and arguably serve more as a means of formalizing and minimally supporting this existing reality, rather than actually enforcing it. (4/🧵)
For an example of how ineffective laws are when they lack this underlying ecosystem alignment, look no further than VHS/DVD and bootlegs. No one has any delusions that legal tools would be effective in combatting bootlegs, studios understood that they would have to combat that problem through other means and develop a model that would be profitable without requiring the elimination bootlegging. Their pre-VHS theatrical models that COULD rely on only official screenings wouldn’t translate. (5/🧵)
Now that’s not to say they won’t try to force the old models to continue working, but my point is that those attempts will fail because they will quickly reveal themselves to be unimaginably expensive to maintain, orders of magnitude more costly to maintain than any constructed DRM schemes of the past. Companies are already overwhelmed by CVEs, why would you sign up to *artificially multiply that avalanche of maintenance for yourself*? (6/🧵)
And the fact that you’re not expanding your maintenance burden unboundedly isn’t even the real concern. The actual threat is that while your baseline maintenance is expanding, your open competitors have no such burden and are using those resources to instead focus on actual product and feature development to start running past you. This isn’t a hypothetical or even a prediction, users are already unlocking their devices. This is simply the new cost of maintaining these systems TODAY. (7/🧵)
That’s what I mean by all software is effectively open source by default now. You must expend tremendous energy to make software “simulate” its old closed behaviors, and the underlying frictions have flipped to naturally align with open systems, such that now even the legal tools are sort of redundant for us — the GPL isn’t what ensures software is user controlled, that’s just the new default nature of *all* software. Users can just circumvent barriers, suing for GPL violation is overkill. (8/🧵)
LLMs have undeniably had a ton of negative effects on open source, but I think we might be letting that distract us from recognizing that the larger macro shift that is taking place is that the environment has reconfigured itself to, perhaps for the first time, naturally advantage the actual original FOSS vision of the world. If nothing else, the open source models are the least negatively affected by these changes. (9/🧵)
I think FOSS has a real opportunity to proactively work to surface and understand these newfound advantages to ultimately actively exploit them. Look, the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs sucked no question about it, but it is also true that that asteroid was undeniably good for team mammals. Suddenly our weird mammal adaptations aren’t merely survival-grade, we find ourselves in a world where they’re actually now apex predator caliber. We should proceed accordingly (10/10)