Free/Libre

I hope we'll eventually see something more humane. History moves in cycles, alternating social and liberal times with economical and restrictive times. From the 80ies on the Hippies have been crowded out by the Yuppies. I believe the next social/liberal revolution has been gathering its followership since the 70ies: RMS paved the way for millions of geeks who brought about a revolution of revolutions: The first revolution to start by creating things instead of destroying things. The first revolution to be officially prescribed by governments (who order their administration to exclusively use open formats).

However, the FLOSS revolution is rather unpolitical and is a top secret operation. My telling people that Microsoft is trying to assassinate information society and that they will fucking not get this document in Wordwhatever format from me is perceived as ridiculous - and I can't even begrudge them the ridicule. I believe the reason for this total lag of public perception is that FLOSS is utterly technical. There is no social vision connected to it in public perception. No geek who contributed anything to FLOSS needs to be told about the value of free information. But beyond that, there is little that politically binds the FLOSS community. Even the word FLOSS is a unloved merger of names of two major factions of that community.

However, that plurality of the FLOSS community is a strength, because that plurality allows us to politically reach far more people than the FLS/OSS factions - or developers who don't even care about these distinctions - could reach alone. I do think though the initial ignition has to come from the FLOSS movement because the next major political revolution will very likely make heavy use of network technology. And it will hopefully not be a proprietary revolution. That means FLOSS will have to provide the technology for the next revolution.