We've come to the limits of the FOSS and libre software movements. The political and ethical limits of these movements have become clear, and they no longer serve the needs of the workers. Without protection, under permissive licensing, our work gets coopted and put to use in ways we'd never have consented to. Put to work against us, and against others we'd never have dreamed of harming directly. With the limited protections of the GPL, we see our work coopted by capital, ourselves functionally locked out, and, once again, our own work set to harming ourselves and others.
It is clear to me now that open knowledge sharing under capitalism, under oppression, is naive. Indigenous groups know this and have known this for a long, long time. I hope, with recent events, the rest of us are now ready to learn this lesson as well. Reflexively, I want to share. I want to create helpful things and help others create helpful things. But the powerful are listening, and the powerful need to be excluded, or they will continue making hell on earth for us. Sharing should be for comrades and comrades only.
Accordingly, I want to form a collective. As I currently think of it, this means pooling our work under a common agreement, with a common license, and pooling our resources for the common defense of our work under that license; since we do live in the real world and do see the way that the legal system favors the powerful and allows them to violate legal agreements and licenses, I don't expect this to hold forever. Once again, indigenous groups the world over can attest to the value of agreements and promises made with oppressors. The tactic of licensing acts as no more than a deterrent for smaller and mid-sized exploiters and a signal light for the like-minded. All the same, I personally see even that little bit of protection as worth the cost of drafting such a document. Fundamentally, we are in a situation where there no guarantees of anything; we are trying to make our odds as good as possible.
The first and strongest line of defense should be simply keeping the work of the collective internal to the collective, as much as possible. In situations where this sort of privacy is not practical, where the work must be shared in its entirety outside of the collective, either with select parties or broadly, in order to achieve the collective's goals, then licensing and legal agreements come into play, for whatever they may be worth.
My reasons for forming this collective are multiple, but here are some of the biggest ones:
Fundamentally, if we want to live in a world where we continue to have a conception of basic, universal human dignity, of human rights, then we have to reject the assumption of "might makes right" underlying capitalism, patriarchy, imperialism, generative AI, and so on. We have to build for ourselves an alternative tradition that does not discard these things, that attempts to move carefully in the world, that produces sustainable, well-built artefacts and does not squeeze both worker and materials, both the earth and its people, for the benefit of a parasitic capitalist class. We need to build it and defend it; otherwise, those for whom power is both means and end will be all too happy to incorporate whatever work we do to shore up their fundamentally rotten systems of oppression, to extend both their empires and our suffering.
To assert our rights, we need collective power; we need it in the hands of as many comrades, as many people who feel the same and are willing to put their shoulders to the same wheel, as possible. We have no power except collectively. The most basic assertion of this power we can make is that our own work may not be used against us, or anyone else suffering under the inequitous systems of domination the world over.