I think we have to consider that the principles of the free software movement, revolutionary though they genuinely were, were also set in the same mindset that latterly saw its founder Richard Stallman spectacularly fall from grace. They are principles that deal in software development and licensing in strict isolation, outside of the social context of their use. They are code-centered, not human-centered.
(…)
It’s worth considering whose freedom we value. Do we value the freedom of the people who use software, or do we also value the freedom of the people the software is used on? While the latter group doesn’t always exist, when they do, how we consider them says a lot about us and our priorities.
This makes me think of last year’s update by Matrix saying that they are used by multinational corporations all over the place, but they themselves aren’t even sure they can afford to work on their own product anymore, financially, because these Megacorps don’t give them a cent.
It reminds me of that XKCD comic:
The fact is, when those supports crumble… so will everything else.
Just look at COVID and how during it there was an explosion of States hiring COBOL programmers because they were trying to update their fucking Unemployment systems that were coded in COBOL. You might say “life comes at you fast.”
In all 35 years of life I’ve met two people that knew COBOL, and they both wanted me to know that they knew COBOL.