DIY open software

Over the holidays, I listened to a fair amount of Soft Play ^[1] and this suffusion in punk rock made me think about something I’ve intended to write about before: how my approach to open source software is shaped by DIY culture and this punk DIY ethos differentiates my politically anti-capitalist approach from other approaches to free and open source software.

The open source software movement is not a monolith and there are multiple competing approaches clustered under the umbrella term ‘free/libre and open source software’ or FLOSS. While all FLOSS movements encourage the use of software which is licensed in such a way that the user can use, modify, or distribute the software in contrast to proprietary software, there’s major differences in philosophical and political approach under that umbrella. This is especially relevant when, like me, you’re explicitly positioning your use of FLOSS as a tool for digital liberation from capitalism, neoliberal corporate agendas of power, and enshittification.

There’s a fairly good summary of the differing terms for FLOSS on Wikipedia but I would argue the major distinction is between ‘free software’ and ‘open source software’. Richard Stallman ^[2] has championed the term ‘free software’ since the 1980s with the emphasis on the word ‘free’ to highlight the movement’s commitment to freedom. He established the Free Software Foundation and wrote the Free Software Definition which articulates that “the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software” through the four essential freedoms of free software:

• The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
• The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).
• The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this. (GNU, 2021)

Unfortunately for the free software movement, the word ‘free’ has semantic ambiguity in the English language and Stallman regularly had to clarify that he meant ‘free’ as in ‘liberty’ rather than ‘free’ as in ‘provided at no cost’ which he often did with the aphorism “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer.”” Several other free software advocates thus also used the French and Spanish word ‘libre’ to remove the ambiguity of cost while retaining the meaning of liberty.

Libertarian developer Eric S. Raymond ^[3] coined the term ‘open source software’ specifically as an alternative to ‘free software’ that was more business-friendly and didn’t come with the troublesomely radical political implications of the free software movement. The Open Source Initiative wanted the term “to dump the moralizing and confrontational attitude that had been associated with "free software" in the past and sell the idea strictly on the same pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape.” (Tiemann, 2006) While the term ‘open source software’ thus avoids the ambiguity of the word ‘free’, it is historically situated in a tradition of bootlicking business leaders, corporate co-opting of a political movement, and libertarianism.

This historical lineage of the term ‘open source software’ makes things difficult for me, a left-wing developer and activist who wants to use open source software for anti-capitalist digital liberation from corporate and state control and who also regularly uses the term ‘open source software’ including punning on it in the title of his newsletter. I use the term ‘open source software’ because: a. I’m used to doing so (laziness); b. my current job title includes the words ‘Open Source’; c. it’s now more widely understood than ‘free software’ or ‘FLOSS’; and d. I work in areas of open research and open access publishing where the use of the word ‘open’ makes an immediate conceptual link between these related practices in a way that is expedient for my advocacy of open source in these areas.

This is where DIY culture comes in as an important philosophical touchstone for my approach to FLOSS. DIY culture is popularly thought to have emerged from the punk music scene of the 1970s. As Caroline Coon (1976: 24) wrote in a 1976 Melody Maker review:

The creative buzz, the feel that something is ‘happening,’ is infectious. There is a continual stream of criticism and rude abuse poured over each other's favourite enterprises, but having and giving back that kind of attention is part of the fun. “Do It Yourself” could be the motto down at the 100 Club. Everyone wants to get in on the act. Everyone can.

One of the philosophical tenets of punk was that anyone can express themselves artistically and they can do so without expensive equipment. The idea was that anyone could pick up a guitar, cobble together some recording equipment, and self-produce a 7” single. This was positioned in direct opposition to the corporatisation of the mainstream music industry. George McKay (2024) points to the proliferation of terms used to describe this idea in the early to late ‘70s: “Street Rock”, “dole queue rock”, “Xerox culture”. ^[4] This DIY ethos not only applied to punk music production itself but to the fan production of materials around music like fanzines and fan-produced clothing especially in the Riot Grrrl scene which “merged the early punk ethos of Do It Yourself (DIY) with feminist politics” (Schilt, 2004: 115).

DIY culture expanded to cover a wide range of cultural activities beyond music production and music fandom: self-publishing, zine culture, crafting, guerilla filmmaking, etc. in a variety of non-punk and non-music spaces. The unifying factor of these DIY subcultures is a resistance to the corporate mainstream industries that came to dominate cultural production in the 20th century and a sense that we don’t need them to produce culture and art. We want to be able to make and distribute our own music without a Warner Music Group record label; we want to be able to publish without Penguin Random House; we want to be able to make and distribute software without Microsoft.

So I think my approach to open source software is best thought of in terms of DIY culture and its opposition to corporate control. I don’t want to need corporate permission to install software on my PC: I just want to do it. I don’t want a software company telling me what I can and cannot do with their software and suspending my license if I breach their terms. If software doesn’t quite work for me, I want to be able to expand on it myself so it does do what I want. If a part of my phone breaks, I want to be able to pick up my tiny screwdrivers and replace that component myself. I want to be trusted to handle the mediation between myself and technology without a corporate intermediary placing themselves in my way. Fundamentally this comes down to control: I want to run my own software on my own phone, my own computer, and my own server because I want to control them myself. I also rewatched Andor (2022–) over the holiday and, as Rebel leader Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård) says to Cassian (Diego Luna):

Rule number one, never carry anything you don't control.

This is good leftist practice under any circumstance and taps into the ethical core of my open source advocacy which is the anarchist sense of digital liberation from companies that want to mediate between us and the digital to control our experience. DIY culture used to be more prevalent in computer technology before our current monopolised landscape of corporate control. Tech enthusiasts would assemble their own PC from components they’d picked up rather than buying “smart” surveillance devices from Amazon. Contemporary digital technology is a lot more controlled and circumscribed by big companies like Apple and Google: your laptop cannot physically be disassembled to replace components and your iPhone has to be wholesale replaced if the battery breaks because you can’t fit a new one yourself. By contrast, I had my previous Android smartphone for eight years ^[5] because I was able to replace the battery when it wore down, replace the operating system when Google’s apps became too intrusive, and expand the storage with external MicroSD card storage.

I should be able to install whatever apps I want on my phone and if there’s no app to do what I want to do then I should be able to develop one myself. If I want to edit a video on my computer, I should be able to download some software to do so without getting locked into an expensive monthly subscription. I should be able to run my own server and host my own services because I know what I need more than any corporate intermediary. This is the essence of DIY culture in open source software.

Pretty much every day I see someone complaining about enshittification: how the internet no longer works, how social media is filled with engagement-bait, and how websites are bloated with ads. This is a real problem with larger politico-cultural ramifications than I’m going to discuss here but the start of a potential solution is to do things ourselves rather than relying on Big Tech to fix it. Small acts can lead to larger cultural change. Make your own website rather than using a WordPress or Squarespace packed with ads. Host your own services on a server. Make your own Mastodon instance and run it the way you want to run it. Better yet, bring your friends and colleagues together to run these things as collectives: share the costs, share the labour, and build your own better internet. Make sure they’re open so we don’t silo ourselves into walled Discord gardens and individual Substacks. The digital is broken so let’s do it ourselves and make a new digital.

At the risk of coining a new term in an already contested space, I think that this DIY open software approach avoids the pitfalls of both ‘free software’ and ‘open source software’. ‘Open source software’ is rooted in libertarianism, denying anti-capitalist politics, and bootlicking corporations. ‘Free software’ has more of a community ethos and less focus on individualism but stumbles on the ambiguity of the English word ‘free’. ‘DIY open software’ captures the anti-capitalist spirit of DIY culture and the anarchist community focus of ‘70s punk. It captures the sense that we really can create our own systems and infrastructures outside the corporate monopolies on digital technology.

references

Coon, C. (1976) Parade of the punks. Melody Maker (2 October): pp. 24–25.

GNU (2021). ‘What is Free Software?’. The GNU Operating System and the Free Software Movement. 2021-02-02. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html.en

McKay, G. (2024). 'Was punk DIY? Is DIY punk? Interrogating the DIY/punk nexus, with particular reference to the early UK punk scene, c. 1976–1984'. DIY, Alternative Cultures & Society, 2(1), 94-109. https://doi.org/10.1177/27538702231216190

Schilt, K. (2004). ‘“Riot Grrrl Is . . .”: The Contestation over Meaning in a Music Scene’. In A. Bennett & R. A. Peterson (eds.), Music Scenes: Local, Translocal, and Virtual (pp. 115–130). Vanderbilt University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv17vf74v.12

Tiemann, M. (2006). ‘History of the OSI’. Open Source Initiative. 2006-09-19. https://web.archive.org/web/20090413035630/https://opensource.org/history