The hypocrisy of the free software movement

This is kind of a follow up to my previous blog: "Why I don't use the GPL-license" since I realized the problem is much bigger than just the question what license to use, the problem expands to the whole open source movement.

Let's go back to the beginning, at least my beginning, what lead me to open-source. My first encounter with computers were games and I did not care about the license, since it did not matter, you would just consume them. But later when more complex games were released like 3D-shooters, especially those that came with level editors, I became interested in creating my own content for the games, which quickly became more interesting than the game itself. After some time of doing this however I realized the restrictions of proprietary software, since you needed to buy a license for a game you wanted to create content for and then your options to create content for it and modify it were still very limited and after some time the game was outdated technically and nobody used it anymore. So to make it short, my only criteria for the software was, "Can I use it freely or not?" and the answer was of course I cannot. So my motivatoin was purely practice oriented and no question about ethics and politics etc. Since there was no option to use a game engine freely at that time, I gave up on my hobby for quite a while.

I still observed the scene from time to time, to see if something has changed and at that time there were a few GPL projects, but they were not good enough for me, not because of the license, but because of the inferior quality of the software, so I ditched that option as well. Then later finally I found a good option and got into game development and became more interested in open source software, mostly out of practical reasons, only later out of ideological reasons as well. At that time I also encountered the free software movement, but did not notice it that much, I just thought they are the same as the open-source movement, just more radical being for even more freedom and more ethics. So when I was developing my game, I came in contact with them and I thought some of those people would be interested in helping me, but never found anyone seriously wanting to contribute anything productive, like doing real work. What I found however was people starting to harass me that what I'm doing is not right,not good enough, the wrong license and so on. I also had people that said "I will only contribute, if you make your game GPL only, because GPL is so much better and will get other GPL-fans to contribute as well". Later I realized that something was wrong here and those people did not really intend to contribute anything productive to begin with. They just wanted to convert me to their ideology, to then run away and those other people I supposedly would gain to help me, if I would do so, did not exist to begin with. This was my first encounter with the hypocrisy of the free software movement.

When there is a movement for a good cause, the cause should be the priority, not the politics of the movement, but this is what is the case with the free software movement. The free software movement does not care about developing more and better free software, they only care to convert people into their movement and compel them to GPL their software projects which effectively steals them and makes them owned by the movement. They are like the Borg, only assimilate, never create. This can be proven by looking at their fruits, which are mostly nonexistent, since the number of new free software game projects created by them has dropped pretty close to the number 0 around the year 2011 and did not recover in the last 7 years and most likely never will recover to eternity.

The free software movement is hard to see through, since the issues they talk about are all correct, like evil big companies use evil lawyers to forcefully enslave everyone to their evil restrictive copyright licenses. The problem however starts with their "solution" to solve that issue and that is to create another evil big "non-profit" company, to use non-evil evil lawyers to forcefully enslave everyone to their "freedom" non-evil evil restrictive copyright GPL-licenses. This is all completely hypocritical, they are complaining about something and then using the exact same methods than their enemies, but when they use those methods, they are somehow good, while the same methods are evil when used by their enemies.

A copyright license grants the creator of a thing all the rights, thats why it is called copyright, the creator has all the rights, but a copyleft licenses tries to grant the user all the rights and take the creation from the creator, aka stealing it. This is communist ideology, steal from the productive and give to the unproductive and to do that they need to strengthen the goverment, which creates another evil oppressor in the world, which is then supposed to remove some other evil oppressors like evil big companies. This may even work, you can indeed get rid of the evil companies enslaving people through that, but while doing so, you just take away the power from one oppressor and give it to another.

This then creates 3 new big problems:

1. The new oppressor is much stronger

2. The new oppressor now has a monopoly, making him exponentially stronger and more oppressive

3. You destroyed the only productive class, so nothing gets produced anymore and everyone will live in poverty, like it is the case in all communist systems.

Well this turned into a quite general political article and I thought I can get away from politics by indulging into escapism in the form of video games, looks I was wrong. Initially it was just about personal license preference, but now I can only recommend everyone to stay away from those leftists and their insane ideologies as far as possible, or they will try to destroy your hobby as well.