Free software during wartime

The Internet, which is arguably the (technical and collaborative) foundation of the free software community, was (at least in the late 90s), strongly guided by the principle "you pay for your stuff", be it access or server time or storage or availability. You paid to infrastructure providers but you were your own content providers (with all benefits and, esp. legal, drawbacks).

This has radically changed after 2005ish. It started with youtube and myspace, because all the aggregators before were just hosting ephemeral data (forums, chats) and the rest were institutional providers. After 2005 the hoster was providing permanent data. This has completely changed the game.

This virus of outsourced content provision is the actual bone breaking element. Corporations and governments are able to control collaboration so easily, because they (once again) consolidated the data hosting. This allows them to control the access to the data, use their own protocols instead of free one, use centralised ones instead of easily multi-hosted ones.

One of the biggest drawbacks for a sustainable and resilient open-source collaboration is the de-facto coercion into using a single online interface (like GitHub) for all relevant collaboration. This ties the ability to communicate to the ability to host and share data together.

Look at the Linux kernel community. Yes, there is a central authoritative repository, but it is completely independent of the communications infrastructure (e-mail using multiple providers not tied to the repository hoster). The way of collaboration requires the users to copy all knowledge (to their local repository). Half of the world could relatively effortlessly switch to a completely different set of repository and mail hosters if need be, in case of a crisis. With GitHub, all communication about ipmitool immediately breaks down, making it hard(er) to establish reliable and trustworthy collaboration on the side.

Long story short, the free-software community has long benefited from cheap hosting and communications provision. We now pay the price for our laziness, because all the infrastructure was there and was left to rot. It was just not sexy enough to maintain it. Code contributers are way too cool with respect to infrastructure maintenance (e.g. IRC / mailing list/ newsgroup / forum moderators). We can be much better off again by using decentralised tools (esp. communications) and start paying again for our stuff.