Free vs Open
Cryptography for the people
Our liberties are at stake when it comes to our digital lives.
In the age of big-tech and mobile devices, our interactions are increasingly taking place on online platforms, the vast majority of which flow through corporate owned and controlled software. More than ever, our speech and our actions are easily surveilled. This is by no means a new topic of concern, experts from around the globe have been pointing to this for decades. There are even new US government reports that outline just how extensive this surveillance is. As we race forward with new tech innovation, what alternatives are there to counter the tendencies to control and surveil people, aside from legislation forever chasing, but always falling behind or simply failing? Counterintuitively, we have to look back at the Internet’s history, to find viable alternatives for moving forward.
As the technologies that power what we now call the Internet evolved between the 70s and 80s, a movement for free and open-source software also emerged. The movement, comprised of hackers, hobbyists, working academics and computer scientists rather than traditional activists, developed forms of participatory governance, open protocols, and standards bodies as ways to ensure that certain freedoms could continue to be guaranteed.
Historians of tech have pointed to many defining moments for open-source software. The freedom based language from the early movement was popularised with sayings like — ‘free’ as in ‘speech,’ not as in ‘beer’ — which was paraphrased from a statement by the early free software pioneer, Richard Stallman. However, over the years and despite a rise in the narrative of freedom across the political spectrum, within the culture and institutions that make up the free and open source software community, the idea of ‘open’ gained far more traction as compared to that of ‘free’. Part of that culture shift occurred as large companies like Oracle, Google and eventually Microsoft gave broad support to open-source by contributing open code and also as they began to sit on the boards of many of the project foundations.
Throughout the 90s and 2000s, we saw convenience and ease become key factors in the end-user adoption of mobile devices and software-as-a-service. ‘Freemium’ access to Web 2.0 platforms replaced the purchase of packaged software in stores. We simultaneously witnessed growth in the numbers of languages, tools and libraries released with open-source licences, as well as a huge rise in the use of closed source algorithms. As end-users, we signed up for all the platforms and developed a habit of simply ‘checking the box’ to avoid reading a growing complexity of legal terms of service. Camouflaged by all these changes, another transformation occurred. Many were highlighting the openness of the code, and while more and more code was being written in the open, what was being valued and monetized by the businesses was the user data. Taken together, these seemingly minor and positive shifts led to an incredible concentration of closed and captured data.
Fast forward to today and the consequences are evident, as growing ideological divisions between people exist in the majority of nations, distrust of each other and institutions is at record highs, and where a list of the top 10 tech companies by revenue looks reminiscent of the GDP ranking of nations less than 50 years ago. When you combine the revenues of the five largest corporations in 2020, they are greater than the GDP of France, the 7th largest economy in the world.
More than ever, we are experiencing consolidation and concentration of money and power. More than ever, what we need is the ethos of ‘free and open’ to change this and spur cooperative and communal innovations at the edge. Shifting the value and power back to the edge is necessary for building a thriving digital commons that will encourage the trust needed to solve global challenges. This is a hope that inspires many in the distributed web and decentralised movements today–because they can viscerally see the promise of the past joined to the cryptographic advances of the present creating nearly unimaginable possibilities for the future. Remember, the Internet itself once seemed unimaginable.
Cryptography might sound flashy and modern, but in simplest terms, it’s just codes being used to hide messages, and it has been used as far back as ancient Egyptian culture. Today, cryptography is almost imperceptibly interwoven into most of our digital lives as the basis for passwords, login systems, and many other parts of our digital communication pipelines . Though it is of critical importance to these systems, this also hides a fundamental issue: cryptography is primarily controlled by the companies and institutions that wield all the power rather than everyday end-users. That is in large part how we have arrived at a point where our digital lives can so easily be surveilled both by governments and companies.
“Free software respects the freedom and community of the end-user.”—Richard Stallman, pioneer in the free software movement
One significant innovation that modern cryptography has made possible is cryptocurrencies. Despite the headline dramas and realities of scams and security breaches, a major contribution of the cryptocurrency sector is that now, millions of people understand how to use or control cryptography in the form of public and private keys or ‘wallets’. It’s not yet sufficiently convenient or even resilient enough for mainstream users, but the door has opened and the evolution towards ease of use is underway. Just as convenience and ease opened up the adoption of mobile devices and software-as-a-service, there are many new directions the personal control and use of private keys could take human socioeconomics.
Holochain is part of this process. With Holochain, we have created an innovative peer-to-peer application framework that enables the end-user to cryptographically control their data while using any type of application. This capability allows people and communities to use free software, and (finally) have their digital freedom respected. As we see it, this is one of the only ways to ensure that humanity can continue to take advantage of digital technology breakthroughs without the continued loss of liberties. This new capability will unleash entirely new possibilities for humans to coordinate and collaborate at scale.
In addition to creating new tech, Holochain also helped craft the Cryptographic Autonomy License (CAL), approved by the Open Source Initiative. This is the only license which guarantees the liberties of people to always control their cryptographic keys and data. Systems and software licensed with the CAL ensure that people maintain control over their data, because in this ever evolving digital world, those who control the cryptographic keys, control the game.
