I don’t deny its great contributions to the public and free culture, but I think it has become insufficient. The industry abuses it as much as it can, so I believe the only way to defend ourself is to migrate to a copyfarleft licensing model. With it, we can keep the same openness and freedom for the commons, but force the private sector to choose: either pay for our work, or fuck off.
“Haha funny you use a phone and buy things yet you are anticapitalist haha” ahh argument
The copyfarleft licenses are not incompatible with the spirit of FOSS, they work exactly the same for the people, the only difference is that companies can either fuck off or pay
The fact that the FOSS model is still considered the best thing ever is so sad to me. The “free” part is clearly not working. Or rather it is working as is now intended: free labour for the private sector to exploit.
The Telekommunist Manifesto for the longer version of this 🙃
Conclussion first: In any case, I would agree with what some other used said: What we care about in here, for the most part, is the software element of it. Even if I personally don’t consider using Cl*udflare to be self-hosting, all of us have similar info sharing interests, so this is just a terminology argument that does not really impact us that much
I wrote this first: Actually, this is a pretty interesting thing to think about. To me, the key factor to distinguish what is hosting and what is not is the use of a server. I would say that internet connection is not a requirement for hosting, otherwise it seems absurd to deny that the servers of big LAN parties like the Euskal Encounter are not hosting anything, they clearly are. Down to the smaller scale, having a LAN only Minecraft server in your home server, I would say it still is hosting, even if only you and your family use it. Now, going to a non dedicated computer that is exposing it on LAN, is it self-hosting? I would say no, just because it also seems absurd that any single player world opening in LAN to enable admin suddenly is self-hosting, I say it is not.
But I guess this shows that there is a point where we need more specific definitions, there is some ambiguity.
A summary of my definition attempt:
To me, it is not. If the internet or anything else goes down you lose all access. You are not hosting your services, so claiming to be SELF-hosting is not really accurate.
Furthermore, in the phylosophical aspect, you depend on a private company for all your infrastructure and are not doing anything against the centralization of the internet. To me, this is one of the core reasons I self-host. Maybe we need to make new terms for this, but allowing anything under the corporate cloud umbrella to be called SELF-hosting seems bad to me.
Wow, super based article! Thanks for it, I will also look at other articles from the author :D