[shadowgovt]

The largest challenge the free software movement still faces is philosophical.

The original underpinning of the Four Freedoms is "I own this hardware; how dare someone else dictate how it operates?" That assertion falls flat in the Cloud era, yet Cloud services are way too convenient and useful to just ignore them or try to tell everyone the One True Path is up the mountain to the hermitage of traditional desktop, offline, disconnected software.

I look to the Fediverse as a potential next good model: the idea that if you run a part of the cloud, you have a vested interest in it, it's yours, and how dare someone else dictate etc.

... but it's a fundamentally different challenge than the original pioneers of the movement fought against corporations and monopoly manufacturers and sellers.