Software development has always felt less like a job and more like a craft. Not in the romanticized sense of artisanal mystique, but in the grounded, repetitive, deeply human sense: you learn by doing, you refine through failure, and you leave behind something others can build upon. After 30 years in the open source software world, that idea has only grown stronger for me.
The message that resonated isn’t new, but it’s easy to forget in today’s landscape. Software is not just a product to be consumed—it is a body of knowledge, a shared infrastructure, and a living system shaped by those who engage with it. The Free Software movement understood this early on, even if it didn’t always state it in explicitly political terms. At its core was a simple but powerful idea: if you use a tool, you should have the right to understand it, modify it, and share it.
That idea quietly challenges the assumptions of capitalism.
Capitalism tends to frame software as property—something owned, controlled, and monetized. It draws boundaries: licenses, restrictions, subscriptions. It tells users that their role is to consume, not to participate. But software, unlike physical goods, doesn’t degrade when shared. It improves. It evolves. Every bug report, every patch, every fork is part of a collective process that resists enclosure.
In that sense, Free Software has always been a kind of countercurrent. Not necessarily anti-market in every form, but deeply skeptical of systems that separate people from the tools they depend on. It insists on a different relationship: one where users are also contributors, where knowledge is not hoarded, and where improvement is a communal act.
There’s also a dignity in that. Craft implies ownership—not necessarily legal ownership, but intellectual and practical ownership. When you can read the code you run, when you can fix what’s broken, when you can share improvements with others, you are no longer just a user. You are a participant in the system. That changes how you think, how you work, and how you relate to technology.
Over three decades, I’ve seen this ethos persist, even as the industry around it has shifted. Open source has been commercialized, absorbed, and rebranded countless times. Companies build fortunes on top of it. Platforms centralize what was once distributed. And yet, underneath all that, the original idea still holds.
People still share code freely.
People still collaborate across borders and institutions.
People still believe that software should be something we can shape, not just something we rent.
That’s the craft.
And maybe that’s the quiet link: a recognition that building software is not just about efficiency or profit, but about agency. About having a say in the tools that shape our lives. About refusing to be locked out of the systems we depend on.
After 30 years, that still feels worth holding onto.