I used to learn a lot at work.
One of the most expensive things about being forced to use AI is that I no longer do.
For decades I would learn new things and hone my existing skills during the thousands of hours I spent making other people rich. I got to keep these skills when I punched-out at the end of the day and use them to do the things I like. Now I spend my days coaxing, babysitting and correcting the output of a bullshit generator.
It's kind of devastating.
But things could be worse.
The experience has given me a lot of perspective. While my professional life has not always been easy, it's never been as harmful to myself or others as it is now. I know now what it feels like to have a job that ruins your body and your mind and damages your community and the world. I feel a kinship with the coal miner, the oil field worker, the defense contractor. I consider myself fortunate to have made it this far before finding myself in this situation.
It provides a level of motivation to find a way out far greater than I've ever felt before. Not just a way out for myself, but a way out for everyone.
Something I've been chewing on with Preston for quite some time is the idea of positive liberty and how it applies to the way I work, the way I live and the impact that I and the things I make have on the world. I've struggled to articulate these thoughts for a number of reasons but the biggest reason might be that they could be seen as a threat to institutions that I appreciate and have benefited from, and have helped many others.
But nothing lasts forever, especially in nature, and nature is my favorite teacher.
One of the ideas that has fallen out of these trains of thought is refereed to as FOSS+. FOSS+ is a positive liberty implementation of Free and Open Source Software. It's really more of a test than a process or recipe, and the simplest expression of the test is "It doesn't work until it works for everyone". FOSS+ builds on FOSS by doing what is necessary for everyone to use the freedoms that free software enables. Those of us who create free software have enjoyed these freedoms for decades, but they are often beyond the reach of people who are not themselves programmers or engineers or skilled in whatever specialty is needed to make, modify, extend and deploy free software. As with positive liberty, the + in FOSS+ is whatever it takes to allow everyone to utilize and enjoy these freedoms.
FOSS+ is a manifestation of the idea that "The truth is, no one of us can be free until everybody is free."
What this means in practice is much harder to define than the software license that defines regular FOSS. I'm not sure that something like a license or other document can really do it. I think that for something to achieve FOSS+ status is more of a process than compliance. As someone involved with establishing the standard I look at existing FOSS projects as a starting point (negative liberty being somewhat of a prerequisite for positive liberty) and then look at what those projects do to enable everyone to use the freedoms the project provides. I don't have any specific examples that I think achieve this, but that has as much to do with how hard I've looked as it does with whether or not they exist.
I think project-level granularity is probably the smallest level on which FOSS+ applies because it's hard to see how a single program or piece of code could achieve what FOSS+ requires. It's hard to see how a piece of software on it's own could enable anyone with any level of skill or experience or any amount of access to equipment, networks, etc. to utilize the freedom the software provides unless that freedom is incredibly small. Maybe such a thing could exist, but it's much easier to see how a project composed of people who want to work with the people who use the results of the project and enable them to utilize the freedoms this output can achieve FOSS+ status.
By now you've probably noticed that FOSS+ is about people more than anything else.
I think there's a lot to learn about how to create things that can honestly be labeled FOSS+, and maintaining that label is a continuous process. This is not easy, but I think it's what we need if we want to escape the trap that the current way we work with software has created. Free and Open Source Software has in many ways changed the world for the better, and it has allowed many of us to experience a level of freedom unimaginable in the time before FOSS was available. Many of us are old enough now to remember what those "before times" were like, and we do not want to go back. But the time has come to take the next step and do the work to allow everyone to enjoy the freedoms that have liberated us from the tyranny of proprietary software.
FOSS+ gives this work a name, and a label people can use to find it.
Jason J. Gullickson, 2026