Essay · Free software & ethics

Computing As Social Activity: When Free Software Grows a Conscience

A reflection on the CASA manifesto, the free software movement, and the perennial question of who is responsible for what happens to code.

Ossci Science · 12 November 2026

Introduction

In October 2026, L. Rhodes published the manifesto Computing As Social Activity — or CASA for short — on destructured.net¹. It is an attempt to fundamentally rethink the way we talk and think about software. Not: what may I do with this code? But: what does my use of this code do to the community around me?

At first sight that sounds harmless, almost endearing. But anyone who reads the manifesto alongside the classic texts of the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative quickly sees two world-views colliding²³. World-views that have formed the backbone of the internet for forty years.

What does CASA say?

CASA starts from four principles¹:

1. Computing is inherently social.
2. Therefore, our use of computers should always account for community.
3. Accounting for community entails concern for other people.
4. Concern puts a person's agency before their utility.

The manifesto is explicit about its relationship with FLOSS: it is “less a repudiation of earlier frameworks (such as FOSS) than an attempt to re-establish computing practices in values that necessarily precede technical concerns”. But it is immediately followed by the ominous sentence: “Those that can be harmonized with the principles above are welcome; those that conflict should be abandoned.”

And that is precisely where the conflict lies. Because the core of the free software movement — freedom 0 — cannot possibly be harmonized with CASA.

The old order: four freedoms and ten criteria

To grasp the conflict, we have to go back to first principles.

Incidentally, the two movements do not even speak the same language when it comes to naming themselves. The FSF speaks of Free Software — “free” as in freedom, not as in price — an explicitly ethical stance about the rights of the user. The OSI, founded in 1998, deliberately chose the term Open Source as a more pragmatic, business-friendly label for almost the same category of software. In English-speaking debates the umbrella term Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) is used to cover both camps, and that is the term used throughout this article — unless the difference between the two names is exactly the point.

The FSF defines free software through the four essential freedoms, the first and most important of which is: the freedom to run the program for any purpose (freedom 0)². Followed by the freedom to study how the program works and change it, the freedom to redistribute copies, and the freedom to distribute modified versions. Crucially: the FSF holds that freedom 0 is unlimited. The maker of the software may have no say over the purpose for which you use it.

The OSI, the more pragmatically inclined sister of the FSF, says the same thing in different words in the Open Source Definition³. Criterion 5: “The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.” Criterion 6: “The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor.” No discrimination against users, no restriction of fields of application. A license that says “this software may not be used by the military” is by definition not open source.

Both movements are thus built, each in its own way, on the neutrality of the tool: code is a means, and morality belongs to the user — not to the maker and not to the license.

Why CASA cuts against the principles of the FSF

This is where it gets interesting. CASA collides head-on with the FSF in three ways.

First: agency before utility breaks freedom 0. CASA demands that in every act of computing you put the agency of others first, and that you avoid reducing people to “the value that can be extracted from them”¹. That is a normative prohibition on use, dressed up as an ethical principle. Freedom 0 says exactly the opposite: the program may be used for any purpose, whether the developer approves of that purpose or not². The moment you add criteria for use — “no war drones, no exploitative AI” — the software is, by FSF standards, no longer free software. The FSF has said so itself: any license that restricts the first of the four freedoms falls outside the definition⁴.

Second: CASA shifts rights from the individual to the collective. In a footnote, the manifesto cites Daniel Goldsmith's essay The Original Sin of Free Software with the claim that the rights in the FLOSS founding documents are “almost uniformly expressed as individual rights”¹⁵. That is a deliberate critique: where the FSF protects the individual user against the power of developers and corporations, CASA wants the community — at its broadest, “humanity at large” — to prevail over the freedom of the individual programmer or user. That is not an adjustment; that is a different philosophy. For Stallman and his allies, the individual freedom to run, study and share software is a moral foundation; for CASA that freedom is at best a means, subordinate to social values.

Third: CASA claims jurisdiction over use, not merely over code. The manifesto says it verbatim: “License to alter code provides high order agency to those with the requisite skills, but is insufficient on its own.”¹ The four freedoms concern what you may do with the code. CASA concerns what you do with the computer — “as applicable to interacting via social media as they are to software design”. It thereby reaches further than any license ever could — or, according to the FSF, ever should — go. The practical lists spell it out in black and white: “Avoid… aligning yourself with antithetical projects or groups.” FLOSS asks you to share a program with everyone, including people you despise. CASA asks you not to cooperate with “antithetical” parties. Those two commandments exclude each other.

The OSI does not come off well either: an injunction like “avoid externalizing costs” or “do not contribute to dangerous concentrations of power” is, once translated into a license, a restriction on fields of endeavor — and therefore disqualified under the Open Source Definition³.

The kitchen knife, the car, and the illusion of the neutral tool

The classic defence of the FLOSS world against ethical use restrictions is the kitchen-knife analogy.

A kitchen knife can prepare a delicious meal, but it can also be used to commit murder. Yet we do not demand that manufacturers sell knives only to cooks of good conscience. We do not engrave a usage clause into the blade: “This knife may not be used to harm living beings.” That would be absurd — and, moreover, unenforceable. The same goes for the car: a car takes children to school, but it can also be a getaway vehicle. We accept that duality as the price of functionality, and we place responsibility with the perpetrator, not with the manufacturer.

The FSF and OSI implicitly view software the same way: code is a knife. The same compiler builds a hospital system and a drone's target-acquisition system. The license does not concern itself with that, and that is exactly the point: freedom 0 is the legal codification of the neutrality of the kitchen knife.

There is also a practical argument: use restrictions are virtually impossible to enforce. How does a repository maintainer know whether the binary someone downloads ends up in a Pentagon data center or in a school in Nairobi? Coraline Ehmke's Hippocratic License — made famous by WIRED — tried anyway, and in practice proved largely symbolic⁶.

But CASA, and the movement around it, has a sharp reply. Software is not a kitchen knife, they say. A knife only becomes dangerous in the hand of a murderer; on its own, it does nothing. Modern software, by contrast, is a system: it profiles, it trains, it generates, it decides — often without a human left in the loop. A recommendation algorithm, a trained language model or an autonomous drone is not lying in a drawer waiting to be abused; it acts on its own. And the developer who builds it knows perfectly well which purposes it will serve. Where the knife manufacturer sees his product scatter in a thousand directions, the maintainer of a popular AI framework looks straight at the quote request from a defense contractor. That is the difference between a vendor and an accomplice, says the CASA camp.

Besides — and here the analogy becomes uncomfortable — if the only knife manufacturer in the world knew that ten percent of its knives ended up in murders, could it forever appeal to the neutrality of its tool? The neutrality of the knife is a choice, not a law of nature.

The anger in the community

Where does this movement come from? From sheer frustration.

In recent years, free and open source software has become the backbone of precisely the systems the CASA community has nightmares about. Analyses estimate that the overwhelming majority of American military codebases are built on open-source software⁷. The war in Ukraine showed how AI-powered drone systems lean heavily on open libraries at scale: image recognition, flight planning, swarm coordination — all of it software once built by volunteers who saw free software as an ideal⁸.

And the AI revolution cut the wound even deeper. Today's large language models are trained on decades of freely shared code, documentation and community knowledge — only to be deployed for mass surveillance and, so the accusation goes, to dominate markets under the marketing label of “open source” (“open washing”) while displacing human labor. Freedom 0, meant to protect the weak user against the powerful vendor, turns out in practice to protect the powerful above all: it is always the biggest player that reaps the most benefit from the right to use code for any purpose.

The community behind CASA and related initiatives (think of the Organization for Ethical Source) is therefore angry above all that the idealistic infrastructure of the internet is being used for war and exploitation — while the licenses they once saw as revolutionary give them no legal recourse whatsoever⁹. It is the bitter irony of history: the four freedoms were meant as a weapon against monopolists, and the monopolists became its best customers.

Conclusion: the floodgates

The manifesto itself pretends it can have it both ways: the parts of FLOSS that fit are welcome; the rest can go in the wastebasket. But the core cannot be salvaged. Freedom 0 is not a peripheral feature of FLOSS philosophy — it is the philosophy. A movement that puts the agency of others above the freedom of the user, that wants to exclude “antithetical projects and groups”, and that wants to bind use to moral conditions, does not stand alongside the FSF and OSI — it stands against them.

And yet — however sympathetic the intentions — it should feel right, precisely now, to choose the old, “unlimited” freedoms. Because anyone who wonders what goes wrong once we elevate CASA into the norm needs to ask only one question: who decides what counts as harm?

The manifesto is silent on that in every language. “Concern for community” sounds convincing as long as you picture a single community that shares your values. But the world does not consist of one community — it consists of thousands, and their conceptions of harm stand in direct opposition to one another. The defense industry is also a community: engineers, veterans, entire towns dependent on a factory, and within that community a target-acquisition system is a source of livelihood, pride and “agency”. A fundamentalist religious community is a community — and within it, a censorship filter is experienced as protection for its own members. A state is a community — and down that road, “harmful to the national community” is one step away from blocking dissident, press and communications software. CASA offers no procedure, no judge, no due process that decides whose community counts. All it offers is the principle itself — and hence the power of whoever gets to interpret the principle.

That is the floodgates opening. Once “good for the community” may be a license condition, anything can be pushed underneath it. Today: no military use. Tomorrow: no use that “disturbs public order”. The day after: no use by organizations that “act contrary to the values of the rights holder”. Every majority, every government, every ideology gets a legal instrument to withhold software from people whose goals it rejects — exactly the instrument the four freedoms set out to make impossible in 1986². Freedom 0 is not naive about abuse; freedom 0 is the hard lesson that the only alternatives are “free for everyone” or “free for those the gatekeeper approves”. History leaves little doubt about how the second variant works out.

That is why the four freedoms matter more, in principle, than any potential misuse they enable. A universal right that applies only to people with the correct goals is not a right but a permit. The strength of the FLOSS model is that it does not depend on the moral judgment of whoever happens to hold the pen: it works in Bangalore and in Boston, in a village school and on a military base, for activists and for the agencies prosecuting them — precisely because it asks no one to be approved first. In a divided world, that procedural neutrality is not moral blindness; it is the only common ground on which everyone can cooperate at all. Balkanize that ground along community morals, and open source splinters into a thousand moral enclaves begrudging each other the code.

So the kitchen knife survives, even after all the counterarguments. Yes, a knife can be used for murder, and a car can be the getaway vehicle after a robbery. But a society that sells knives only to vetted cooking schools, and cars only to drivers with a certificate of good character, is not a safer society — it is a society with an approval office. The four freedoms do not claim that software can do no harm; they claim that the remedy — a licensing regime of moral gatekeepers, assigned to whichever community shouts loudest — is worse than the disease. And after forty years, for all the abuse in between, no moral license has ever actually stopped the harm — while the unrestricted freedom has unmistakably produced a worldwide, border-crossing commons of knowledge and tools. That is not a flaw. That is the price, and the reward, of a principle.