Free/open-source live-coding tools are an ethical stance about craft and collective ownership, not just a pragmatic choice

McLean explains TidalCycles’ free/open-source status as reflecting a broader philosophy: technology should enable craft and growth rather than extraction and control, echoing Ursula Franklin’s distinction between holistic and prescriptive technology. Free in the FOSS sense — both free to download and free to modify, contribute, and redistribute — is framed as analogous to heritage crafts like weaving: open to change, pedagogically passed down, sustainable. The comparison to corporate/military-funded programming culture highlights that live coding stakes a different claim on what technology ‘should be about.‘

Examples

TidalCycles: free to download, open source, community-maintained. McLean funded by UK research fellowships. He crowdfunded tutorial videos during lockdown — enough to live on. The alternative to this model would be commercial licensing, which he rejects on principle.

Assessment

McLean draws an analogy between TidalCycles and Carnatic music or weaving as ‘heritage technologies.’ Explain the analogy: what property of weaving does he want TidalCycles to have, and why does this lead to a FOSS licensing model rather than a commercial one?