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Should You GNU?: What Cattle Teach Us About Liberty, Economics and the Internet

Updated: Jun 4

Cowboy on gray horse ropes a black calf in a dusty rodeo arena under a clear blue sky, with crowd in the bleachers.

Few communities on earth are freer than the gnu (pronounced “new”). Gnus are a species of antelope native to the plains of East Africa. Their community of 1.5 million distributed individuals unites once a year to travel ~1,800 miles in search of water and fresh grass. To coordinate, they employ a primitive social cue— a low grunt from which they get their name, “gnu, gnu.” They collaborate with zebra and gazelles to overcome the hunger of other communities. Lions, leopards, hyenas, tsetse flies, and crocodiles— all with no central leadership and no governing authority. While some of the young, the old and the unfortunate are captured to feed the predators, no one farms the gnu.


Yuval Noah Harari describes how humans create community (Harari, 2015). Throughout his work, he describes the complexity of our social cues, the worlds we build inside them and project into the physics. One of the largest projections we've made is the internet, and unfortunately, what is true for the gnu on the plains cannot be said for us in cyberspace. Though some social media communities number in the billions, sharing photo, video, audio and text at light speed, our ability to collaboratively act is interrupted by algorithms designed to make us a product. Applied to the gnu, the arrangement yields milk and beef. Does that make us a community of “cash cows”?


Masked butcher in a meat shop holds a large slab of raw meat and a knife, with hanging hooks and display case behind him.

What separates herds from livestock is less visible than the algorithms used by social media — it is the license to profit from being part of the community, to treat the community as subordinate to specific members or classes. Livestock are cared for, protected, and nurtured, until they are harvested. No gnu maintains this kind of artificial license over another, but we do— in social conventions, including copyright law. Despite its necessity to protect innovation over the last few centuries, copyright law places restrictions on digital telecommunications that seem insurmountable to the average gnu and the only way out without trespassing its deep-rooted values, seems to be a deeper appreciation of the law itself.


Is This Really GNU? 

The Free Software Foundation and Affero Inc. developed the components of the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) in response to the limitations emerging from copyright law applied to digital telecommunications. Currently in version three, the license might be thought of as a user agreement restricting the copyright of edited versions of the software while also allowing users to employ it as their own. This means users can improve a model and convey it to the public without fear of infringement.


Software copyrights create bottlenecks through obscurity and novelty. Most people do not know how to write code, and copying code to customize one aspect is exactly what copyright law exists to restrict. While the predecessors to modern platforms experimented with allowing users to customize parts of their online profiles, their descendants only focus on presenting content they curate for us to consume as a free commodity. Many also restrict user's rights to inspect code through user agreements. Legal scholar and political activist Lawrence Lessig described computer code as "law", enforcing values more effectively than legal statutes (Lessig, 2006). Considering this fact, one might see how platforms keep users ignorant, satisfied and captive.


GNU Rules

The Magnificent Seven (Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta Platforms and Tesla) represent roughly 30–35% of the S&P 500 (Daly, 2026) and a mere index of the vast, ever-emerging swarm of tech companies in the United States. Within 30 years the Seven have transformed the global economy through technological innovation. How did they do it? What the Seven deploy is not a product — it is a social model. It is attention in exchange for service, with the user as commodified inventory. The price is "free", no money is exchanged, users just get the stuff they want, or so it seems.


Prior to the Seven, the “Nifty 50” held this role much more loosely, producing everything from soft drinks (Coca-Cola), to retail stores (JC Penney, Sears), electronic appliances (General Electric) and printers (Xerox). Users of the 50's economy received material value for the money they spent in a reciprocal relationship. Customers kept earning money and companies kept giving them options to buy. While no one knew the exact formula of Coca-Cola, or why shopping at JC Penney felt so good, they could examine it and gain enough information to make similar innovations on their own.


The public currently possesses so little information about digital computing and telecommunications it was nearly impossible to innovate in the space before AI reduced the barriers to entry. Still, many of the AI applications that make this possible focus on providing output within a narrow category of software and are owned by longstanding institutional players in the tech market. What is truly staggering about the move from the 50 to the Seven is the consolidation of leadership— an 86% reduction in a handful of decades, allowing the Seven to tighten their grip on society in ways the 50 could only dream of.


When the 50 dominated the market, their customers benefited indirectly from their for-profit stance. Copyrights protected their brands helping establish standards worth identifying and aspiring to. Software, especially “free software” changed that. Myspace and Black Planet were among the first platforms to engage in data harvesting, though not always for making individuals a packaged product like today. As a teenager, I spent ample time on these platforms learning how to customize my page in the code displaying the surface of the internet— HTML and CSS. Today, only people working inside the industry or those especially passionate about tech, practice coding. The internet is magic to the rest of us, and you can't aspire to do magic, lest you wind up the Sorcerer's Apprentice.


When Mark Zuckerberg came along, he insisted users should not need to learn coding, and the platform should (and could) produce the perfect, uniform experience for everyone. It worked. Daily, users submit to the question, “What’s on your mind?”, freely giving up their private contemplations to corporations legally incentivized to make money from their interactions. These answers contain much more information than, “gnu, gnu” and are curated for purchase from the Facebook brand. Many platforms also track content you consume and how you consume it. They curate your feed for you personally, harvesting your attention while selling facts about your attention to the highest bidder. Corporate digital telecommunications make us billions of domesticated cows ready for milking. 

Close-up of a black-and-white cow’s udder and legs standing in a green grassy field.









What’s GNU? 

The Free Software Foundation describes software under AGPL-3 as “free as in speech, not free as in beer,” and “a matter of liberty, not price” (Free Software Foundation, n.d.). Where platforms either charge us for the right to use their software, or sell data about how we use it online, AGPL-3 gives users in both cases the freedom to conduct what would be a criminal activity with copyrighted software. AGPL-3 licensed software is copyleft, a 180-degree reversal on traditional copyright. To create this arrangement, the owner must first copyright it, then create a user agreement stating AGPL-3 status including the license's official language. The agreement includes a user contract binding those who choose to copy, use, market or convey the software to share the code (including derivatives) as freely as they received it.


Like any bit of infrastructure, an AGPL-3 project requires equipment, knowledge, and continuous maintenance, but essentially works the same as observing a taxi service, then deciding to go into taxiing for yourself. Before Uber and Lyft, taxi service protocols were essentially open. One could observe New York's taxiing infrastructure and establish a Mumbai cab company on the same logic with the unique resources of Mumbai. The digital taxi companies locked their service infrastructure behind proprietary law, and local taxi infrastructure collapsed under creative destruction everywhere they landed. When brick-and-mortar companies asked, "how do they do that?" they did not know where to begin observing the specifications until it was too late.


Uber and Lyft command around 40 percent of every purchase made on their platforms, with individual rides sometimes reaching 65 or 70 percent (National Employment Law Project, 2025). LibreTaxi, conveyed under AGPL-3 on the Signal network, returns that margin to drivers and the communities they serve. It is not slick, and it is not safe in the way an audited corporate platform is safe — but it is theirs. Another AGPL-3 project, Consul Democracy, orchestrates participatory budgeting and legislation for millions of users across four continents. It costs money and labor for communities to host the software, but includes more citizens in the process of governing their own social and economic lives. That is the choice AGPL-3 makes possible. At the Network Theory Applied Research Institute (NTARI), where I serve as president, we license everything we build under AGPL-3 for exactly this reason. 


Twenty-year veteran of financial technology software development with Churchill Downs and vice president of NTARI, Calvin Secrest said, "I think the reason NTARI chose AGPL-3 is so everyone shares improvements." (C. Secrest, personal communication, May 14, 2026). It really is that simple. NTARI is not an organization with the hubris of other platform makers. We do not have all the answers, but our disposition to share freely allows others to benefit by adapting software to their society, and us to benefit from observing the diverse methods of solving similar problems. Improvements from Sorocaba, Brazil, Boulder, CO and Boston, MA have already influenced our Agrinet agriculture orchestration system. Using AGPL-3, the international community can learn from our profit models and evolve them to the needs of their users and the demands of their environments, anywhere.

"NTARI chose AGPL-3 so everyone shares improvements.”

NTARI is not the only organization adopting AGPL-3. The city council of Madrid, Spain used it to convey Consul Democracy which now serves millions of users worldwide. Pol.is carries the license and both platforms have been incorporated into distinct projects built and shared on the same principles. Barcelona forked Consul in 2016 to create Decidim, which has since been rewritten and now runs independently in over 300 instances across 20+ countries. Taiwan adopted Pol.is as the deliberative core of vTaiwan, which has shaped 26 pieces of national legislation as of 2018 (Horton, 2018). The license is real, its users are real, but adoption has not caught on enough to realize its full potential.


GNU Problems

At a Louisville open-source meeting in 2025, Cisco and Red Hat executive Jeff Squyres described the AGPL-3 license to me as "viral". He described how by using components licensed under the AGPL-3 a corporation might "infect" an entire stack of new and old applications and must release them all to comply with the legal language of the license agreement. In 2009, Cisco settled with the Free Software Foundation after license violations emerged from a new Linksys product. The settlement required Cisco to appoint a Free Software Director to oversee Linksys compliance moving forward (Free Software Foundation, 2009).


That said, the AGPL-3 license is statutory code, and like all code it is hackable. This is vividly illustrated by full stack hacker Dylan Ayrey (dxa4481 on Github) on his satirical website malus.sh. (Ayrey, n.d.) The site mocks the ethics of anyone willing to circumvent AGPL-3. It poses as an automated clean room development system that will recreate the code of an AGPL-3 project "freeing" it from the digital commons. Clean room development is a valid method used by conventional companies to reproduce by specification rather than exact code (think NY taxi vs. Mumbai taxi), but malus.sh does not even achieve this goal. A single agent on the site rewrites the code after observing for itself. This single actor model is not clean room development, which requires one agent or team to gather specifications and another to rewrite the code from the spec. The premise of the site is the punchline. It is designed for corporations to use as they take from the pool of free, common software to copyright for themselves.


The digital commons present challenges to corporations, who until recently were the vehicles of socioeconomic progress. Corporations bought resources to develop, including land, materials and sometimes people. All these goods were organized from the commons. The Doctrine of Discovery established the fallacy that if resources (including persons) were not organized by Christian values they were free to exploit. This was softened some 200 years later by British economist William Forster Lloyd, whose lectures on common pasture were later read as establishing that resources held in common would be abused by all and disappear, further justifying colonial economics. This framing, named the Tragedy of the Commons by Garrett Hardin in 1968 (Hardin, 1968), ignored millennia of human existence and growth that did involve misuse and tragedy, but also gradual learning of how to manage resources. Regardless, the doctrine has given us a material culture unparalleled by most if not all ancient civilizations. That progress was led by European corporate theory, supported by copyright law.


Corporate entities have greatly improved the communication of resources in the world of orchestrated commerce, but today suppress the ability of billions to maximize local coordination using the internet. It is not that corporations are doing a bad job; they are just not efficient when compared to a community with better social skills. Whether or not organizations like NTARI can establish better social networks remains to be seen, but our bets are that we can; as a nonprofit, selflessness is a legal part of our organization. NTARI does not answer to shareholders demanding profitable investments. It answers to its mission— to improve the internet. Conversely, for-profit corporations are selfish — having a legal desire to benefit investors that disregards the needs of others and prevailing social expectations. This is a real detriment to a social network. Money makes self-centeredness visible. If currency is a resource for coordinating resources and value, the gross accumulation of wealth by the Seven is a failure to communicate, an unwillingness to orchestrate and an indictment against their commitment to community in the digital age.


Who GNU?

Lone wildebeest stands in tall grass, facing the camera in a green savanna with trees in the background.

At NTARI, we build orchestration software under AGPL-3 allowing communities to deploy and address social and economic issues without paying us rent or being commodified. All we ask is for them to abide by the terms of the license. While we do deploy our models under an LLC to generate cash flow, we also create opportunities for competition by inviting university students and the public to learn the systems intimately by volunteering in development and maintenance and by abiding by the license ourselves. You can find the code to our research & development projects at https://github.com/NTARI-RAND.


The GNU Affero General Public License allows the internet to work how its creators intended it to. Internet pioneer, psychologist and computer scientist J.C.R. Licklider, imagined potential governance over the internet as a giant teleconference (Licklider, 1960). Today, we know this is a dream, but it points to something about our ability to communicate with this technology. A massive electrical network crosses oceans to deliver information that would have taken weeks and months to convey in the days when representative republics were designed. Communications technology has since evolved to telegraphs, telephones and 5G. Governments have also evolved to improve our collective intelligence, driven by increasing network fidelity and speeds.


Possessing the ability to govern social and economic life does not mean the global collective will govern well, but without the opportunity we will just have to trust a small technically literate elite to guide us into the future. While this is the pragmatic answer for now, it is known as technocracy, a fact I see as a step backwards. Who has our best interests at heart? The Seven or we, ourselves? The choice is before each of us daily like the prompt, “User, what’s on your mind?”. 


A GNU Hope

Our language-making capabilities put us far ahead of the gnu, but those who understand this tech and those who do not might divide into communities of cows and cowboys. If our collective history gives us any clue to deal with such divisive and innovative technological advancement, it is that we approach it as an altruistic community or risk catastrophic competition. We need to be a herd or a murmuration in the face of all who would hunt us, including bad implicit principles. Personally, I would rather be a gnu than a cow. I would rather have my leaders (if I must have them) be part of my community, maintaining a reciprocal exchange rather than them farming me and my family. The leaders of the gnu are invisible, indistinguishable from the community they shepherd. They bear the same risks, they eat the same food and compete for the same resources; not maliciously, not possessively but as part of a complex, adaptive society in which everyone shares responsibility as the need arises.


I admire the gnu, but I also think there is a better community on the planet— ours. Over the next 150 years, the human community will have the potential to become a unified, multi-planet ape-swarm. No queens, no kings, no congresses, or corporations. With well configured, free communication protocols for orchestrating resources, we can serve one another the social and economic opportunities we crave. Not selfishly, not entirely selflessly, but naturally as creatures of technology.


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