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I feel the frustration at cultural appropriation is not that someone else is enjoying whatever part of another culture exists, or making their twist on it. It's

I feel the frustration at cultural appropriation is not that someone else is enjoying whatever part of another culture exists, or making their twist on it. It's when something is taken out of the culture it existed in with the original culture getting no recognition for their creation. Usually, the original culture is also denigrated. It's a bit like taking an open source product, calling the original creators chumps, and selling the open source product with no recognition that I ever got it from open source while continuing to make blog posts about how great my thing is and those chumps over there suck. In that example the original creators can get a little miffed but they have no real harm. On a cultural level this often is part of bigotry and oppression.

mwfunk 8y ago
I wonder if that's at the heart of it. I've noticed that this is something that doesn't bug me one bit in the open source world, but it seems to bug some other people a lot, and I never understood why. It just always seemed so strange to me how obsessed people would sometimes get with the notion of giving credit in the open source world, especially given the consensus negative feelings about things like the advertising clause in the original 4-clause BSDL. I've seen people who simultaneously loathed the advertising clause but were incredibly uptight about (for example) always saying "GNU/Linux", and chastising other people when they didn't, or getting up in arms if some Linux user didn't know about or (in their eyes) properly respect the GNU system by...I don't know. I never figured out what people expect when they have these sorts of expectations of acknowledgement. It always seemed like they were more annoyed at other people not knowing a bit of history, and interpreting that as being some sort of disrespect, or bigotry and oppression as you say. I always felt like the act of contributing to open source was for me never even remotely a selfish act for which I expected any reward or even acknowledgement. If that's what someone craves in their life, open source is probably one of the worst places to try to get it. My own lack of caring about this comes from the fact that I never equated any form of disrespect with not "acknowledging" (not scare quotes, just trying to express the ambiguity of what the word can mean to different people) who or what came before. See also endless threads where it's a never-ending argument about who should get credit for "the real work" (whatever that is) when it comes to things like gadgets or programming languages or software or whatever. Example: any discussion about what individual or company should be created with "inventing" the modern smartphone. You start out with someone saying something nice about Apple or Palm or whoever, then some negative Nancy has to jump in and chastise them for not giving credit to some predecessor a la Psion, then another person jumps in and chastises that person for not giving credit to an even earlier predecessor, then eventually people are talking about Dennis Ritchie, then people are talking about freaking Charles Babbage, and everyone's pissed off at everybody. The whole game always seemed like outrage roulette more than an honest attempt to get to the bottom of who deserves credit for what. We all stand on the shoulders of giants, and they became giants by not caring whether or not the people who stand on their shoulders publicly credit them for it. Those who do care tend to get lots of patents and copyrights and other IP protections, which is anathema to open source and a lot of engineering in general.

mwfunk 8y ago

I wonder if that's at the heart of it. I've noticed that this is something that doesn't bug me one bit in the open source world, but it seems to bug some other people a lot, and I never understood why. It just always seemed so strange to me how obsessed people would sometimes get with the notion of giving credit in the open source world, especially given the consensus negative feelings about things like the advertising clause in the original 4-clause BSDL. I've seen people who simultaneously loathed the advertising clause but were incredibly uptight about (for example) always saying "GNU/Linux", and chastising other people when they didn't, or getting up in arms if some Linux user didn't know about or (in their eyes) properly respect the GNU system by...I don't know. I never figured out what people expect when they have these sorts of expectations of acknowledgement. It always seemed like they were more annoyed at other people not knowing a bit of history, and interpreting that as being some sort of disrespect, or bigotry and oppression as you say. I always felt like the act of contributing to open source was for me never even remotely a selfish act for which I expected any reward or even acknowledgement. If that's what someone craves in their life, open source is probably one of the worst places to try to get it. My own lack of caring about this comes from the fact that I never equated any form of disrespect with not "acknowledging" (not scare quotes, just trying to express the ambiguity of what the word can mean to different people) who or what came before. See also endless threads where it's a never-ending argument about who should get credit for "the real work" (whatever that is) when it comes to things like gadgets or programming languages or software or whatever. Example: any discussion about what individual or company should be created with "inventing" the modern smartphone. You start out with someone saying something nice about Apple or Palm or whoever, then some negative Nancy has to jump in and chastise them for not giving credit to some predecessor a la Psion, then another person jumps in and chastises that person for not giving credit to an even earlier predecessor, then eventually people are talking about Dennis Ritchie, then people are talking about freaking Charles Babbage, and everyone's pissed off at everybody. The whole game always seemed like outrage roulette more than an honest attempt to get to the bottom of who deserves credit for what. We all stand on the shoulders of giants, and they became giants by not caring whether or not the people who stand on their shoulders publicly credit them for it. Those who do care tend to get lots of patents and copyrights and other IP protections, which is anathema to open source and a lot of engineering in general.