4 ms·

I'm going to replicate one of my recent replies ([4] which unsurprisingly got me downvoted, but I regret nothing) here because it seems relevant. Specifically,

I'm going to replicate one of my recent replies ([4] which unsurprisingly got me downvoted, but I regret nothing) here because it seems relevant. Specifically, Marak seems to grok the exploitatitive nature of the current setup (chosen in part by themselves) but lacks real negotiation leverage because they have no organization behind them (besides people cheering them on in the comments). With this in mind, I think it's okay for me to get the big scary words out here again. :) The problem (okay, "a" problem) here is that it is indeed OSS, and not FOSS, that is being used. It might be worth re-visiting "Post-Open Source" by Melody Horn (boringcactus) [1] on this. You might want to copy/paste that link instead of clicking. :) It has been discussed here before [2] and (unsurprisingly, IMHO) gotten quite a bit of blow-back from the HN crowd. The General Intellect Unit podcast recently had an episode on the piece [3] and I think they made the point clearer (well... also they roll the piece out to 1h 40min) by more openly posing it in a class struggle context. (Side note: please don't post replies attacking this as communist. The podcast has "marxists" in the name, you wouldn't be insulting them, and I'm merely engaging with their content, so if you're gonna try to attack their/my positions, please do the same and don't just throw scary words.) The bottom-line is that Open Source Software has nothing to do with the freedoms of the developers. It is... * a corporate entrenchment scheme: enlarging your hiring pool by establishing your in-house solution as the industry standard, giving you full hiring pipelines and stronger negotiation position against current and prospective employees. * a capitalist commons: by tending to one industry standard, the companies (not their devs, who will still have full work days) save on duplication of effort. At the same time FOSS (which does focus on the freedoms of the devs to read, modify, learn...) kind of misses the point by being... * too obvious a trap, and thus ineffective. No sane capitalist company will go anywhere near AGPL code (and we just had an example on HN of someone trying. it wasn't pretty) * ultimately not even clear on how this will make anyone's lives materially better, even if it were effective. It's not gonna raise your salary, nor give you more paid vacation, health insurance. As a dev, you'll still be producing surplus value (okay, in a hopefully less alienated way) that will then not be paid to you (that's the definition of profit) so from this perspective the "F" in FOSS doesn't really bring much to the table. The GIU podcast concludes that yeah, working in IT was nice for a while, because it posed some fundamental problems to capital and as a dev you were in a much better negotiation position. However, those times are over. Capital has found a way to make IT labour just as fungible as manual labor, at least to the extent that we should expect those "rock star" benefits to dwindle soon. Up to us to realize that and take action. Again: relaying analysis here. Not sure I buy all of it. But even if, please keep your replies centered on the content, not the vocabulary it's presented with. [1]: https://www.boringcactus.com/2020/08/13/post-open-source.htm https://www.boringcactus.com/2020/08/13/post-open-source.htm... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24397552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24397552 [3]: http://generalintellectunit.net/e/066-post-open-source/ http://generalintellectunit.net/e/066-post-open-source/ [4]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24977616 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24977616

BlueTemplar 6y ago
> * too obvious a trap, and thus ineffective. No sane capitalist company will go anywhere near AGPL code (and we just had an example on HN of someone trying. it wasn't pretty) Source plz ? > the "F" in FOSS It's free as freedom, not beer. GNU seemingly doesn't want to use 'libre' because Indians might not understand it or something, which IMHO is ridiculous considering how often this confusion is made ! Otherwise, I get that E.S.Raymond has furiously anti-leftist political views, and I can respect that, but IMHO he should be held accountable for the current situation… EDIT : Also, isn't it fairly ironic of someone using the closed and Microsoft-owned Github to complain about these issues ?
- black_puppydog 6y ago
  > Source plz ? The dominance of permissive licenses in the industry (compared to GPL) and the relative non-impact of AGPL software. I can't think of many AGPL (or similarly licensed) projects that have similar industry standard status as react or tensorflow have in their respective niches. > It's free as freedom, not beer. I'm sorry I should have made this point more explicit I guess. Of course I am well aware of the double meaning of free, and that it relates to freedom in this context. My point is that yes, that freedom allows you to do and read things, of course. But what? In an (exaggerated, and not entirely fair) analogy, it would be like claiming/securing the right to wear clown shoes during coffee breaks in the office. Yes, it's a right you may not have had otherwise, and it will brighten up your day, but ultimately it won't change the material relationship to your employer. In the same way, being allowed to read, modify, and distribute software is not in itself a solution to this specific problem at hand here, i.e. the strategy of Fortune 500 companies, as a stand-in for capital to get free labor from OSS devs. (note the omission of the "F" in this case because again, for the most part, this will happen with open source work, but not so much with libre projects). ------- As an aside, I'm unsure how to interpret the tone of your comment, so just to clarify: please don't mistake this as an attack from me on AGPL and similar. I think they're better than nothing and I personally prefer contributing to strongly copyleft projects. But they won't be a mechanism that can have a similar impact on the software industry as widespread unionization had on employer/employee relationship a hundred years ago. I lived in the Ruhr Area in Germany for a few years and the impact was really impressive, quite hard to imagine it happening like this today... The conclusion of the podcast I linked above is that IT work (and programming in particular) has developed from something where the individual holds significant negotiation power (and thus individual choices matter a lot) to a market in which workers are essentially interchangeable (since they all work with the same tools anyhow) and thus individual choices like Marak's are relatively less likely to be effective. Of course I hope that Marak gets hired and paid accordingly asap, but following this argument, in the long run programmers (the non-glamorous term for anything to do with code) will have to organize and/or accept significant drops in their salaries.

BlueTemplar 6y ago

> * too obvious a trap, and thus ineffective. No sane capitalist company will go anywhere near AGPL code (and we just had an example on HN of someone trying. it wasn't pretty) Source plz ? > the "F" in FOSS It's free as freedom, not beer. GNU seemingly doesn't want to use 'libre' because Indians might not understand it or something, which IMHO is ridiculous considering how often this confusion is made ! Otherwise, I get that E.S.Raymond has furiously anti-leftist political views, and I can respect that, but IMHO he should be held accountable for the current situation… EDIT : Also, isn't it fairly ironic of someone using the closed and Microsoft-owned Github to complain about these issues ?

black_puppydog 6y ago
> Source plz ? The dominance of permissive licenses in the industry (compared to GPL) and the relative non-impact of AGPL software. I can't think of many AGPL (or similarly licensed) projects that have similar industry standard status as react or tensorflow have in their respective niches. > It's free as freedom, not beer. I'm sorry I should have made this point more explicit I guess. Of course I am well aware of the double meaning of free, and that it relates to freedom in this context. My point is that yes, that freedom allows you to do and read things, of course. But what? In an (exaggerated, and not entirely fair) analogy, it would be like claiming/securing the right to wear clown shoes during coffee breaks in the office. Yes, it's a right you may not have had otherwise, and it will brighten up your day, but ultimately it won't change the material relationship to your employer. In the same way, being allowed to read, modify, and distribute software is not in itself a solution to this specific problem at hand here, i.e. the strategy of Fortune 500 companies, as a stand-in for capital to get free labor from OSS devs. (note the omission of the "F" in this case because again, for the most part, this will happen with open source work, but not so much with libre projects). ------- As an aside, I'm unsure how to interpret the tone of your comment, so just to clarify: please don't mistake this as an attack from me on AGPL and similar. I think they're better than nothing and I personally prefer contributing to strongly copyleft projects. But they won't be a mechanism that can have a similar impact on the software industry as widespread unionization had on employer/employee relationship a hundred years ago. I lived in the Ruhr Area in Germany for a few years and the impact was really impressive, quite hard to imagine it happening like this today... The conclusion of the podcast I linked above is that IT work (and programming in particular) has developed from something where the individual holds significant negotiation power (and thus individual choices matter a lot) to a market in which workers are essentially interchangeable (since they all work with the same tools anyhow) and thus individual choices like Marak's are relatively less likely to be effective. Of course I hope that Marak gets hired and paid accordingly asap, but following this argument, in the long run programmers (the non-glamorous term for anything to do with code) will have to organize and/or accept significant drops in their salaries.