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That analogy is a false one. Duck hunting is a self-selecting, non-mandated recreational activity for privileged people, not an activity that forms a critical r

That analogy is a false one. Duck hunting is a self-selecting, non-mandated recreational activity for privileged people, not an activity that forms a critical role in a global pro-business economy. The correct analogy is: If the law mandates the indiscriminate killing of animals, you don’t title an article that some animals have become extinct, you say that the indiscriminate killing of animals has caused the extinction event. The given analogy misattributes the source of the harm based on proximate factors… in effect it’s saying ‘i didn’t kill the animal… the bullet from the gun I fired caused the animals heart to stop’ - it’s a VERY shoddy argument.

danShumway 5y ago
What law mandates that companies can't donate to someone on Patreon or help triage bugs or dedicate QA/security time to identifying issues? What law mandates that companies have to ignore maintainer burdens? Each company made an individual choice to use infrastructure that they weren't funding/supporting, to effectively transfer bug-testing and security reviews onto unpaid maintainers. Then the infrastructure they weren't supporting broke. The mistake I'm trying to point out is in looking at a corporate problem, where corporations are not doing due diligence to ensure the success of the commons that their own products critically rely on, and then implying that it's the responsibility of Open Source maintainers to make it easier to fund them or to alter their culture/projects to better fit company priorities. Well if everyone relies on this stuff, then the people who rely on it can figure out how to support it. That I'm seeing articles suggesting that the problem is that Github sponsorships are hard to explain to accountants -- well, it sounds like the giant accountant firms that are being paid a lot of money aren't doing their jobs well, and aren't actually able to navigate financial situations that are outside of their comfort zone. But that's not the Open Source community's problem to solve, and the law doesn't mandate that companies be unable to navigate those spaces. Companies ended up in the situation where an undersupported library that they needed to be stable instead broke because of their individual choices as companies about what parts of their infrastructure they would and wouldn't fund/support. There is a systemic problem here, but it's not systemic in the exact same way as many other systemic problems that we face -- it's not systemic primarily due to outside pressure or laws, it's only systemic in the sense that companies are systemically and culturally unable to think about infrastructure or the commons in a responsible, long-term way. Sometimes systemic problems are really hard and complicated, but sometimes there are systemic problems that basically boil down to, "a bunch of people are irresponsible, and if they stopped being irresponsible the situation would get somewhat better." I don't think that Minecraft is the victim of circumstances outside of its control, I think it's really reasonable to expect a game bringing in that much money for Microsoft to be able to look at its dependencies and proactively identify/reinforce fragile parts of their infrastructure. Minecraft wouldn't have needed to solve the entire Open Source funding problem to avoid this bug, they would have needed to figure out how to support the extremely finite number of libraries that they rely on and that are directly linked to the success of their product. And we can talk about wide-scale problems that hold Open Source back, we can get into the weeds on concepts like UBI, or better payment platforms, of IP laws, or whatever. It's not that those conversations are bad to have or that they're not important in their own ways. But they're not prerequisites for Microsoft giving money to people. And even in a world with full UBI or in a fully post-Capitalist society, you still might have Open Source developers making really useful stuff, where those developers don't want to spend all of their time or energy on that project or want to take it in a narrow direction, and that's fine. That shouldn't be a situation that we're trying to eliminate. Open Source is accessible and it allows people to dip their toes in, to solve narrow problems, to pick up and port/extend other libraries without a complicated legal process, to collaborate across national borders, to evolve their priorities and to jump between or even abandon projects -- and it turns out despite everything that is a really great ecosystem to live in. I don't think it's right to try and tear that ecosystem down and rebuild it into something that's purely professional, which is what I think a lot of corporations want. I think it's a lot more reasonable to ask businesses to learn how to interact with and support developers who may or may not be professionally working full-time on each project; I think it's more reasonable to ask why when the Open Source community is building stuff that other people find useful, that it is also our job to figure out how to make funding us attractive. And more directly relevant to your argument, I don't believe that there's a legislative reason why companies like Microsoft/Google/Apple can't get better at this stuff right now.
- localhost1729 5y ago
  The law that mandates that companies can't donate to someone on Patreon or help triage bugs or dedicate QA/security time to identifying issues is the requirement for CEO's to demonstrate good judgment in managing the company by maximizing profit for shareholders. The law that mandates that companies have to ignore maintainer burdens is similar, but much more obtuse, mainly concerning commercial and workplace agenda issues founded on aversion to risk. The mistake I'm trying to point out is your analogy is wrecked, it's only a very small, but well scoped rebuttal. Your analogy, granted it has been taken out of the context of the comment, but it's important that analogies used to make a point actually map on to the concrete situation, and your analogy clearly doesn't achieve that. Anyway, let's move on to the substance of your comment. You want to shift the burden of fixing what is a very well documented and well understood market failure (free riding) on to corporates. I get that. You want to do that by shifting the burden of the fix to them. What you fail to grasp are the free market maxims which rule these companies. You are, in effect, asking people to stop writing articles about (say) wearing a face mask in public when faced with a public health epidemic and instead write articles about how animal husbandry practices in a small market in Wuhan is the real story. What your comment fails to capture is the systemic failure of Open Source. In the same way, an article about how a virus that is harmful to human health that focuses on hygeine ina market in Wuhan won't help anyone stay safe once it becomes an epidenic. You are, mistaking an epidemic for a malpractice suit. You don't solve an epidemic by suing the market traders in Wuhan, you write articles about wearing face coverings and public helath policy programmes like vaccines. So, your argument is bogus. Open source is broken, as a system, it is meant to be broken, it was designed to be broken in the same way Windows is designed to be broken, because it suits people that promote it. If you are making FOSS you are perpetuating a broken system and are accountable for that. If you design your house with no doors or windows and then proudly announce the fact it has no doors and windows and everyone is welcome to take a look around you don't get to blame people who wander in from time to time and take a look around. The rest of your comment here seemd to flip flop between whether the problem is systemic or not based on ideas of what the system is, and what it is not. I am not convinced by that analysis because the systemic failure is self-evident here and so to discuss whether open source software production is a system or not, or it is interacts with other systems or not seems naive. Your point about Minecraft seems to show some naivety around the way production systems interact with economic systems. Some form of interpretation from either the history of the industrial revolution or the economics corpus would probably be enough to disabuse you of your reluctance to admit the interplay between economic and technological systems. Your opinions suffer from a widespread tendency for peoples opinions to be wrong. I include mine in that category too, but at least readers may benefit from beinga given a choice as to how wrong they wish to be. Sorry, I didn't mean 'mandate' as in 'legal', I meant more like 'Social License to Operate' (SLO) which is more at the social/cultural level, although there are of course legal ways to keep corporations away from code... AGPL/Copyleft/Ethical Source/Noncommercial licening and Social Domain licenses all seem to be pointing to a new economic future that, despite outr differences in opinion here, I think we can both agree on, would be more desirable than the current situation?
cormacrelf 5y ago
Great, another HN comment from someone who read the first sentence or two, was enraged by a duck analogy and decided to hit reply.

danShumway 5y ago

What law mandates that companies can't donate to someone on Patreon or help triage bugs or dedicate QA/security time to identifying issues? What law mandates that companies have to ignore maintainer burdens? Each company made an individual choice to use infrastructure that they weren't funding/supporting, to effectively transfer bug-testing and security reviews onto unpaid maintainers. Then the infrastructure they weren't supporting broke. The mistake I'm trying to point out is in looking at a corporate problem, where corporations are not doing due diligence to ensure the success of the commons that their own products critically rely on, and then implying that it's the responsibility of Open Source maintainers to make it easier to fund them or to alter their culture/projects to better fit company priorities. Well if everyone relies on this stuff, then the people who rely on it can figure out how to support it. That I'm seeing articles suggesting that the problem is that Github sponsorships are hard to explain to accountants -- well, it sounds like the giant accountant firms that are being paid a lot of money aren't doing their jobs well, and aren't actually able to navigate financial situations that are outside of their comfort zone. But that's not the Open Source community's problem to solve, and the law doesn't mandate that companies be unable to navigate those spaces. Companies ended up in the situation where an undersupported library that they needed to be stable instead broke because of their individual choices as companies about what parts of their infrastructure they would and wouldn't fund/support. There is a systemic problem here, but it's not systemic in the exact same way as many other systemic problems that we face -- it's not systemic primarily due to outside pressure or laws, it's only systemic in the sense that companies are systemically and culturally unable to think about infrastructure or the commons in a responsible, long-term way. Sometimes systemic problems are really hard and complicated, but sometimes there are systemic problems that basically boil down to, "a bunch of people are irresponsible, and if they stopped being irresponsible the situation would get somewhat better." I don't think that Minecraft is the victim of circumstances outside of its control, I think it's really reasonable to expect a game bringing in that much money for Microsoft to be able to look at its dependencies and proactively identify/reinforce fragile parts of their infrastructure. Minecraft wouldn't have needed to solve the entire Open Source funding problem to avoid this bug, they would have needed to figure out how to support the extremely finite number of libraries that they rely on and that are directly linked to the success of their product. And we can talk about wide-scale problems that hold Open Source back, we can get into the weeds on concepts like UBI, or better payment platforms, of IP laws, or whatever. It's not that those conversations are bad to have or that they're not important in their own ways. But they're not prerequisites for Microsoft giving money to people. And even in a world with full UBI or in a fully post-Capitalist society, you still might have Open Source developers making really useful stuff, where those developers don't want to spend all of their time or energy on that project or want to take it in a narrow direction, and that's fine. That shouldn't be a situation that we're trying to eliminate. Open Source is accessible and it allows people to dip their toes in, to solve narrow problems, to pick up and port/extend other libraries without a complicated legal process, to collaborate across national borders, to evolve their priorities and to jump between or even abandon projects -- and it turns out despite everything that is a really great ecosystem to live in. I don't think it's right to try and tear that ecosystem down and rebuild it into something that's purely professional, which is what I think a lot of corporations want. I think it's a lot more reasonable to ask businesses to learn how to interact with and support developers who may or may not be professionally working full-time on each project; I think it's more reasonable to ask why when the Open Source community is building stuff that other people find useful, that it is also our job to figure out how to make funding us attractive. And more directly relevant to your argument, I don't believe that there's a legislative reason why companies like Microsoft/Google/Apple can't get better at this stuff right now.

localhost1729 5y ago
The law that mandates that companies can't donate to someone on Patreon or help triage bugs or dedicate QA/security time to identifying issues is the requirement for CEO's to demonstrate good judgment in managing the company by maximizing profit for shareholders. The law that mandates that companies have to ignore maintainer burdens is similar, but much more obtuse, mainly concerning commercial and workplace agenda issues founded on aversion to risk. The mistake I'm trying to point out is your analogy is wrecked, it's only a very small, but well scoped rebuttal. Your analogy, granted it has been taken out of the context of the comment, but it's important that analogies used to make a point actually map on to the concrete situation, and your analogy clearly doesn't achieve that. Anyway, let's move on to the substance of your comment. You want to shift the burden of fixing what is a very well documented and well understood market failure (free riding) on to corporates. I get that. You want to do that by shifting the burden of the fix to them. What you fail to grasp are the free market maxims which rule these companies. You are, in effect, asking people to stop writing articles about (say) wearing a face mask in public when faced with a public health epidemic and instead write articles about how animal husbandry practices in a small market in Wuhan is the real story. What your comment fails to capture is the systemic failure of Open Source. In the same way, an article about how a virus that is harmful to human health that focuses on hygeine ina market in Wuhan won't help anyone stay safe once it becomes an epidenic. You are, mistaking an epidemic for a malpractice suit. You don't solve an epidemic by suing the market traders in Wuhan, you write articles about wearing face coverings and public helath policy programmes like vaccines. So, your argument is bogus. Open source is broken, as a system, it is meant to be broken, it was designed to be broken in the same way Windows is designed to be broken, because it suits people that promote it. If you are making FOSS you are perpetuating a broken system and are accountable for that. If you design your house with no doors or windows and then proudly announce the fact it has no doors and windows and everyone is welcome to take a look around you don't get to blame people who wander in from time to time and take a look around. The rest of your comment here seemd to flip flop between whether the problem is systemic or not based on ideas of what the system is, and what it is not. I am not convinced by that analysis because the systemic failure is self-evident here and so to discuss whether open source software production is a system or not, or it is interacts with other systems or not seems naive. Your point about Minecraft seems to show some naivety around the way production systems interact with economic systems. Some form of interpretation from either the history of the industrial revolution or the economics corpus would probably be enough to disabuse you of your reluctance to admit the interplay between economic and technological systems. Your opinions suffer from a widespread tendency for peoples opinions to be wrong. I include mine in that category too, but at least readers may benefit from beinga given a choice as to how wrong they wish to be. Sorry, I didn't mean 'mandate' as in 'legal', I meant more like 'Social License to Operate' (SLO) which is more at the social/cultural level, although there are of course legal ways to keep corporations away from code... AGPL/Copyleft/Ethical Source/Noncommercial licening and Social Domain licenses all seem to be pointing to a new economic future that, despite outr differences in opinion here, I think we can both agree on, would be more desirable than the current situation?

cormacrelf 5y ago

Great, another HN comment from someone who read the first sentence or two, was enraged by a duck analogy and decided to hit reply.