6 ms·

FOSS and the sublimation of commodity fetishism

12 points by lukaseder 13y ago

davexunit 13y ago
What a garbage article. Several articles likes this have been posted here lately. The idea that FOSS is a tool for oppression by privileged, white men is laughable.
- steveklabnik 13y ago
  DH0, then DH3. You can do better! http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html
  - moron4hire 13y ago
    Technically, your post is probably only DH2.
    - steveklabnik 13y ago
      Yup! The problem is, without a more substantial statement, it's very hard to actually refute, because there's basically nothing there. This is why discussions don't work very well when they aren't far up the hierarchy.
  - davexunit 13y ago
    I would be inclined to agree with you. Yes, my post was reactionary, but I don't really feel like expending much effort on an article that calls Jeff Atwood a white supremacist. Sometimes my patience runs thin.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - steveklabnik 13y ago
      Of course, that's just a footnote. But they're calling forth a long tradition of an entire academic field, 'postcolonialism,'[1] which specifically discusses things like how currency, culture, and language were used by colonialist powers in order to subjugate native peoples in their colonies. I will agree that they didn't provide very much argument there, and I'm not willing to say anything about Jeff's character, but demanding that people only speak English has a history. I think a flag would have supported your point better than a comment that simply decreases the level of discourse here. 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcolonial_literature http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcolonial_literature
    - moron4hire 13y ago
      What's particularly funny about the Atwood example is that it's used in an article complaining about heterosexual (among other adjectives) men. I'm about 75% sure I remember Atwood writing about having a boyfriend.
droob 13y ago
If a bunch of folks pitch in to build a communal well, are they being exploited by perceived "social rewards"?
- lukaseder 13y ago
  Eventually, yes, by someone claiming ownership of the well in one way or another. At least, that's what the article seems to be saying as I understand it.
  - steveklabnik 13y ago
    This is correct. Marxist 'exploitation' does not happen until someone profits, to use other people's terminology. This can only happen when someone is in control of the well, and then uses it in some form of economic exchange. A bunch of people building and then using a well does not have this character, at least as far as this particular thought experiment goes.
    - lukaseder 13y ago
      Yes, but individual advantage has lured people away from building wells just for non-profit reasons. Be it economic profit, or even social capital as claimed in the article. Or both. I don't even think that these things are good or bad, they're just human. And in a way, FOSS has lost its innocence and goes the path of all human endeavours.
- vkou 13y ago
  The point this article makes, is that FOSS are not exploited - but rather, that FOSS is a very effective way for the privileged and financially secure to gain social capital. I think the HN articles of the past few days "We only hire people with Github accounts" demonstrate that those social rewards are real.
  - steveklabnik 13y ago
    To be clear: within a Marxist framework, the only way to gain capital is to exploit others. So your second half is correct, but your first half is wrong, unless (which I suspect you are) that you're using a different definition of exploitation than the article.
sethev 13y ago
The strangest bit of this article for me was the choice of RMS as an example of profiting from open source. And the evidence of that is that he's not homeless and he hasn't died of starvation. By that logic wait-staff at the Waffle House are also enriching themselves.
- steveklabnik 13y ago
  > By that logic wait-staff at the Waffle House are also enriching themselves. I think you're missing the point very slightly. The point is not that RMS is living the high life; the logic goes like this: 1. FOSS is unpaid labor. 2. RMS only works on Free software. 3. Money is needed to live. 4. RMS is alive 5. Contradiction: RMS must make money somehow, therefore, FOSS is not entirely unpaid. Note that this works for the Waffle House as well, but there's no contradiction, as their waged labor is obviously paid, so Step 1 is different. I don't think that many people here would disagree with this, 'social capital' is a pretty well-understood concept.
  - lambda 13y ago
    I don't know who really still believes that FOSS is unpaid labor. It is generally paid in the form of better jobs available based on your record, paid support, being paid to do it incidentally as part of your job, or even being paid directly to work on it. So, pointing out that FOSS is paid labor is basically just attacking a strawman. I suppose that a few people seem to be mistaken in thinking that their FOSS work is unpaid, despite all of the economic benefits they derive from it (like DHH recently), but I don't think that this perception is particularly widespread or really very harmful.
    - steveklabnik 13y ago
      > pointing out that FOSS is paid labor is basically just attacking a strawman. I would agree with you if that was the entire attack, but it's not. The article isn't making an attack. The point is that it's important to think about _who_ has access to social capital, and _who_ can produce social capital.
grimtrigger 13y ago
I think the article points to an important point, but also a fundamental conundrum. There's social capital and there's financial capital. If you have a lot of financial capital, your willingness-to-pay for social capital is higher. If you're poor, your WTP for social capital is lower. However, if you take social capital off its pedestal (which this article attempts to do) it's value as a commodity decreases.
lambda 13y ago
So, the social and economic context of FOSS, especially in light of things like DHH's article about how he doesn't believe in paid contribution to FOSS (despite, well, being paid to contribute to RoR) and Chris Anderson's post about requiring a GitHub account is certainly a worthy topic of discussion. However, throwing around random Marxist buzzwords like "hegemonic control" and "commodity fetishism", and accusing Jeff Atwood of being an "unapologetic white supremacist" for a post that could be best described as Anglocentric, is a really pretty awful way of convincing anyone but those who already agree with you. It appears that the author, rather than trying to improve anything, is merely trying to improve her own social capital in Marxist academic circles.
- steveklabnik 13y ago
  > throwing around random Marxist buzzwords First of all, these words are not random. They're being used exactly how they're supposed to be used. Source: I read lots of Marx. I can explain any individual one to you if you'd like. Secondly, one man's domain terms is another's 'buzzwords.' Domain terminology has value because it allows you to get to the point, once there's some amount of shared understanding. You need that understanding first, though, which I think is causing the friction here. > is a really pretty awful way of convincing anyone but those who already agree with you. I don't disagree, but I don't think the blog post is trying to convince anyone. As it says at the top, it's attempting to add a certain frame to the previous article: in this case, a Marxist one. I say "I don't disagree" because, well, I actually disagree with Marx, but that doesn't hurt my understanding of the article, because I understand the terminology. It actually helps me grok the author's point and where they're coming from, because I can draw on previous bodies of work to help me understand. > It appears that the author, rather than trying to improve anything, is merely > trying to improve her own social capital in Marxist academic circles. What I find amusing about this statement is that in some ways, she would agree with you: the thrust of the article is a simple assertion that 'unpaid' labor is paid, just not in {the money commodity,money}. It's paid through social capital. And ignoring the relationship between who has access to and can produce each different kind of capital misses an important part of the analysis.
  - 13y ago
moron4hire 13y ago
I throw up a huge red flag (and usually just bomb out of the article completely) whenever I see someone using the word "cisgender", because experience has taught me that all it has in store is a lot of complaining about something without any suggestions of fixes. Here is why: I want to help people and do good by people. I work very hard to try to recognize my own prejudices and try get over them and not let them impact my relationships with people. I especially try very hard to treat people as the individuals they are and not assign attributes to them based on group membership, regardless of what that group is. I try not to give a whole lot of credence to any non-corporeal entities, and there are a LOT of them in our society. Corporations, governments, religions, etc. A lot of people want to act like "The United States Government" is a thing, or "Apple Inc" is a thing, or "the Philadelphia Eagles" is a thing, or "Catholicism" is a thing, or "Art" is a thing, or "Entrepreneurs" is a thing, or "Native Americans" is a thing. They aren't. They are collections of other, real things called people, but they themselves are not real things. They're just ideas. The people are what matter. The United States Government is a particular person in the seat of the President, and his name is Barack Obama, and a particular person in the seat of Vice President, and his name is Joe Biden, and 100 people in the seats of the Senate and 435 people in the seats of the House of Representatives, and a-bunch-of-other-people-I'm-intentionally-skipping-over-for-expedience-so-bring-out-the-internet-pedantic-nitpicking, and all of their particular names can easily be looked up. The point is, we talk a lot about "The X" as if it is one thing, as if it has one conscience, but it isn't. It's hundreds, thousands, millions of people, all trying to get shit done and go home at the end of the day. The ability to give everyone their due and to not deny opportunities to people just because their personal makeup differs from mine can only be a net benefit for everyone. There are a lot of people who feel just like me. I've had to know a lot of people who aren't at all that way, too. But when someone writes about "white, cis, hetero men", they are lumping us all together. "white, cis, hetero man" isn't a person. In articles and books and talks crying about <strike>the lack of the</strike>[1] "white, cis, hetero man's" attempts to deny the identity of other cultures, they are guilty of nothing but the same. It makes it sound like we are part of the problem. And it's incredibly frustrating. I know the "white, cis, hetero men" they are talking about. I want nothing of them either. It makes me want to pack my bags and go become a hermit. It also fails to suggest any sort of solution. Having been involved in a couple of organizations that have tried to "increase their diversity", nobody ever has ideas, or if they have ideas, they are patronizingly transparent and rather prejudiced in their own way. So what are we "white, cis, hetero men" supposed to do? Are we supposed to quit making open source projects? Are we supposed to stop giving software away for free and stop feeling good about the real good that free software is doing for the world? Are we supposed to literally take knowledge out of the hands of poor children? To the people who write these sorts of articles: you are saying that we're on the inside and the door is closed, barred against The Others. I'm saying I'm on the inside and I'm not doing anything to lock the door. Those other people are not accountable to me. I don't really even know anything about them, I'm too busy paying attention to my own corner. Hell, when I'm not busy actually doing the making of things, I'll hold that damn door wide open. Come on in. Multiculturalism is valuable? I need value in my projects. Bring it. Get your ass in the door. But no, I'm not going out there to drag you in. [1] EDIT: need to review my posts before submitting to make sure I don't end one half of a sentence with the other half of a different sentence.
marijn 13y ago
First, I agree that using an OSS portfolio as a hiring filter is sure to reinforce existing privileges. But I do find articles like this which try to attach a stigma of oppression and exploitation to OSS as a concept rather distasteful. In my personal experience as a (white, male, etc) OSS developer, the software I'm writing from my privileged position is used by and contributed to by lots of people with non-white and/or female names. As such, I believe the fact that I'm able to do my work (and derive an income from) OSS rather than commercial software, and thus reduce both the financial and the cultural barrier for people who want to use it, acts as a (minor) privilege-equalizing force from the perspective of users. Self-congratulatory OSS circle jerks (which are indeed kind of common) are dumb. But the very fact that a field is dominated by privileged groups does not automatically make it evil.
rjknight 13y ago
I don't find too much to disagree with in the observations made in the post, but I'm not sure what useful conclusions emerge. It's clear that women are under-represented and this needs to be addressed. The OP doesn't really suggest how this might be done and appears to be more interested in assigning blame (which is not actually particularly Marxist thing to do; after all, it was Marx who said that "the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways - the point is to change it"). Beyond that, I'm not totally convinced by the argument that women are incapable of leveraging unpaid work to gain future economic advantages. The last 50 years has seen a massive increase in the number of women doing this - work done towards a degree in a university is not only unpaid, but you actually have to pay for the right to do it (in many countries). Despite this, the proportion of degrees awarded to women has consistently increased and in many countries there are now more female graduates than male on an annual basis[1]. The argument that women are capable of passing 3-4 year degree courses but incapable of maintaining a Github account needs some further explanation. As a cis/hetero/white/male human, my opinion has always been that, yeah, life is pretty awesome. Open source software is great and I'm hugely empowered by it. However, I genuinely would wish to see those benefits extended as widely as possible, and open source software has the potential to be a good tool for this purpose. FOSS does lack formal barriers to participation and the culture is still young and malleable. One of the things that the OP does is attack the rhetoric of open source, on the basis that claims to "openness" or "meritocracy" (not mentioned in the OP but often raised in these discussions) are misleading. I would accept that but I think it would be best to see this as a failure to live up to our ideals rather than as a deliberate obfuscation that masks the hidden agenda of oppression. If we want to challenge hackers on their behaviour, point out that behaving misogynistically is un-hackerish, that our commitment to openness needs to be backed by actions, that our values are best served by giving everyone the best possible chances to thrive in our community. The OP takes the view that the straight white men of the tech industry are perfectly happy with excluding those who are unlike them, to which my initial response is unprintable on a family website and my more measured response is that this is a blanket assertion that does not match my experience. It is certainly true of some people, but I think it would be better to isolate and exclude them, rather than start from the assumption that they represent the mainstream view of the community and that hacker culture is inherently sexist. [1]: http://www.theguardian.com/education/datablog/2013/jan/29/how-many-men-and-women-are-studying-at-my-university http://www.theguardian.com/education/datablog/2013/jan/29/ho...
dgreensp 13y ago
The author objectifies and distorts FOSS quite a bit in order to shape it into a target for a critique of capitalism. You can criticizes anything as being soulless if you remove the soul! FOSS runs on human values. As an analogy, if your village doesn't have good drinking water, and BigWaterCo isn't doing anything about it, you get together build a well, and then you try to keep BigWaterCo from taking it over. It's that simple. Not every single actor in the vast ecosystem acts from those motivations, but that's why the movement is there. (With the addition of: Don't wait until the water is bad.) Many people get paid to work on FOSS, while others volunteer or treat it as a hobby. It may or may not bring money or "social capital" (a term used to try to frame "respect" as "money" and any group of cooperating people as an overly materialistic economy). The author's perspective is shallow and cynical. I imagine them seeing, "Built a well" on a villager's resume and thinking they finally understand why they went to all that trouble. It's to look good, and turn that into money! No, it's to have clean water to drink, now and in the future. But I'm just your typical member of the "able, white, cis, hetero male" category, so feel free to view my answer through the lens of whatever stereotypes are supposed to apply to that category. (Sorry, couldn't resist!)
utnick 13y ago
Here are my rambling thoughts on the article, happy to discuss. 1) I don't feel that all or even most open source developers do it for social capital. There are plenty of people who do it selfishly to scratch an itch, to learn , or because they are passionate about a project. There are lots of people toiling away on obscure open source projects that will never see any kind of social reward for what they do. And the social capital generated by closed source success is just as big if not greater than open source. Bill Gates or Zuckerberg could cash a lot of favors surely. 2) I agree that privileged people with free time are more able to do open source. But isn't even just being a programmer the same situation? Not every human has a computer and the time to learn how to program. So I don't really follow that this same constraint makes open source oppressive, any more than programming itself is oppressive. 3) Is Stallman really the best example of someone cashing in on all of that social capital? I don't know him , but he seems to live a pretty modest life. Has he made more money than he would have if he never did open source and just became a professor after going to MIT. Also , not sure if I would describe him having hegemonic control over open source discourse. As lots of people dont always see eye to eye with him. I get that these criticisms are popping up now due to some people requiring github profiles for jobs, which I agree is not good. But outside of the HN / twitter bubble , not many companies are actually doing that. As the # of programmer jobs are increasing greatly ( partially I would say due to open source projects like rails & linux ), the # of programmer jobs that dont require a github are increasing faster than those that do. Alot of the criticisms in the article are more criticisms of society and the economy in general. I think the solution looks more like fighting for basic income or something similar vs fighting for closed over open source softwares.
nateabele 13y ago
To anyone who feels attacked by this article, here are three things to keep in mind: In life, guilt is optional. If you think you're expected to understand something you don't, it's not your problem. [0] Finally, the world is full of different people with different value systems: if you don't share someone else's, you don't have to invalidate it, you can just choose not to accept it. No one can judge you without your permission. [0] http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/01/13/LawOfConversation http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/01/13/LawOfConve...

12 points by lukaseder 13y ago

What a garbage article. Several articles likes this have been posted here lately. The idea that FOSS is a tool for oppression by privileged, white men is laughable.

steveklabnik 13y ago
DH0, then DH3. You can do better! http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html
- moron4hire 13y ago
  Technically, your post is probably only DH2.
  - steveklabnik 13y ago
    Yup! The problem is, without a more substantial statement, it's very hard to actually refute, because there's basically nothing there. This is why discussions don't work very well when they aren't far up the hierarchy.
- davexunit 13y ago
  I would be inclined to agree with you. Yes, my post was reactionary, but I don't really feel like expending much effort on an article that calls Jeff Atwood a white supremacist. Sometimes my patience runs thin.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - steveklabnik 13y ago
    Of course, that's just a footnote. But they're calling forth a long tradition of an entire academic field, 'postcolonialism,'[1] which specifically discusses things like how currency, culture, and language were used by colonialist powers in order to subjugate native peoples in their colonies. I will agree that they didn't provide very much argument there, and I'm not willing to say anything about Jeff's character, but demanding that people only speak English has a history. I think a flag would have supported your point better than a comment that simply decreases the level of discourse here. 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcolonial_literature http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcolonial_literature
  - moron4hire 13y ago
    What's particularly funny about the Atwood example is that it's used in an article complaining about heterosexual (among other adjectives) men. I'm about 75% sure I remember Atwood writing about having a boyfriend.

droob 13y ago

If a bunch of folks pitch in to build a communal well, are they being exploited by perceived "social rewards"?

lukaseder 13y ago
Eventually, yes, by someone claiming ownership of the well in one way or another. At least, that's what the article seems to be saying as I understand it.
- steveklabnik 13y ago
  This is correct. Marxist 'exploitation' does not happen until someone profits, to use other people's terminology. This can only happen when someone is in control of the well, and then uses it in some form of economic exchange. A bunch of people building and then using a well does not have this character, at least as far as this particular thought experiment goes.
  - lukaseder 13y ago
    Yes, but individual advantage has lured people away from building wells just for non-profit reasons. Be it economic profit, or even social capital as claimed in the article. Or both. I don't even think that these things are good or bad, they're just human. And in a way, FOSS has lost its innocence and goes the path of all human endeavours.
vkou 13y ago
The point this article makes, is that FOSS are not exploited - but rather, that FOSS is a very effective way for the privileged and financially secure to gain social capital. I think the HN articles of the past few days "We only hire people with Github accounts" demonstrate that those social rewards are real.
- steveklabnik 13y ago
  To be clear: within a Marxist framework, the only way to gain capital is to exploit others. So your second half is correct, but your first half is wrong, unless (which I suspect you are) that you're using a different definition of exploitation than the article.

sethev 13y ago

The strangest bit of this article for me was the choice of RMS as an example of profiting from open source. And the evidence of that is that he's not homeless and he hasn't died of starvation. By that logic wait-staff at the Waffle House are also enriching themselves.

steveklabnik 13y ago
> By that logic wait-staff at the Waffle House are also enriching themselves. I think you're missing the point very slightly. The point is not that RMS is living the high life; the logic goes like this: 1. FOSS is unpaid labor. 2. RMS only works on Free software. 3. Money is needed to live. 4. RMS is alive 5. Contradiction: RMS must make money somehow, therefore, FOSS is not entirely unpaid. Note that this works for the Waffle House as well, but there's no contradiction, as their waged labor is obviously paid, so Step 1 is different. I don't think that many people here would disagree with this, 'social capital' is a pretty well-understood concept.
- lambda 13y ago
  I don't know who really still believes that FOSS is unpaid labor. It is generally paid in the form of better jobs available based on your record, paid support, being paid to do it incidentally as part of your job, or even being paid directly to work on it. So, pointing out that FOSS is paid labor is basically just attacking a strawman. I suppose that a few people seem to be mistaken in thinking that their FOSS work is unpaid, despite all of the economic benefits they derive from it (like DHH recently), but I don't think that this perception is particularly widespread or really very harmful.
  - steveklabnik 13y ago
    > pointing out that FOSS is paid labor is basically just attacking a strawman. I would agree with you if that was the entire attack, but it's not. The article isn't making an attack. The point is that it's important to think about _who_ has access to social capital, and _who_ can produce social capital.

grimtrigger 13y ago

I think the article points to an important point, but also a fundamental conundrum. There's social capital and there's financial capital. If you have a lot of financial capital, your willingness-to-pay for social capital is higher. If you're poor, your WTP for social capital is lower. However, if you take social capital off its pedestal (which this article attempts to do) it's value as a commodity decreases.

lambda 13y ago

So, the social and economic context of FOSS, especially in light of things like DHH's article about how he doesn't believe in paid contribution to FOSS (despite, well, being paid to contribute to RoR) and Chris Anderson's post about requiring a GitHub account is certainly a worthy topic of discussion. However, throwing around random Marxist buzzwords like "hegemonic control" and "commodity fetishism", and accusing Jeff Atwood of being an "unapologetic white supremacist" for a post that could be best described as Anglocentric, is a really pretty awful way of convincing anyone but those who already agree with you. It appears that the author, rather than trying to improve anything, is merely trying to improve her own social capital in Marxist academic circles.

steveklabnik 13y ago
> throwing around random Marxist buzzwords First of all, these words are not random. They're being used exactly how they're supposed to be used. Source: I read lots of Marx. I can explain any individual one to you if you'd like. Secondly, one man's domain terms is another's 'buzzwords.' Domain terminology has value because it allows you to get to the point, once there's some amount of shared understanding. You need that understanding first, though, which I think is causing the friction here. > is a really pretty awful way of convincing anyone but those who already agree with you. I don't disagree, but I don't think the blog post is trying to convince anyone. As it says at the top, it's attempting to add a certain frame to the previous article: in this case, a Marxist one. I say "I don't disagree" because, well, I actually disagree with Marx, but that doesn't hurt my understanding of the article, because I understand the terminology. It actually helps me grok the author's point and where they're coming from, because I can draw on previous bodies of work to help me understand. > It appears that the author, rather than trying to improve anything, is merely > trying to improve her own social capital in Marxist academic circles. What I find amusing about this statement is that in some ways, she would agree with you: the thrust of the article is a simple assertion that 'unpaid' labor is paid, just not in {the money commodity,money}. It's paid through social capital. And ignoring the relationship between who has access to and can produce each different kind of capital misses an important part of the analysis.
- 13y ago

moron4hire 13y ago

I throw up a huge red flag (and usually just bomb out of the article completely) whenever I see someone using the word "cisgender", because experience has taught me that all it has in store is a lot of complaining about something without any suggestions of fixes. Here is why: I want to help people and do good by people. I work very hard to try to recognize my own prejudices and try get over them and not let them impact my relationships with people. I especially try very hard to treat people as the individuals they are and not assign attributes to them based on group membership, regardless of what that group is. I try not to give a whole lot of credence to any non-corporeal entities, and there are a LOT of them in our society. Corporations, governments, religions, etc. A lot of people want to act like "The United States Government" is a thing, or "Apple Inc" is a thing, or "the Philadelphia Eagles" is a thing, or "Catholicism" is a thing, or "Art" is a thing, or "Entrepreneurs" is a thing, or "Native Americans" is a thing. They aren't. They are collections of other, real things called people, but they themselves are not real things. They're just ideas. The people are what matter. The United States Government is a particular person in the seat of the President, and his name is Barack Obama, and a particular person in the seat of Vice President, and his name is Joe Biden, and 100 people in the seats of the Senate and 435 people in the seats of the House of Representatives, and a-bunch-of-other-people-I'm-intentionally-skipping-over-for-expedience-so-bring-out-the-internet-pedantic-nitpicking, and all of their particular names can easily be looked up. The point is, we talk a lot about "The X" as if it is one thing, as if it has one conscience, but it isn't. It's hundreds, thousands, millions of people, all trying to get shit done and go home at the end of the day. The ability to give everyone their due and to not deny opportunities to people just because their personal makeup differs from mine can only be a net benefit for everyone. There are a lot of people who feel just like me. I've had to know a lot of people who aren't at all that way, too. But when someone writes about "white, cis, hetero men", they are lumping us all together. "white, cis, hetero man" isn't a person. In articles and books and talks crying about <strike>the lack of the</strike>[1] "white, cis, hetero man's" attempts to deny the identity of other cultures, they are guilty of nothing but the same. It makes it sound like we are part of the problem. And it's incredibly frustrating. I know the "white, cis, hetero men" they are talking about. I want nothing of them either. It makes me want to pack my bags and go become a hermit. It also fails to suggest any sort of solution. Having been involved in a couple of organizations that have tried to "increase their diversity", nobody ever has ideas, or if they have ideas, they are patronizingly transparent and rather prejudiced in their own way. So what are we "white, cis, hetero men" supposed to do? Are we supposed to quit making open source projects? Are we supposed to stop giving software away for free and stop feeling good about the real good that free software is doing for the world? Are we supposed to literally take knowledge out of the hands of poor children? To the people who write these sorts of articles: you are saying that we're on the inside and the door is closed, barred against The Others. I'm saying I'm on the inside and I'm not doing anything to lock the door. Those other people are not accountable to me. I don't really even know anything about them, I'm too busy paying attention to my own corner. Hell, when I'm not busy actually doing the making of things, I'll hold that damn door wide open. Come on in. Multiculturalism is valuable? I need value in my projects. Bring it. Get your ass in the door. But no, I'm not going out there to drag you in. [1] EDIT: need to review my posts before submitting to make sure I don't end one half of a sentence with the other half of a different sentence.

marijn 13y ago

First, I agree that using an OSS portfolio as a hiring filter is sure to reinforce existing privileges. But I do find articles like this which try to attach a stigma of oppression and exploitation to OSS as a concept rather distasteful. In my personal experience as a (white, male, etc) OSS developer, the software I'm writing from my privileged position is used by and contributed to by lots of people with non-white and/or female names. As such, I believe the fact that I'm able to do my work (and derive an income from) OSS rather than commercial software, and thus reduce both the financial and the cultural barrier for people who want to use it, acts as a (minor) privilege-equalizing force from the perspective of users. Self-congratulatory OSS circle jerks (which are indeed kind of common) are dumb. But the very fact that a field is dominated by privileged groups does not automatically make it evil.

rjknight 13y ago

I don't find too much to disagree with in the observations made in the post, but I'm not sure what useful conclusions emerge. It's clear that women are under-represented and this needs to be addressed. The OP doesn't really suggest how this might be done and appears to be more interested in assigning blame (which is not actually particularly Marxist thing to do; after all, it was Marx who said that "the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways - the point is to change it"). Beyond that, I'm not totally convinced by the argument that women are incapable of leveraging unpaid work to gain future economic advantages. The last 50 years has seen a massive increase in the number of women doing this - work done towards a degree in a university is not only unpaid, but you actually have to pay for the right to do it (in many countries). Despite this, the proportion of degrees awarded to women has consistently increased and in many countries there are now more female graduates than male on an annual basis[1]. The argument that women are capable of passing 3-4 year degree courses but incapable of maintaining a Github account needs some further explanation. As a cis/hetero/white/male human, my opinion has always been that, yeah, life is pretty awesome. Open source software is great and I'm hugely empowered by it. However, I genuinely would wish to see those benefits extended as widely as possible, and open source software has the potential to be a good tool for this purpose. FOSS does lack formal barriers to participation and the culture is still young and malleable. One of the things that the OP does is attack the rhetoric of open source, on the basis that claims to "openness" or "meritocracy" (not mentioned in the OP but often raised in these discussions) are misleading. I would accept that but I think it would be best to see this as a failure to live up to our ideals rather than as a deliberate obfuscation that masks the hidden agenda of oppression. If we want to challenge hackers on their behaviour, point out that behaving misogynistically is un-hackerish, that our commitment to openness needs to be backed by actions, that our values are best served by giving everyone the best possible chances to thrive in our community. The OP takes the view that the straight white men of the tech industry are perfectly happy with excluding those who are unlike them, to which my initial response is unprintable on a family website and my more measured response is that this is a blanket assertion that does not match my experience. It is certainly true of some people, but I think it would be better to isolate and exclude them, rather than start from the assumption that they represent the mainstream view of the community and that hacker culture is inherently sexist. [1]: http://www.theguardian.com/education/datablog/2013/jan/29/how-many-men-and-women-are-studying-at-my-university http://www.theguardian.com/education/datablog/2013/jan/29/ho...

dgreensp 13y ago

The author objectifies and distorts FOSS quite a bit in order to shape it into a target for a critique of capitalism. You can criticizes anything as being soulless if you remove the soul! FOSS runs on human values. As an analogy, if your village doesn't have good drinking water, and BigWaterCo isn't doing anything about it, you get together build a well, and then you try to keep BigWaterCo from taking it over. It's that simple. Not every single actor in the vast ecosystem acts from those motivations, but that's why the movement is there. (With the addition of: Don't wait until the water is bad.) Many people get paid to work on FOSS, while others volunteer or treat it as a hobby. It may or may not bring money or "social capital" (a term used to try to frame "respect" as "money" and any group of cooperating people as an overly materialistic economy). The author's perspective is shallow and cynical. I imagine them seeing, "Built a well" on a villager's resume and thinking they finally understand why they went to all that trouble. It's to look good, and turn that into money! No, it's to have clean water to drink, now and in the future. But I'm just your typical member of the "able, white, cis, hetero male" category, so feel free to view my answer through the lens of whatever stereotypes are supposed to apply to that category. (Sorry, couldn't resist!)

utnick 13y ago

Here are my rambling thoughts on the article, happy to discuss. 1) I don't feel that all or even most open source developers do it for social capital. There are plenty of people who do it selfishly to scratch an itch, to learn , or because they are passionate about a project. There are lots of people toiling away on obscure open source projects that will never see any kind of social reward for what they do. And the social capital generated by closed source success is just as big if not greater than open source. Bill Gates or Zuckerberg could cash a lot of favors surely. 2) I agree that privileged people with free time are more able to do open source. But isn't even just being a programmer the same situation? Not every human has a computer and the time to learn how to program. So I don't really follow that this same constraint makes open source oppressive, any more than programming itself is oppressive. 3) Is Stallman really the best example of someone cashing in on all of that social capital? I don't know him , but he seems to live a pretty modest life. Has he made more money than he would have if he never did open source and just became a professor after going to MIT. Also , not sure if I would describe him having hegemonic control over open source discourse. As lots of people dont always see eye to eye with him. I get that these criticisms are popping up now due to some people requiring github profiles for jobs, which I agree is not good. But outside of the HN / twitter bubble , not many companies are actually doing that. As the # of programmer jobs are increasing greatly ( partially I would say due to open source projects like rails & linux ), the # of programmer jobs that dont require a github are increasing faster than those that do. Alot of the criticisms in the article are more criticisms of society and the economy in general. I think the solution looks more like fighting for basic income or something similar vs fighting for closed over open source softwares.

nateabele 13y ago

To anyone who feels attacked by this article, here are three things to keep in mind: In life, guilt is optional. If you think you're expected to understand something you don't, it's not your problem. [0] Finally, the world is full of different people with different value systems: if you don't share someone else's, you don't have to invalidate it, you can just choose not to accept it. No one can judge you without your permission. [0] http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/01/13/LawOfConversation http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/01/13/LawOfConve...