Post B5lEy9K20R8xTnUzeS by toxi@mastodon.thi.ng
 (DIR) More posts by toxi@mastodon.thi.ng
 (DIR) Post #B5lEy9K20R8xTnUzeS by toxi@mastodon.thi.ng
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       "Learning from mistakes" as individuals is hard if those lessons are not (or can not be) percolated up or are even rejected by larger groups or society in general, if the behaviors one might consider a mistake on a personal/ethical level are actually rewarded and encouraged (or imposed) by those larger social structures.So many people have tried so hard for so long to share their knowledge and tools, trying to teach & inspire others, to build communities to help make the world at least a tiny better, enabling people to do more with their tech than just consuming or being "entertained". People have been sacrificing years and hard-earned savings to keep the work/projects/momentum going... only to have these efforts being outright stolen & upended now, declared meaningless, and at the same time being called to our faces "entitled", "self-important", "gate keeping" for attempting to retain some form of humanity in these projects (all phrases taken from an email received on weekend about my anti-LLM stance for my own 200+ projects — always so amazing for motivation! 😭)Has this all been meaningless? The same entities who've been benefiting the most from 20-30 years of this culture of openness, are now regularly talking about it as weakness, "supply chain risk" and "threat vector"... People who've never ever run a project themselves are just as happy to chip in with this narrative.Sure enough, mistakes were made, many of them (a small selection):A large mistake was to systematically devalue our own labor, to believe a participatory, postspectacular[1] society would be possible, that more people/orgs would not just consume, but actively participate, reciprocate, feed back, wanting to learn/build together, to create & co-own their tools of production and seeing the true value of that. Of course, not everyone is able to divert time & energy, but many more people/orgs/unis/govts would and should have been! Support for these projects can take so many different forms! Instead it's always been left to so few people to do it all... and then punish them (in many direct/indirect forms) for trying (or not being perfect)!A mistake was not to set strict boundaries early on what these shared assets/knowledge could be used for and by whom. We allowed large corporations (and countless smaller bad players[2]) to harvest the fruits of our labor as free, high-quality raw material, them never contributing anything back. We didn't organize to demand more rights, have proper legal frameworks or even interest from larger society to help creating or enforcing terms & constraints. For years, we were labeled naive altruists and were stuck with the issues of existing FLOSS licenses which were written by people who (mostly) explicitly rejected any ethical/moral constraints of use and instead sold this lack as "freedom to use for any purpose", a core pillar of these licenses.A mistake was to believe a culture of resource-poor decentralized entities could meaningfully influence or even outcompete the centralized infinitely funded structures whose ONLY interest is in exploitation, sustaining/cementing/expanding their own imposed hierarchy and grasp of power/control at all costs.These mistakes (and many more) are all fractal in nature, from the individual, projects, to governments and entire cultures... If you personally or organizationally have benefited from open source culture, but never once acted on any of the above, you're simply part of the problem and the mistakes made!It's time to learn from them, together, and before it's too late (if it isn't already)...If you want to keep on benefiting from open source culture (not the corporate or agent-regurgitated neo-interpretation), get active, show some support to the projects and esp. people involved, in whatever form or gesture you can![1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle[2] Over the past 25+ years, I know of at least that many businesses & people who built their entire early careers on my open source work, without ever contributing, donating or acknowledging...#OpenSource #Culture
       
 (DIR) Post #B5lEyAMu7F2Gizqnlg by wolf480pl@mstdn.io
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       @toxi > For years, we were labeled naive altruists and were stuck with the issues of existing FLOSS licenses which were written by people who (mostly) explicitly rejected any ethical/moral constraints of use and instead sold this lack as "freedom to use for any purpose", a core pillar of these licenses.And then it turned out the licenses wouldn't've mattered anyway, because their power comes from copyright, and corpos convinced the judges that LLM training is exempt from copyright...
       
 (DIR) Post #B5lFb26alty2OIknw0 by wolf480pl@mstdn.io
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       @toxi A programmer has power as long as the software has not been written.Once the software has been written, it is only the law that gives the programmer any leverage.Well, unless you do DRM.And if you could affect the law to prevent your enemies from ignoring your licenses, couldn't you also affect the law to prohibit unethical use of software in the first place?There should've been a strike.Is there a union I can join?
       
 (DIR) Post #B5lHKsHliHbzD7P8bY by wolf480pl@mstdn.io
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       @toxi > A programmer has power as long as the software has not been written.> unless you do DRM.Well ok, this is not entirely true - you could keep the only copy on an encrypted disk that only you know the password for.We could extend this reasoning to a group of mutually trusting people - a guild could have software that is only distributed within the guild, and as long as it's not been shared outside, it empowers the guild.You could even have free collaboration inside such a guild.1/
       
 (DIR) Post #B5lI527nSoBZ2ykaPI by wolf480pl@mstdn.io
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       @toxi But the process of introducing new people to the guild would have to be very stringent, since a single member who betrays the guild would put all the other members back at square 1.(NB: it seems funny how people complain about maintainers "gatekeeping" these days, when the alternative is pretty much a secret society...)And if "FOSS" becomes an exclusive club that you cannot join without knowing the right people, then it's just another vehicle of social stratification :/2/2
       
 (DIR) Post #B5lIVLM2afguDSxUY4 by wolf480pl@mstdn.io
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       @toxi So yeah, I think a coordinated strike in order to get better laws is the only way to save software commons that can be openly collaborated on.
       
 (DIR) Post #B5lIuDpRhxRS7CZkSu by asie@mk.asie.pl
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       @wolf480pl@mstdn.io @toxi@mastodon.thi.ng a FOSS labor strike would be the most beautiful thing imaginable and i also don't believe we could unite enough to make it happen. which is wild because, like, i'm thinking of the volunteer force here
       
 (DIR) Post #B5lOlN3Qdbe5qXHKcq by taylan@fedi.feministwiki.org
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       @wolf480pl @toxi In my observation many "FOSS" projects these days are already an exclusive club. You have to share a certain set of quasi religious political views that are not even related to software freedom, or you'll risk being canceled.Needless to say, I don't trust such people to have a sensible definition of "ethical use of software."Let's say such a license was applied to a Fedi server implementation or another piece of software that facilitates communication. Heck, could be a web server... The license would probably try to control what speech you are allowed to publish via the software. "No publishing hate speech or you are in breach of the license."Congrats, it's now illegal to use the software to publish feminist views critical of gender identity theory, because it will 100% be branded "transphobic hate speech."It's actually somewhat scary to think about, because the whole CoC trend already comes somewhat close to this, just limited to culling contributors rather than blocking people from using the software.I can hardly imagine it ever going that far, but think about a world 20 years from now in which people who want to publish unpopular views are barred from using most web servers, blogging platforms, etc. and have to pay fringe "free speech hosting" companies a ton of money because the company has to maintain an entirely independent software stack developed from scratch. Unrealistic, but scary. Would make for a good dystopian story.
       
 (DIR) Post #B5lOlNQTFw4r003jXc by wolf480pl@mstdn.io
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       @taylan at least you can still forkor just read the source to understand how it worksImagine a world without copyright, and with cheap reverse-engineering, in which software is guarded like coca-cola recipe.Or one in which allegedly there exist Freemasons and allegedly they make software, but nobody really knows, and nobody has ever seen that software.