One of the most important things I learned at Mozilla was the idea of “priority of constituencies” - that is, if you have responsibilities to different groups for different reasons, being explicit up front about who is at the front of the line and why. As with The Tyranny Of Structurelessness, there’s always a hierarchy, and letting those hierarchies stay hidden means letting power escape scrutiny.
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The thing that saddens me about so many developments in Linux, at every level - from SystemD and the Wayland permission model up to snaps and flatpak and now apparently the kernel - is that these priorities are, obviously to me at least, not being spelled out explicitly because saying so out loud would be too obviously repulsive. Because today the primary constituencies of Linux are cloud fleet rentiers first, their developers second and human computer owners a distant third at best.
The people who got us here did it with open eyes, making mouth-noises about openness and freedom over the decades they collaborated building the systems that now enclose us, by and large totally capitulating to the whims of whatever trends and market forces wafted by along the way. But how do you find your way to a human-centered, human-prioritizing computational worldview if you're starting from licenses and moral frameworks that can't admit the existence of society, or even the word 'no'?
Privacy is another term for dignity, autonomy is the heart of democracy, dependencies are a kind of complicity, and an empowered people in a healthy, free society should be our most important constituency, above corporations, above shareholders or trends or money. It feels like a lonely, alienating set of things to believe; it's definitely career-limiting. But it beats having a moral framework that spins like a pinwheel some greasy hand is fanning with a sack of twenties.
Sorry, that "pivots".
@mhoye 100% agree.
but just as much i think we need a transparent economy and transparent companies down to every part of it.
This is what will change everything, but the only way to get there i ho is by starting such organisations or joining them and supporting them exclusively as customers.
Of course, we imho also need transparent government. ...once we have both of that, i think what you propose will follow automatically and as long as we dont have that, we wont get there
@mhoye This has more or less always been true but in my experience, there was a period where recruiters and hiring managers were more or less explicitly saying "we need to do right by our customers (the cloud rentiers or their near equivalents) but the great thing about open source is there's this huge positive externality for the community that we get to contribute to"
but then someone in finance realized that "positive externality" is a way of saying "breach of fiduciary duty to shareholders"
engineering management: "we could be a beacon to humanity, ushering a technological golden era of personal agency and mutual benefit between us and our users"
finance: "no, we are obligated to capture all the value"
engineering management: "OK we'll do it, but, like, quiet"
finance: "we're going to start basing your bonus on return on capex and OSS is capex"
engineering management: "ALL OPEN SOURCE REQUIRES APPROVAL BY A SUPERMAJORITY OF A PANEL OF 25 LAWYERS, ONE COMMIT AT A TIME"
@mhoye
yeah, cant see this trand changing sadly.
it would require some quite drastic changes in incentive structures and i dont think anyone cab even agree on how to get there. different groups have different ideas, but without critical mass nothing will change so this will probably continue to get worse
