Alright, so
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@ajroach42 thanks for all the thoughts in this thread.
If you all are wondering why so many of us in the “tech” world are feeling such existential dread and exhaustion about our profession, passion, and livelihoods, this thread does a good job of touching on most of the topics.
As you may have gathered from some of the posting that Sundog and I have been doing over the last few days, we're kicking the tires on some tech stuff.
Toy production is still ongoing, we're getting ready to order more molds, I met with one of our 3D modelers yesterday about the next models we'll be working up.
You can get Kumiai-Ki, The Mighty Labor Union Mech action figures from @MountainTownToys right now!
But we've solved a bunch of toy production problems, and half solved a couple of others, and a byproduct of that is that we have some extra cycles while we're waiting on parts and tooling to finish solving problems and start making the next batch of toys.
And that means we've been working on some tech stuff.
For me, this mostly means that I've been dusting off old ideas and checking out new projects and checking in on old projects.
I've been writing a lot, about technology, about what I want, about culture, about the ways technology has failed.
Some of these things might eventually become blog posts or a newsletter or a zine.
But mostly, I've been thinking, and trying to fight back in small ways to find or build a new foundation as the forces of capital erode the ground from underneath my feet, technologically speaking.
I have, for decades, considered Debian the bedrock of my computer infrastructure.
The thing that I could trust, because it was run by an organization so obsessed with the ideology of software freedom that it routinely rendered itself significantly more cumbersome as a result.
I was there for the IceWeasel campaign! I thought those principles were central to the project.
I was wrong.
So one of the many things I'm trying to do, as I reorient myself in the computer world without Debian as a foundation to build on, is looking for a new operating system.
The Linux kernel project accepts slop contributions, the debian project accepts slop contributions. Where does that leave me?
Put simply, I'm looking for a daily driver operating system that I can trust to be made by people, and not contain the product of an automated plagiarism machine.
(No, I'm not interested in arguing about the merits of AI, or hearing about how your use case is justified or okay or whatever.
I am opposed to generative AI and LLMs on several levels, but
I don't care what you do personally, and I'm not here to police your decisions.
I don't want AI generated code in my OS, and I don't want to talk about it.)
Of course, all of this is made all the more complicated by the fact that, along side most major software projects allowing AI code contributions, a bunch of software projects are ever more obviously being operated by Nazis.
And I don't want bigots writing my code either.
So I'm exploring.
I didn't think I would need to find an operating system that wasn't Debian or a Debian derivative, so I haven't really paid attention to the larger OS world.
From what I can see, the operating systems that have taken the most strong stance against the kinds of generative AI utilization that I'm concerned about here are NetBSD, FreeDOS, and ... illumos (or at least some Illumos distributions such as Tribblix)
I've also seen some general "we don't want AI here" conversation from Haiku.
But hardware support among these alternative operating systems is inconsistent (with NetBSD sitting at the top of the pile, but well under Linux and Windows.)
And, as with all things, there are degrees to all this. I recognize that I will probably end up having to make compromises in some of the things that I use in order to continue to do much of the work that I want to do.
In much the same way that I begrudgingly keep a windows 10 box around so that I can interface with some windows only hardware, I will allow Linux on devices that support Linux, or for activities that I can't perform in other environments unless/until I can afford to replace them.
But, if I'm going to be exploring alternative OSs and reexamining the foundational layer of how I approach computing, I might as well question it all.
I am looking at new ways of doing things, and new software, and new ideas about how software should work, and new ideas about what is *good* about the software community, up and down the stack.
I'm not just questioning my OS, I'm questioning everything about modern computers (and not for the first time! I was already banging this drum nearly a decade ago https://ajroach42.com/observations-on-modern-computing-the-last-10-years-were-a-misstep/ )
So yes, I'm going to set up a NetBSD laptop and a NetBSD server and start figuring out how much of my core life I can move onto them.
I'm going to migrate things off of my yunohost server and into the NetBSD server. I'm going to try to use Linux only when I don't have another choice.
I think these things are pretty obviously values aligned with the position that I've taken.
But I'm also going to start doing some other things.
This bit might get a little controversial, and I want to make sure that I say what I mean to say, and that means I'm going to take my time to write it.
I haven't stopped, I'm just being careful.
Alright, I also made a sandwich and grabbed some chips. I should be slightly more able to speak correctly.
Everything that's happening in computers today is evidence to me that the free software movement failed.
Or, at least, depending on which vision you have in your head of Free Software, it has either entirely failed as a movement, or it has ended up where it was always headed.
It’s amazing to me how we’re watching the tech world fall apart at the feet of monetization, enshitifiction, AI, and whatever other Bullshit trend they’re chasing this week.
The world we're living in, where privacy disappears more each day and everything gets worse, is basically the consequences that the Free Software folks have been warning about and talking about for decades!
But, by and large, the tools that are being used to implement these consequences *are* so called "Free" software.
Even before we let AI eat everything, our so called alternatives were compromised.
Canonical partnered with Amazon to send them your keystrokes, Firefox was almost entirely funded by Google, Duck Duck Go has always been Bing in a trench coat.
And, even outside of AI, one of the most widely used Free image editing programs is named after an ableist slur, and is actively hostile to anyone who suggests the name should change.
Free Software alone was never going to save us.
The free software movement did some good! I don't want to dismiss it. I am deeply grateful for the existence of the free software movement, and computers would be worse and less safe without it.
But it was insufficient.
From the very beginning, it was also about power, about wielding power, about being protected.
Many of the people associated with the free software movement got a free pass to be horrible, bigoted, or abusive, because they also wrote good code. (or, even sometimes because they wrote code at all, regardless of quality.)
This is playing out now with DHH, but it's been there from the very beginning, with far too many people to list.
For years, I was of the opinion that it didn't matter who wrote the code as long as the code accomplished my goals.
I no longer believe that.
Ideology influences decisions, controls the possibility space.
This isn't an absolute, and it doesn't wholly dictate what software I will use (I am, after all, still an internet user in spite of it's DARPA origins), but peoples values influence their choices and you gotta remember that when you're looking at any given piece of software.
But that's neither here nor there because the worst damage the free software movement did was in expectations.
The Free (libre) software movement seeded the idea that software would also be Free (gratis) and that anyone charging for a piece of software must be punished.
And, in the process, broke the only mechanism for funding software development that ever really worked, and replaced it with telemetry and advertising and surveillance and subscriptions.
I was born in 1990.
I grew up through the last days of shareware and the early days of modern free software.
I got to watch the shareware model die, I got to watch the Open Source revolution.
If you weren't there for the shareware days, what I'm about to say might sound impossible, but small software projects released as limited demos with paid upgrades used to handily pay a *good* wage to solo developers or small teams.
There was a lot about the shareware era that wasn't great, don't get me wrong, and there's a lot about the modern free software era that is much better.
I am a huge fan of not paying for my operating system, and *many* of the things I do are only possible because there is a good, community made, gratis and libre software package out there to make it possible.
But I'd gladly pay ten bucks to keep the kdenlive or [insert project here] developers fed.
One time payment, single transaction, let me mail some cash or a check to a PO Box.
My favorite kind of shareware was the "donationware" or "nagware" model.
Give me the full application, and every time I launch it, give me a splash screen that says who I can pay to make the splash screen go away.
It was great! I paid for stuff that I ended up using.
(I've talked about my history with Shareware in the past. I'm not going to get into it again, but I suspect there's a fedithread or a blogpost that you could find about the flea markets I went to as a kid.)
Here: https://retro.social/@ajroach42/113481632282311122
That was two years ago. I haven't re-read it. I wonder how much I agree with.
Two years ago was around the time I noped out of computers more or less completely to start making toys.
To be clear, I don't think the fault for the "I'm not paying for that" mentality lies solely with the Free Software movement.
I think it mostly belongs to The Internet in general, and as much as major corporations pretended to hate it, I think it largely served their interests.
Generosity is harder to find, when hardly anyone is making a living wage.
That right there is probably THE single biggest factor holding us back. Capitalism's social engineering, constantly pushing everyone towards precarity and away from the security it takes to share freely.
I think I disagree with almost every part of that.
Many of the most generous people I've ever known have been struggling to make ends meet, or actively failing to do so.
When I was working in tech, my well off work friends would send me venmo requests for "my portion" of the appetizer that we "shared." These were men making $250k/year or more, many of them worth multiple millions of dollars.
When I was working retail and not making ends meet at all, my other co-workers who also didn't have enough to go around *always* had something to share.
The thing that makes the modern capitalism so insidious is the way it steals your time. The time spent working, the time spent exhausted, the shadow work of self checkout and building your own ikea furniture, the time spent navigating systems designed to trick us.
Simply being in a precarious position doesn't, as a rule, make someone behave selfishly (and simply being in a stable position doesn't make someone behave generously.)
But also! I'm not talking about Generosity, or about people who can't afford to spend money. The time period in question, as discussed in the post you replied to and *at length* over the subsequent half dozen posts, was a period of financial stability in which the only people who could participate in the systems I am discussed had the disposable income to have a high speed internet connection at a time when that was a geographic and economic luxury.
People stopped paying for things because it was significantly easier not to pay for them. Doing the "right" thing was significantly harder than doing the "wrong" thing and, in the vast majority of cases, neither had any material impact on anyone.
