Diseased Open Source Software Community - it's about ethics in Code of Conducts

[Rusty Metal Skull Gun]

Our digital infrastructures exist globally through foundations of ... sizeism

Jumbo Ethernet frames confirmed to be fatphobic

 

[AnOminous]

You have to a little insane and retarded in order to be a regular poster on any Internet platform.

Speaking as a regular poster on an Internet platform, I can confirm that I am insane and retarded.

 

[attractive_pneumonia]

You are correct. It looks like some archivers pulled 17 TB of Miiverse comments back when the shutdown was announced here. Then recently (last December) another archiver deployed a bot that crossposts archived Miiverse content to ActivityPub, source code here.

Ah so this is what it is, it still could have been using Ostatus which predated the ActivityPub protocol. There was a period of time where Fediverse software was running both at the same time. Still an amusing thing to see pop up on the Fediverse.

 

[Rusty Metal Skull Gun]

I think part of the problem of wokeism is that it's career suicide to publicly criticize any aspect of it, meaning that they can churn this sort of unmitigated bollocks out without consequence. "Our digital infrastructures exist globally through foundations of anti-Blackness, anti-indigeneity, Orientalism, racism, heterosexism, femmephobia, slavery, classism, colorism, ableism, ageism, surveillance capitalism, sizeism, and religious imperialism" - not only is this objectively not true in the slightest, they make no effort to prove it to be true. It's just noise, showing what good people they are.

Also, how come the English aren't on that native-land.ca map? Or the Finns, for that matter, even though the Lapps ("Sami") are? The thing that annoys me about the word "indigenous" nowadays is that it effectively means "indigenous and unsuccessful"... which is in itself pretty racist.

 

[Atlictoal]

Ah so this is what it is, it still could have been using Ostatus which predated the ActivityPub protocol. There was a period of time where Fediverse software was running both at the same time. Still an amusing thing to see pop up on the Fediverse.

Infected by the cult of troonism or not, I applaud what the Miiverse archivists did. I hate when gaming shit of any kind gets lost forever for no good reason.

 

[Kendall Motor Oil]

I think part of the problem of wokeism is that it's career suicide to publicly criticize any aspect of it

Anyone who's worked in a tech company office would likely have experienced the ever-present discomfort of constantly walking on eggshells around certain people, groups, or the entire company. There are true believers and opportunists who could end your career. You only need to read about a few instances of it happening to become paranoid. It reminds me of men slowly realizing how messed up divorce law and the open bigotry of the courts and society is but not being able to voice it unless around like-minded individuals. At the cybersec meetups I've gone to, I've had conversations with professionals that turned into discussions about the "woke" the second these men got a hint I wasn't in the other camp.

 

[Mikoyan]

Anyone who's worked in a tech company office would likely have experienced the ever-present discomfort of constantly walking on eggshells around certain people, groups, or the entire company. There are true believers and opportunists who could end your career. You only need to read about a few instances of it happening to become paranoid. It reminds me of men slowly realizing how messed up divorce law and the open bigotry of the courts and society is but not being able to voice it unless around like-minded individuals. At the cybersec meetups I've gone to, I've had conversations with professionals that turned into discussions about the "woke" the second these men got a hint I wasn't in the other camp.

It's not the groups themselves I found odd, it was all the fellow travelers. Straight white people acting super important about their views.

 

[Kendall Motor Oil]

It's not the groups themselves I found odd, it was all the fellow travelers. Straight white people acting super important about their views.

We had one who would constantly insult white people. "But what do I know. I'm just a white guy". The indian women on the team seemed confused when he said those things.
The ones who acted self important were usually the art guys and the HR women but we didn't have a lot of hipster devs. There was a no politics rule in the building chat but a few people would violate that, especially during the Kavanaugh hearings and George Floyd. We had more MLP guys who kept to themselves than people like Drew or Elliot Fong. The white contractors were typically a lot more work focused and easy going.

On a related note, I do wonder how much needless drama from narcissists and zealots has incentivized people to not contribute to open source.

 

[teriyakiburns]

Also, how come the English aren't on that native-land.ca map? Or the Finns, for that matter, even though the Lapps ("Sami") are?

They redefined it at the same time the redefined racism to mean "prejudice plus power", starting around 2010. Only people who are struggling against oppressors (by which they mean"white", as it exists in American racial discourse) can be indigenous. Everyone else is merely a coloniser, or some sort of ill-defined non-native. It also changes definition depending on what they want to achieve. For instance, English is classed as one of ten indigenous languages of the British isles, but none of the native speakers of those languages are considered to be indigenous peoples, even though most of them have genetic ancestry that can be traced back to the Mesolithic inhabitants of the British archipelago.

 

[Markass the Worst]

On a related note, I do wonder how much needless drama from narcissists and zealots has incentivized people to not contribute to open source.

Speaking personally, I was seriously considering donating to GrapheneOS until I did my research and learned that Daniel Micay accuses every one of his critics of harassing him, and even got Techlore's Twitter account suspended. He's still working on Graphene so I don't want to contribute to enabling that kind of behavior.

 

[Pee Cola]

I do wonder how much needless drama from narcissists and zealots has incentivized people to not contribute to open source.

As mentioned a few pages back, this sort of horseshit is turning me away from even just using open source, let alone contribute to it.

It's not just me, and it's not just because the FOSS movement has been overrun by people of gender.

---

Years ago, well before the current year paradigm of CoCs, the dude who developed the Maximite series of hobbyist computers wrote this. The article dates back to 2012, and at that stage he was frustrated at chancers coming along and trying to commercialise his work because this is perfectly acceptable under traditional open source licenses, specifically GNU GPL.

Problems in Open Source​

When I designed the Maximite (a small computer running BASIC) I primarily saw it as a fun project for people to build and use and so I released the design and software under the GNU General Public License open source license.

This turned out to be a mistake. The GNU GPL license is focused on ensuring that someone who modifies publicly available software also makes their modifications publicly available. While doing this it tends to ignore the rights of the person who wrote it in the first place.

This is the story of my experience with Open Source and why I believe that you require more than the GNU General Public License to protect your ideas and effort.

The Maximite
I won't go into the details here but the Maximite is a small low cost computer running the BASIC language. I published the design in Silicon Chip magazine in March 2011 and it became an instant hit. Visitors to my website multiplied by 20 times and thousands of Maximites have been built spawning an active community which also included a number of companies selling copies of the hardware.

The Maximite consists of three important components:

• The Concept of a small, self contained computer that mimics the computers of the 80's where you could plug in a keyboard and screen and start entering your programs.
• The Design which included the choice of the microcontroller that powered it, the schematic and the interfaces.
• The Software which included a full BASIC interpreter with floating point, arrays, string handling, etc.

Because the Maximite was published in a magazine the concept and the design were on the public record but I licensed the software under the open source GNU General Public License. This was a rather naive move on my behalf - but I always liked the idea of open source so I did not think twice before using it.

At that time it seemed like a reasonable decision, I wanted the design and software to be open and free, so what was there to defend? I certainly did not see why anyone would (or could) do harm to me.

Problems

A few months after the Maximite's release a sizeable community had built up including a discussion forum and people who were making clones and add-on boards. However, with success the Maximite also drew a number of people who wanted a "piece of the action" so to speak.

One commercial group in particular took a look at the Maximite and could see that there was an opportunity to make some money and gain a little glory - so they decided to simply move in. They created websites using the Maximite name, they dominated discussion groups and presented themselves as the manager of the Maximite world.

I hasten to add that their intentions were not necessarily evil, they just saw a good opportunity and simply trampled over me in their efforts to get to it.

Part of their technique was to design an improved hardware board based on my Maximite design and then claim that they had a better solution. Key to this was my software which they downloaded from my website and made some small changes to suit their board. What really distressed me was that they also took my name off my software and assigned the copyright to themselves.

This was something that I had not anticipated; a takeover that used my own hardware and software against me - and when I resisted they responded with public criticism and attacks. It was obvious that if I did not do something I was going to be relegated as a footnote in the Maximite's history.

Fortunately they made a few mistakes which damaged their credibility and this gave me an opportunity to recover the situation. I did this by releasing a significantly upgraded version of my software with a license that did not allow commercial exploitation. They still had access to my earlier releases under the GPL but they could not claim that their version of my software was "better" in any way and this forced them onto a parallel path and out of competition with me.

Lessons Learnt

I have glossed over the details of this unhappy story but it was a hard six months as I battled with these people. I had put a huge amount of effort into creating the Maximite and at one stage it looked like I would just have to walk away from my work and leave them to claim it as their own.

The biggest lesson that I learnt from this is that if you give your work away for free, that is how some people (a minority) will value the effort that you put into it.

The second lesson is that the GNU GPL provides little protection for the software author. It is focused on protecting the public nature of the software, not the author's rights.

Finally, in the open source world, the value is in the software but the money is in the hardware. My antagonists needed my open source software so that they could sell their "open source hardware" (still based on my design). The difference was that they were making money from the hardware while I was expected to give them the software for free (ironically, because it was also open source).

Looking Back

When I look back at this saga it is easy to pinpoint the mistake that I made, which was to rely only on the GNU General Public License. This license offers minimal protection against someone who wants to take over your work and claim the whole software package as their own (as happened to me).

In this modern Internet age there is a lot of glory associated with writing and making available some new and innovative software or device. Just look at the Arduino and Linux for examples. The problem is that there are many people who want the glory but are not prepared to do the work to achieve it. I am not sure how pioneers such as Linus Torvald have handled the open source minefield but I am prepared to bet that they have had their share of battles.

If I had known at the start how popular the Maximite was going to be, I would probably have trademarked the name Maximite and then worked to make that name the defining feature. That would have left the design and software as open but my rights as the creator would have been protected.

Another approach would have been to charge a small royalty for the design and software. That would have given me a say in what eventuated and would have at least provided me with a reward when my antagonists took over. But, then, I would have had to enforce the licenses, hire an accountant and engage in all the other paraphernalia associated with making even a small amount of money.

New License

My new license is simple, it is still open source, it is just not based on the GNU GPL. It says (in summary) that the executable program produced by me is free to be distributed in any way for any purpose. The source is freely available and can be modified for personal use but it, and any executables generated from it, may not be distributed without first consulting me and obtaining my permission.

This licence is legally binding (see this reference) but, having said that, it still gives no protection from someone who will take what they want regardless of licensing provisions. Only a million dollars and a team of lawyers would prevent that.

This does not mean that people cannot make programs from the source and distribute them. I just want the chance to negotiate some sort of simple agreement first. I do not necessarily want royalties or payment but I would like the name MMBasic to be retained, the startup copyright notice to remain intact and attribution given to me as the author. Given what has happened in the past these requirements seem to be reasonable.

A few people have complained about my new license but they tend to be either purists or commercial people who see it as a restriction on their rights. It has also caused problems for some who would like to genuinely contribute to the source but also want a large share of the glory. In practice I have distributed the source (under the new license) to many people and they have had no problem with my license. Also, a multinational corporation is designing MMBasic into their equipment and they are happy to take the source under a NDA (Non Disclosure Agreement) which, in practice, achieves the same thing as my license.

He ended up writing his own license from scratch, and he's happy to give anyone access to his work for free but they have to go through him to get it.

I'd love it if this dude updated his old open source opinion piece, this time addressing the social problems along with the commercial problems. Maybe he'll do that in a couple of years, once he's too old to give a shit about being cancelled.

 

[Kendall Motor Oil]

As mentioned a few pages back, this sort of horseshit is turning me away from even just using open source, let alone contribute to it.

Another issue I forgot to mention is being unable to contribute to open source projects or create your own under the name you use for jobs due to potential political issues with said projects. If most of your hobby code projects on github are tangential to certain things the media has demonized, it may damage your employment chances.

 

[Rusty Metal Skull Gun]

They redefined it at the same time the redefined racism to mean "prejudice plus power", starting around 2010. Only people who are struggling against oppressors (by which they mean"white", as it exists in American racial discourse) can be indigenous. Everyone else is merely a coloniser, or some sort of ill-defined non-native. It also changes definition depending on what they want to achieve. For instance, English is classed as one of ten indigenous languages of the British isles, but none of the native speakers of those languages are considered to be indigenous peoples, even though most of them have genetic ancestry that can be traced back to the Mesolithic inhabitants of the British archipelago.

Yeah, but the Lapps are white. They arrived in Finland more or less the same time as the Finns, but now they're "indigneous" and it's racist to call them by the name we've used for centuries (even though no one calls the Finns "Suomi"). It doesn't make any sense.

 

[UERISIMILITUDO]

On a related note, I do wonder how much needless drama from narcissists and zealots has incentivized people to not contribute to open source.

Free Software is what truly matters anyway. On that note, I enjoy watching corporations twist the meaning of open source in an attempt to remove free usage from the colloquial meaning. Who would've thought bending over for corporations would eventually lead to being fucked by them?

The article dates back to 2012, and at that stage he was frustrated at chancers coming along and trying to commercialise his work because this is perfectly acceptable under traditional open source licenses, specifically GNU GPL.

That shows how much he knows.

This turned out to be a mistake. The GNU GPL license is focused on ensuring that someone who modifies publicly available software also makes their modifications publicly available. While doing this it tends to ignore the rights of the person who wrote it in the first place.

No shit; the FSF explicitly states this.

What really distressed me was that they also took my name off my software and assigned the copyright to themselves.

That he believes the GPL caused this is proof he doesn't understand software licensing.

My new license is simple, it is still open source, it is just not based on the GNU GPL. It says (in summary) that the executable program produced by me is free to be distributed in any way for any purpose. The source is freely available and can be modified for personal use but it, and any executables generated from it, may not be distributed without first consulting me and obtaining my permission.

This is a good example of a retard misunderstanding what open source is supposed to mean, but it's funny.

 

[Tacgnol]

Something's amiss here. After a cursory look, the Wii U appears to predate ActivityPub, which is still older than I thought, at nearly a decade old now. Was that added later? I never owned a Wii U.

While skulking around for the details, I found this:
https://www.w3.org/wiki/Socialwg (archive)
View attachment 5391562

A very dready harassment suit.

At least he ain't a fag, all oogling the troons and shit.

 

[1440p Curved Monitor]

On a related note, I do wonder how much needless drama from narcissists and zealots has incentivized people to not contribute to open source.

I have personal stake in this drama as I have used these tools for years for side hustles. I know the ins and outs of p5.js and can easily contribute to it. However I don't. Because of this feeling that I get from the community and foundation:

We invite you to remember the labor and love of QTBIPOC femme, elder, disabled, low-income healers, crafters, technologists, storytellers, and artists

I would technically check four of the six marginalized boxes they list here. The fact that I would specifically be rewarded for any quality of contribution because I meet that criteria is fucking offensive. Not only do I want to receive fame for the quality of my work, but I also want others to receive it as well if they deserved because then I'll know that the recognition I got is genuine. High achievers want prestige for their high achievement, so anything less than a meritocratic culture for an open source project is not something I want to invest my time and skills into. So I looked into mastering another framework and maybe contributing if I like it.
I like the idea of open source - if I'm using it I want to be able to tinker and break it - however these communities are really starting to ruin it for me.

I'm gonna ask some friends if they can get more details on the Processing/p5 drama.

 

[teriyakiburns]

Yeah, but the Lapps are white.

Oh no, they're not. "White", in the Americanised racial discourse that originated all of this bullshit, means "people I don't like". It's being deliberately transformed into an othering term, used for any group of people who are currently deemed to have "privilege". Sami aren't white, even though most of them are paler than the Finns, because they are not currently dominant in their regional polities. Finns are white, even though they are historically oppressed and subjugated by the swedes and the russians, because they have had borders and national identity within those borders for an arbitrary period of time

This is why you sometimes see the Japanese being referred to as "white". Their country is wealthy and benefited from "oppression" and "imperialism". It may or may not be true that they have some sort of ethnic advantage, but there's no objective marker that defines them as "white". They're "white" because it's ideologically useful for them to be "white".

Remember, in future, when you see someone referred to as "white", it's not because of the colour of their skin, but because their ethnosocial group is deemed to be a valid target for discrimination.

That shows how much he knows.

I was about to post the same thing. It's pretty clear he didn't read the license he was using, otherwise he would have known that it specifically prevents relicensing and enclosure. He was also more than happy to advertise these "competing" boards on his homepage. Chances are he got pissed off at one company in particular (probably circuitgizmos, as they're the only one mentioned on the wiki as being compatible with the original design) and threw a hissy fit about how they were making money of the thing he deliberately gave away for free.

The fact is, he fucked up when he released the board design for free. He should have licensed the hardware design such that anyone producing it on remotely commercial scales would have to pay, while hobbyists and people designing add-ons could use it for free. He should also have trademarked "maximite", even if he deliberately licensed it at zero cost to every one. Trademarks are a lot easier to enforce.

 

[Safir]

StackOverflow has experienced yet another year filled with opportunities and challenges [A].

They also cut 28% of staff, after cutting 10% in May.

One of the cut was Catherine Kuck [profile] [hiring announcement] [obituary], who judging by her hobbies is surprisingly not a troon despite pronouns in bio, and whose (downvoted) month-old suggestion to democratize downvotes is right next to the discussion of the layoffs [A] in the sidebar.

edit:
the other dearly departed is this useless Valued Associate #958 pajeet failweeb with zero activity (remember, 100 points is the free "association bonus") on any technical or science site on the Stack Exchange network:

Previously, V2Blast worked as a Community Manager and Localization Manager for the game Nova Drift. He also worked as a contract YouTube Moderator for the online media production company Rooster Teeth. In addition, he has served as a volunteer moderator for numerous communities across multiple platforms over the past decade.

Nova Drift is a small indie game made by one guy and a composer, it's still in Early Access, and its translations were being CROWDSOURCED ON LOCALIZER as late as April '23!

 

[AnOminous]

Catherine Kuck

Seriously? Catherine Kuck?

 

[DavidS877]

Seriously? Catherine Kuck?

Not sure if DeMartino is better or worse: