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

[Marvin]

My understanding of open source has always been that it's a form of philanthropy. I write software at home, on my own time and release it for free for anyone to make use of. It's an act over and above the rest of the economy. I do this because I enjoy it and because I've benefited immensely from other people doing likewise.

Not entirely. The idea is more that if you release the source, the other people who benefit can contribute changes. So instead of you writing one program 100% yourself (and thus incurring all of the costs of development yourself), you might only need to shoulder, say, 20% of the cost of development. This makes it harder to monetize (though not impossible), but for a lot of everyday software, it's stuff you weren't necessarily going to monetize in the first place, and you were just going to make use of as an end user. (Like infrastructure, like docker)

Open source is often a very pragmatic move, not really a charitable act. (But it can incorporate charity in the decision to open source)

People like Corey recently have been complaining about big companies using open source software to lower their costs.

 

[AirdropShitposts]

"those w/ life responsibilities don't get to contribute at all"
"and even those lucky enough to contribute can't prevent orgs like ICE using their sw"
This person is essentially complaining because life is limited by factors outside a persons control, then demanding that someone else find a way to eliminate fundamental causes of scarcity like time. I admit I'm assuming the last part because looking at their Twitter feed I see a complete absence of suggested solutions.

"What other industry asks us to play this kind of ethical game?"
Well, all of them if you're the type of tard that demands some kind of "moral calculus" like you suggest.

shut up dummy

 

[vertexwindi]

People like Corey recently have been complaining about big companies using open source software to lower their costs.

There are licenses that prevent commercial use, just use one of those?

 

[Dante Alighieri]

There are licenses that prevent commercial use, just use one of those?

Corey just wants to destroy.

 

[Where Do You Find Them?]

There's so much about this that doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

As @Norvic pointed out the first one amounts to "charity is bad because it requires privilege" but there's also a removal of the agency of contributors that seems to underlay a lot of this. "Creators burn out and don't get compensated," if you burn out you have nobody to blame but yourself. Nobody has ever forced anyone to contribute nor promised compensation. They knew the breaks. To pretend they've been hard done by is to imagine they didn't choose exactly this.

"The old guard who hold the keys to the OSS kingdom"

What keys? There are no keys. The closest thing to locks here is the licenses and very deliberately nobody holds the keys there. They are permanently welded open. On that note, what kingdom? There's an implication that there's limited land, that by holding these keys to the kingdom others are somehow restricted. The only restriction is that you can't take something created by someone else and apply your own ideas as to how it should or shouldn't be used. Nobody ever forced you to take part in the OSS kingdom. There are infinite fields of possibility for you to start your own kingdom of "ethical production" if you wish. Instead we get a complaint that can be characterised as "They built a castle and threw the doors wide open so that everyone can come in. Some of the people who have come in I find undesirable," and when it's put like that we see why starting your own kingdom isn't enough. They don't want freedom themselves. They want to restrict it for others. They want to guard the doors and enforce their own ethical judgements. Fortunately, the doors were legally welded open exactly to prevent these decrees of who is or is not worthy. It's too late to do anything about it now even if we wanted to.

"What other industry asks us to play this ethical game?"

Every single one of them. If I make shovels I have to ask if the benefit of allowing people to dig holes outweighs the possibility that they might be used as a murder weapon. Life asks you to play an "ethical game" and do what you think is right. I'm sorry that there aren't simple easy answers on which we can all agree. I'm sorry that other people have different ethics and the temerity to pursue them effectively, but that's the big boy world. The irony here is hilarious as well, "I want you to consider the ethics of a situation in which you have to consider ethics. Isn't it just awful?"

But, more subtly, we see the actual problem here. A slip of the tongue that reveals the misconceptions that lead to these moronic statements. This isn't industry. It's charity. That's why you give as much as you can and get nothing in return. That's why the doors are welded open. That's why ethical considerations stand at the heart of why we do what we do. Ultimately that's why people like our friend here are anathema to the ideals that have led to the success of the OSS kingdom.

 

[Shoggoth]

Perhaps I'm super slow, but I've only just realised. I've seen this shit happen before:

View attachment 1012050

This is literally Atheism Plus all over again. For anyone not familiar, Atheism Plus was an effort to redefine atheism to be not just not believing in any deities, but also to tack on a host of other, completely unrelated positive beliefs that had to to be adhered to or you weren't actually an atheist. It would probably be reductive to say that Atheism Plus destroyed the New Atheism movement, but it certainly didn't help. It alienated even people who broadly supported the atheism plus extras because they were expressed as a dogma, you couldn't pick and choose or opt out entirely.

I guess now it's open source's turn. Now we're going to be told that just releasing the source is not good enough. We're going to have conform to some external ethos that not be our own, or even particularly relevant to the project or our cultural context. We're going to be told that we have to raise money to pay contributors because it's not "fair" that some people are underprivileged and don't have free time to contribute.

My understanding of open source has always been that it's a form of philanthropy. I write software at home, on my own time and release it for free for anyone to make use of. It's an act over and above the rest of the economy. I do this because I enjoy it and because I've benefited immensely from other people doing likewise. This "ethical source" shit is dangerously close to arguing that philanthropy is problematic because only the "privileged" can engage in it. That's the level of absurdity we're dealing with.

There's a lot to go over here. I think the biggest gaffe by Corey here is the most subtle one - "moral calculus". I have never, in my life, seen a troon, sjw, dangerhair or other, lay down a logically consistent, calculable, formal moral system. One that can be used for derivation and proof via formal methods, allowing one to recognize, with certainty, the morality of an action. They actually make a laughably weak case.

He also pulls a slight of hand between consequentialism (giving evil people freedom) utopianism (bad people shouldn't do bad things, ever), and just plain old preference (I don't like group X, hence they are bad).
Ya can't hold a stick by three ends, you goof. The premise which underlies liberal thought, and open source, which I'll get to in the next paragraph, is that humans are by default free. Good or Evil, we are born free, and it's a moral imperative to protect this freedom, nurture it, and use it to make room for the good and a chance for the bad to be good, because liberalism is empirical (read English), we can't know a person is good or bad by anything but their actions. That's not neccessarily my beliefe here, just my understanding of English liberalism.

The premise underlying open source is that like people, code is "born" free. It's only not free if you decide to not share it, hide it, and take measures to obscure it. It is your prerogative to do so, but when you give someone that code to run on their property and they relinquish their freedoms completely to you, since they can't know what's in it and can't modify it, you invite people to make themselves less free, similarly to the immorality of the drug dealer or the pimp. The whole thing about licenses is just a gentlemanly agreement that if you do modify the code, would you kindly send your work back so everyone could benefit? The rest is just pragmatism.

"those w/ life responsibilities don't get to contribute at all"
"and even those lucky enough to contribute can't prevent orgs like ICE using their sw"
This person is essentially complaining because life is limited by factors outside a persons control, then demanding that someone else find a way to eliminate fundamental causes of scarcity like time. I admit I'm assuming the last part because looking at their Twitter feed I see a complete absence of suggested solutions.

"What other industry asks us to play this kind of ethical game?"
Well, all of them if you're the type of tard that demands some kind of "moral calculus" like you suggest.

View attachment 1012115
shut up dummy

Perhaps if homeboy didn't spend to much time on the twatter he'd have more time to contribute to open sores, like plenty of people, myself included, do. also, holy persecution complex batman.

 

[awoo]

...code is "born" free. It's only not free if you decide to not share it, hide it, and take measures to obscure it.

I'm not sure what you mean here. I thought it was the opposite: code is naturally closed, ex. whatever I write in my text editor stays on my hard drive, unless I choose and consciously make an effort to share it freely. Putting code online is easy, but unless you are in some strange situation where everything you write is shared by default, it is not the default state of code.

And licenses are not just gentlemanly agreements but legally binding agreements that have been tested in court, so that (in more restrictive licenses like GPL) people who make use of the code must release the source code under the same license.

 

[AnOminous]

Open source is often a very pragmatic move, not really a charitable act. (But it can incorporate charity in the decision to open source)

This is why even huge corporations can and should support it.

Throw in random SJW/troon bullshit, though, and doing this makes a lot less sense. Especially when the projects you're investing in could attract that kind of person anyway.

It makes a lot more sense just to crush and destroy projects like this. Frankly, I think people like Cory are a part of this kind of opposition to open source. Why are they driving out people like Stallman and Linus?

 

[altkiwi01]

Why are they driving out people like Stallman and Linus?

People like Cory just want someone to fight against, they crave this relevance and fame that they can't get on their own, so they spend their lives kicking up a storm about nothing whenever they can.
Sure Stallman is an ass, and Linus is difficult to work with, but they've created some of most revolutionary software in the last 20 years, and replacing them with average programmers who sperg about pronouns is probably going to detrimental to OSS. I mean, its not difficult, if you don't wanna work with those guys, don't, make your own thing and let all the people you think are toxic work on their own shit. I'm sure we'd see pretty quickly where the productivity comes from.
Cory, I know you read this shit, the best change you can make in the programming world is to friend people you disagree with and break down these walls of difference that keep getting set up.

 

[Jaimas]

This is why even huge corporations can and should support it.

Throw in random SJW/troon bullshit, though, and doing this makes a lot less sense. Especially when the projects you're investing in could attract that kind of person anyway.

It makes a lot more sense just to crush and destroy projects like this. Frankly, I think people like Cory are a part of this kind of opposition to open source. Why are they driving out people like Stallman and Linus?

Especially true when you remember that they also despise meritocracy.

Because nothing says quality code like someone who doesn't believe in working at all.

 

[Shoggoth]

I'm not sure what you mean here. I thought it was the opposite: code is naturally closed, ex. whatever I write in my text editor stays on my hard drive, unless I choose and consciously make an effort to share it freely. Putting code online is easy, but unless you are in some strange situation where everything you write is shared by default, it is not the default state of code.

And licenses are not just gentlemanly agreements but legally binding agreements that have been tested in court, so that (in more restrictive licenses like GPL) people who make use of the code must release the source code under the same license.

Everything you write on your own is done by default in the privacy of your own home, but once you want to distribute, what's an easier model? Cross compile a binary for every operating system, package it, obfuscate it, etc, or just sending the code to the client with a build script and tell them "run this and it will work for you"? Even commercial software used to be distributed via code, you just weren't licensed to share it. As storage media improved we went the binary route. I don't know how well I can represent this position because I don't know if I agree with it, but it seems to me that's the narrative people like Stallman believe in. He also calls closed source fascism, so there's that.

Regarding the gentlemanly part, what I mean is there's no obligation on your side or enforcement on the provider's side that if you hack your own local copy of Emacs to do something or fix a bug in it, that you send that patch back besides you being a Good Boy.

 

[Spooky Bones]

And MSFT spent $7.5 billion to "apocalypse-proof" GitHub source code by storing it in a special arctic repository. Absolute exceptionalism. The article doesn't really mention climate change, remarkably enough, but I can only imagine that this was done because people were being histrionic about climate change and to score points with people who are histrionic about climate change.

 

[Coolio55]

So did they save all the language runtimes and compilers or are we supposed to download all that shit from the post apocolypse package repo.
OOPS

Also lol @ all the misinformation in that article. OPENOFFICE WAS A PROPRIETARY SUITE CALLED STAROFFICE BEFORE ORACLE BOUGHT IT YOU STUPID CUNTS.

 

[Shoggoth]

And MSFT spent $7.5 billion to "apocalypse-proof" GitHub source code by storing it in a special arctic repository. Absolute exceptionalism. The article doesn't really mention climate change, remarkably enough, but I can only imagine that this was done because people were being histrionic about climate change and to score points with people who are histrionic about climate change.

Or someone read A Canticle For Leibowitz.

 

[Spooky Bones]

What really pisses me off about it is that just cutting a $7.5 billion to Bill Gates would result in a shit load of good to humanity thru charity but they are getting props like they are doing a good thing when really they are just doing a very expensive very autistic thing that helps nobody.

 

[awoo]

My thought when I saw it on GitHub is that at the very least they should pick important items to keep like the Library of Congress does. Actually it's probably cheaper and less effort to dump everything than to sort through it. We are much more likely to lose the Apollo computer source code than the latest version of Node which millions of people have.

For people who don't have billions of dollars lying around to store stuff in the Arctic, distributed systems like BitTorrent are a good way to ensure reselience. However they depend on people seeding and being willing to store your data. In the situation humanity doesn't have a catastrophic disaster, distributed still looks more realistic and usable.

 

[Spooky Bones]

Computers and the internet having less of a role in society could be an upside of an end of the world scenario tbh

 

[PhantomDiploma]

One of the software developers for Learna actually tried to pull this a year ago, attempting to retroactively change the license to explicitly forbid ICE contractors from using the platform. He was booted from the project the next day and the license was changed back.

Assuming Coraline's view did gain traction, the definition of a "good" and "bad" actors would be bound by the member's collective moral compass. Hence, targeted harassment activists like Coraline would ban "bad actors" like ICE, conservatives, and moderates from using their code. Likewise, the MAGA hats would ban "bad actors" like Coraline, liberals, and moderates from using their code. To that end, the "moral calculus" of Fox News and MSNBC pundits would end up shaping the flow - or trickle at this point - of OSS more than developers.

I agree, Coraline's decisions have been almost as detrimental to her own "safety, daily life, and mental well-being" as they've been to her targets.

And MSFT spent $7.5 billion to "apocalypse-proof" GitHub source code by storing it in a special arctic repository. Absolute exceptionalism. The article doesn't really mention climate change, remarkably enough, but I can only imagine that this was done because people were being histrionic about climate change and to score points with people who are histrionic about climate change.

The Global Seed Vault ended up flooding less than a decade after it was constructed. It's hard enough to predict future conditions when it's business as usual, let alone after a civilization-ending event.

For people who don't have billions of dollars lying around to store stuff in the Arctic, distributed systems like BitTorrent are a good way to ensure reselience. However they depend on people seeding and being willing to store your data. In the situation humanity doesn't have a catastrophic disaster, distributed still looks more realistic and usable.

Agreed, it's all about statistics. If 10 million computers have a copy of something, the data on them would still have a better chance at surviving and then being discovered than anything in a single site. It may have been smarter to just make some SETI-type program that distributed parts of the backups on people's drives, or even started leasing drive space in some sort of crowd-sourcing set up. But that doesn't involve building a Bond villain lair.

 

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Also lol @ all the misinformation in that article. OPENOFFICE WAS A PROPRIETARY SUITE CALLED STAROFFICE BEFORE ORACLE BOUGHT IT YOU STUPID CUNTS.

Nothing worth reading has ever been written in Bloomberg, regardless of topic.

And that's Sun (PBUT) that bought Star Division to you, sonny boy. Larry Ellison and Oracle are basically the demons that everyone made Bill Gates into in the 90s. I am counting down to Larry trying to shut down commercial use of VirtualBox without a license. Cory would get on gangbusters with him.

 

[AnOminous]

I agree, Coraline's decisions have been almost as detrimental to her own "safety, daily life, and mental well-being" as they've been to her targets.

It's almost like his entire life is a series of fuck-awful decisions that have had negative consequences for him and everyone around him. Like he's a lolcow or something.