There's something truly dismal about watching foss go slop.
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There's something truly dismal about watching foss go slop. Like, free software was supposed to be about ideals, a better vision for what computing could be. The rampant misogyny, transphobia, abelism, and racism already showed how limited that vision was, but now it seems like it doesn't exist at all.
Just... volunteer work for giant corporations. The same extractive vision of computing, but now coupled to a Reagan regime oppression of labor rights and environmental deregulation.
@xgranade Let them eat TANSTAAFL. No quid pro quo? No workie!
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@mirabilos @xgranade see I don't want people making money in certain spaces at all. if possible, I would like it if there was enough open source ttrpgs to completely push companies out of the space, instead of what we're seeing is that it adds easier and easier to publish things for money.
Instead of writing an adventure for a home group, thinking it's pretty good, and putting it up on a forum for free for others to enjoy, everyone puts it up on DTRPG to make a quick buck.
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@mirabilos @xgranade see I don't want people making money in certain spaces at all. if possible, I would like it if there was enough open source ttrpgs to completely push companies out of the space, instead of what we're seeing is that it adds easier and easier to publish things for money.
Instead of writing an adventure for a home group, thinking it's pretty good, and putting it up on a forum for free for others to enjoy, everyone puts it up on DTRPG to make a quick buck.
@mirabilos @xgranade It's even getting to the point that people are expecting to be paid for DMing these days
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@xgranade I think that's wretched for a whole pile of reasons, but I'll cite one especially: because there's so many FOSS programmers who are locked into corporate trend-riding, much free-software work seems almost as stale and stagnant and conservative as corporate software. There's the same defensiveness about sticking with bad old precedents, merely because they're established precedents, that one sees everywhere in the corporate and political spheres.
As someone who started their growing-up before the advent of omnipresent computing, and someone who really did get into that stuff in adolescence and had high hopes for it, I'm still a bit astonished by how hidebound the technology sector really is—totally at odds with their pose as being always ahead of the curve and capable of any act of creation or transformation.
"WE CAN DO ANYTHING WE ARE GODS!" "oh then could we maybe drop the fixation on C/C++ with thousands of other programming languages existing now?" "shut up C is God's programming language"
@mxchara @xgranade To be fair I was knee deep in C23 specs this morning and it is not bad at all. But that's not to say more stuff should perhaps be written in Python? I'm just about willing to give TypeScript a pass given Ableson and Sussman wrote the latest SICP edition with JavaScript examples, not Scheme/LISP. What the tech industry lacks as a whole is humility and creative synthesis. I skimmed a GenAI textbook which name checked Dijkstra 3 times and missed his essential messages entirely.
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@xgranade A lot of the movement side has been co-opted by corporate interests for decades,
it's part of why I still make a point to distinguish 'free/libre' from 'open source'; a lot of 'foss' is open source - about a model of productivity, a workflow, an approach to project management, even the terminology is designed to be more welcoming to the capitalist class.
The ethical side of it has been obuscated, deprecated. Not that the original ethical stance was all that strong to start with;@miss_rodent @xgranade David Reed (he who invented the UDP protocol) is not a big fan of the Linux Foundation, if his LinkedIn posts are to be believed (and not false flags). I cook up tasty nothingburgers to game the engagement algorithm.
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@mirabilos @xgranade It's even getting to the point that people are expecting to be paid for DMing these days
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@Canageek The BSD and MIT licenses, very much so. The GPL, though, that's a very strange case. The copyleft provisions make a lot of companies run for the hills (hence the popular thing of slopbros license-washing away the GPL), but also its refusal to prohibit any kind of extractionism not explicitly called out in Stallman's original writings is.... weird, to say the least.
@xgranade @Canageek The GPL is often used as a "moat"... and a weak one at that. @bcantrill may or may not be being strategic here, I can't speak for him, but I suspect our convergence on the pragmatic choice of the MPL (halfway between GPL and BSD in many ways) is not a coincidence. I have favoured BSD because I don't believe you can always force people to share by fiat; the flip side of that is that attribution matters more with MIT/BSD, so LLMs manifest epistemic injustice by denying it.
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@mirabilos @xgranade I don't get your point? I'm dealing with an existing culture that I can't change, but I can prevent my stuff from contributing to the problem.
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@xgranade @Canageek The GPL is often used as a "moat"... and a weak one at that. @bcantrill may or may not be being strategic here, I can't speak for him, but I suspect our convergence on the pragmatic choice of the MPL (halfway between GPL and BSD in many ways) is not a coincidence. I have favoured BSD because I don't believe you can always force people to share by fiat; the flip side of that is that attribution matters more with MIT/BSD, so LLMs manifest epistemic injustice by denying it.
@xgranade @Canageek Oh yeah. Tsinghua researchers found a minor resource leak in a kernel subsystem I wrote in 2009. They used GLM 5.1 to beat up on the code. Apple fixed the same issue in their fork but didn't upstream. You see the pickle? Don't get me started on Apple.. OK, authorship probably scored me a PhD scholarship, but that is/was no shangri-la. I can't talk about it but it's just Sayre's Law. Hate the sin, love the sinner (St Augustine 424CE) == don't hate the player, hate the game.
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@xgranade it was always a very narrow ethical position about a specific subject; which is useful in some cases, but, also means that outside that specific vein, the ethical side was never that well-aligned elsewhere.
@miss_rodent @xgranade I got into FOSS hoping that I could help non-profits and activist groups become more independent from corporate influence. Instead I've seen them outsource more and more of their organizational infrastructure.
Who does use FOSS? Hobbyists, and the inner machinery of the worst organizations in the world.
It was already notorious that FOSS advocates were often at odds with writers and independent artists, who have to sell their work to survive. FOSS has been part of the alienation of IT workers from workers in general.
Outside Fediverse, and occasionally even on it, I see "fossbros" advocating for "GenAI" on the grounds that artists charge too much for creative work.
And at some point, I have to ask whether it's even ethical to do volunteer work when the main beneficiaries of your free labor are surveillance and propaganda organizations, and the military.
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