I've seen like 100 people say something to the effect of "we need to find ways to support open source developers" in the last couple days.But I don't get the impression that most people know what that would look like. Can I suggest listening to Astra T...

Jenniferplusplus

I've seen like 100 people say something to the effect of "we need to find ways to support open source developers" in the last couple days.

But I don't get the impression that most people know what that would look like. Can I suggest listening to Astra Taylor's lecture series as a place to start imagining that future?

https://www.cbc.ca/radiointeractives/ideas/2023-cbc-massey-lectures-astra-taylor

Or the book version, if lectures aren't your thing

https://houseofanansi.com/products/the-age-of-insecurity

mx alex tax1a - 2020 (4)

@jenniferplusplus the thing we've been wondering is, has anyone asked the original xz developer what kind of support he wants? all of these thinkpieces seem to kinda gloss over that.

Jenniferplusplus

Open source software is a commons. And like all commons, it's being plundered by capital. "Paying maintainers," or whatever is a bandaid, at best. It may help some individual developers, but it doesn't protect the commons. At worst it undermines the commons by ceding control of it to a small group of people and their capital backing.

If we want to "support open source developers" then we need to protect the commons itself. We need to empower people to do that as members of the commons.

Jenniferplusplus

@atax1a Not to my knowledge. Someone should, but the same situation that made him so vulnerable in the first place also makes that hard to do.

Jenniferplusplus

I can't tell you how many times I've said or heard someone say, as professional software developers, that we were waiting on a feature or bug fix in some open source software.

Just waiting. Because we usually have no choice in the matter. We're actually not allowed to contribute. We can only take, never give, and that's how we end up where we are today.

datarama

@jenniferplusplus ...and everything you contribute to the commons is immediately used by capital to help build its commons-polluting machine.

Matthew Lyon

@jenniferplusplus I ended up forking a golang SQL builder at my previous employer, because my work needed proper CTE support & the library we were using was otherwise abandoned

the chief architect expressed concern: “do we really want to be responsible for maintaining this?”

there’s so much to unpack in that statement

and yet: this place had its own in-house floating point implementation, because it was necessary for the domain

it ended up with this toot: https://hachyderm.io/@mattly/109831551699436514

Jenniferplusplus

@mattly oof. So so much to unpack

Jenniferplusplus

@mattly I can't get over this. It's so messed up that taking a small amount of responsibility for a public good that you were using seemed riskier to them than just allowing it to decay. And it's so messed up that this reaction is neither surprising nor unusual.

Matthew Lyon

@jenniferplusplus I wish I could say that this was perhaps the most messed up thing about my time at that company, but it’s not, not even in the same solar system of messed up

I successfully pushed back with something like: The complexity of what I’ve been tasked with doing has to live somewhere, and it’s sure as hell not going to be in building complex queries via string concatenation

? Offline

@jenniferplusplus Do you think there's a meaningful difference between private companies paying for specific pieces of software that they rely on and governments broadly funding open-source initiatives & infrastructure with things like grant programs?

Jenniferplusplus

@saffronsnail yes, but the difference isn't that big. They both set up a system where maintainence of the commons requires permission. The difference is permission from whom