I'm going to regret this but I need an ELI5 for the WordPress situation??? I mean sociologically speaking how did it get here
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one thing I'm getting from this is it's a big surprise to a lot of people when "entities" turn out to be owned by a single person/or not following the entity-associated-governance-structures we might imagine for them, which is not really surprising to me actually
Entitavity is a psychological phenomenon that may be worth pondering! aka, we bestow "groupness" and cohesion and internal organization on a lot of things, based on a lot of cues, that may not deserve it
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(yeah it IS a terrible term that no one can spell though, lol! That's part of why I like it)
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One theory that I have always found compelling from more recent psych on this is the uncertainty theory wrt to intergroup cohesion/formation. Basically, just like with the "just world hypothesis," we have a lot of very deep reasons that we want to resolve "group uncertainty." IS something a cohesive group? DO we share a common fate? IS this my ingroup? We actually navigate highly ambiguous group situations a lot, but people show quite a bias to resolve that uncertainty with entitativity
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@[email protected] @[email protected] ooof, the incident at the bottom
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As I work on my book (Psychology of software teams! Stay tuned
), I have been reading DEEP in the science of in-group formation/and all the mechanisms of how we rapidly form, question, and re-form groups, and sides; this is sometimes called "coalitional cognition" (Cikara, 2021) and I think it is so important for understanding how we can create healthier organizations -- far more actionable imho than many of the isolated, individualistic stories we've been telling about "productivity" -
@risottobias @grimalkina That Guy never listens to his lawyers.
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@tess @grimalkina I'm worried about becoming That Guy
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@grimalkina oh uh so this goes back to the history of how "open source" as a term and banner to rally under was invented by Netscape and popularized by ESR in order to be more acceptable to corporations than RMS's "free software", which was more explicitly anti-capitalist though it's not clear that RMS would appreciate being called that
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@grimalkina and the thing to keep in mind is that, although this was a very serious philosophical and practical rift through the foundation of the broader community of people who make software and give it away...
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@grimalkina ... it was almost immediately papered over, both with invisible-hand rhetoric about how companies that release open source are allegedly still doing good for the world, and with euphemistic umbrella terms such as "FOSS" (explicitly including both sides of the rift as if there's no conflict)
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@grimalkina and because the leaders of these movements were not interested in pursuing internal conflict, and also RMS in particular always had a very top-down and abrasive leadership style which has over time resulted in the attrition of anyone with actual ideas in proximity to him...
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@grimalkina ... you will see a lot of people today uncritically believing that all that's necessary for a for-profit corporation to be doing good for the world is for there to be a fig leaf of, oh, the thing is open source
even if it's not really a contribution to the commons in the ways that matter
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@grimalkina in particular, there have been other companies already which seeked to wield hegemonic influence over what we're calling the "heterogenous software ecosystems" consisting of third party stuff that integrates with the central pieces the company publishes
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@grimalkina (we use that term because "app store" is insufficiently general, since many of them are language- or OS-specific package repositories with no money changing hands, or with money as an optional component)
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@grimalkina *sought
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@grimalkina at some point over the last five to ten years, that all started go to hand in hand with this corporate structure where there's a non-profit and a for-profit and the non-profit owns the code or the patents or whatever
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@grimalkina but like the thing to keep in mind is that, until these things blow up into publicized personality conflicts, everyone has just been going along with it... in a normalization of deviance kind of way
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@grimalkina like... the last big blow-up that the community took seriously was with npm, the package repository for javascript, which was always under corporate control, and still is
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@grimalkina and the thing is that, like, people wrote angry essays about it back when that happened, but nobody really did anything that helped. there are alternate build tools but there are no alternate repositories, and nobody really tried to move to ways of working that don't have central points of control. it's the usual programmer fallacy of thinking that building a piece of technology will solve a social problem.
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@grimalkina and the company that owns npm is still doing perfectly fine today
so you can see how the wordpress guy got the message that for all practical purposes, he owns everything and everyone in this supposed commons
