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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@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
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@grimalkina in our view, what's been lacking is any sort of storytelling that looks beyond the moment, that is more than just reactivity... that puts forth a positive world view of how things should work, and ties individual decisions into a self-consistent philosophy
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@grimalkina so that's our analysis. we hope it helps. we hope we at least managed to keep sociology as a core thread in how we explained it, though we know we dipped into technocratic thinking a few times despite our best efforts
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@uberbrady @grimalkina @risottobias we wrote a little bit yesterday about our mental model of what's going on internally for people who you so vividly describe as being "Elon'ed"
https://adhd.irenes.space/@ireneista/statuses/01JA14PYE5MKTQ2S99WHJXP86B -
@grimalkina I didn't have an ELI5 summary. But, if you're asking sociologically how we got here, i think any answer would be incomplete if it didn't discuss the FSF restoring Stallman as chairman after he was previously removed due to sexual harassment and assault allegations.
Free Software Foundation and RMS issue statements on Stallman’s return
Today, Stallman and the FSF board issued joint statements concerning his return.
Ars Technica (arstechnica.com)
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@jenniferplusplus oh, god
