So, these takes that Mullenweg is threatening the foss movement itself....

Jenniferplusplus

So, these takes that Mullenweg is threatening the foss movement itself.... Did people have the same assessment when Oracle tried to extort java shops? Or, I dunno, when Musk set fire to twitter?

Like, it's not that I disagree, exactly. It just feels overblown. It's a serious enough problem without dragging in all of open source as a potential casualty.

Ashe Dryden

@jenniferplusplus I think it’s more of a sign of the times - the power exercise has become a siren song to these guys and it threatens the community-driven nature of OSS

Jenniferplusplus

I think if we're going to extrapolate from word press to some kind of larger point, that point should be governance.

It really REALLY should be the role of our existing FOSS institutions to guide and support project governance within the ecosystem. They should have templates, and blog posts, and conference talks, and rubrics for identifying and evaluating the condition of project governance.

But then they'd have to apply it to themselves, and they really really don't want to do that.

Jenniferplusplus

The risk to wordpress has been present for some time. It was identifiable. The lesson I would like to learn from this shit show is how to identify and react to governance risk like this in the future.

Like, a year from now, I want to see governance health scores on github projects, in the same way it exposes licenses. And guides for how to improve it. And training. And grants for training. And grants for doing governance work, for that matter.

Marco Rogers

@jenniferplusplus I hear you. I largely agree. As much as people love to talk about community, they are hard wired to want one person in charge so they don't have to worry about it. One person to admire. One person to be mad at. Open source has consistently created hierarchies of control, because that's what let's people get back to figuring out to take advantage of the free shit.

Jenniferplusplus

@polotek I hesitate to attribute that to something hard wired in humans. There are plenty of examples of people doing things in other ways, for long periods of time. But yeah, in this time we are deeply trained and acclimated to hierarchies.

Jenniferplusplus

@Ashedryden that is a risk, yes. But it's not new, and there's not any real way it could spread beyond the things Matt mullenweg owns. It could be highlighting similar risks in other projects, but that's actually a good thing.

Marco Rogers

@jenniferplusplus sorry. I don't mean to invoke a generalized "human nature" argument. I'm talking about the demonstrated culture of open source. I do think that we see people create and maintain hierarchies more often than not. Even when they swear that's not what they want. But it's bad enough without being overstated.

jornucopia

@jenniferplusplus I like the idea in spirit, but the idea of making Microsoft the arbiter of what constitutes good open source governance doesn’t sit well with me

Jenniferplusplus

@jordan I wouldn't make them the arbiter of governance, any more than indexing license choices makes them the arbiter of licensing.

Paul Cantrell

@polotek @jenniferplusplus
I’m willing to go so far as to say that it’s one among many things whose potential is present in hard-wired human nature, and we need to pay a lot more attention to which parts of our human selves we’re cultivating in a given context. Which of course is a thought deeply entangled with governance, per Jennifer’s larger point.

Clifford Adams

@polotek @jenniferplusplus
I'd say that a good first step would be simply clarifying the governance that exists within FOSS projects. For many small projects a single "dictator" model may work well, with the (currently unwritten) rule that forks should change the name enough to avoid confusion with the original project. Part of the "WordPress" problem seems to be that people believed it was this way (because "open source"), when there were actually trademarks and legal restrictions.
1/x

Clifford Adams

@polotek @jenniferplusplus
Some legal restrictions are a good, even necessary thing for large projects--imagine if any random person could trademark the "Python" programming language. With Jennifer's proposal it could be clear when a project is changing governance as it grows, and avoid unpleasant surprises later.
2/2

Marco Rogers

@wikicliff @jenniferplusplus all of these things require people to do actual work. It's not for lack of knowing what to do. It's lack of people showing up to make sure it happens. Everybody is hoping somebody else will do it for them. And in this case, everyone was happy to leave it to Matt and assume he was doing something reasonable.

Jenniferplusplus

That was timely

The Stallman report

Comprehensive report detailing Richard Stallman's political program in defense of sexual violence, allegations of misconduct, and the misconduct of the Free Software Foundation

The Stallman report (stallman-report.org)

This was an awkward thread to write, because the FSF is the obvious party that *should* be providing the kind of support and guidance the foss movement needs. We need responsible stewards. We need tools to perform that stewardship. And we need to learn to recognize it's absence. The FSF should have built those things. But instead they've rejected the premise that stewardship even exists, and they've frozen the movement in the 1990s.

mcc

@jenniferplusplus I think it's ok to pay especial attention here because one of the grounds on which some of us have been selling open source is that it *averts* problems like this. "You can always just fork it" and so on. We're now obligated to prove that true, I think.

If someone tried to argue this is a unique problem with open source well no, that's wrong, if anything open source just makes the problem more plain because the dynamics aren't hidden inside a corporation—

mcc

@jenniferplusplus —but a softer statement like "does this threaten open source as a movement" well maybe it does!, because if freedom from the effects of bad governance is an advantage of open source and that *evaporates*, then it raises the question of whether open source can compete with commercial software on its remaining merits.

Overall I think it makes more sense to focus on the WP case than the Oracle/Twitter case, because the WP case we have the power to change (because of open source)

mcc

@jenniferplusplus this said, I *have* been both avoiding Oracle for years and pointing at cases like Oracle for years to argue "this is why you cannot trust any software unless it is open source"

Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse

@jenniferplusplus "on github"?? rotflbtc

Boo Ramsey 🧛🏻‍♂️🧟‍♂️👻🎃

@jenniferplusplus @jordan Speaking of, I think the organizations that exist who could/should provide these resources (e.g., OSI, Software Freedom Conservancy, FSF, etc.) largely see themselves only as arbiters (or, rather, stewards) of licensing.

The Linux Foundation appears to go beyond licensing support to provide training and continuity for its member projects.