On Monday, 29 July 2024 08:18:50 CEST Carsten Agger wrote: > > It's a good and thought-provoking read: > > https://is.efeefe.me/stuff/open-for-all
Indeed. Here's a part which is quite insightful: "An example of competitiveness-oriented questionable practice coming from the digital world that is lately making the rounds on the SDGs and the like are hackathons. The way they are usually structured can be critically interpreted as exploitative and ideologically biased towards market-oriented results. When you invite a lot of tech-oriented young people to spend 48 or 72 hours competing to solve a problem they don't fully understand, what you frequently end up with is a couple of unfeasible or irrelevant ideas transformed into pitch decks to attract startup funding. Most projects that win hackathon competitions are soon left aside due to the lack of support, maintenance and more profound engagement with real communities. Not to mention the aspect of exploiting cheap young labour instead of properly investing on long-term and deeply thought of solutions." I have seen the more general phenomenon present itself repeatedly over the last couple of decades: getting people, particularly younger people and newcomers, to work for free (or "pizza and beer") to "help out", knowing that they have already been coached by society to hustle for opportunities. While it might be claimed that everyone should show some initiative, what usually isn't mentioned or properly acknowledged is that the cause or initiative being "helped out" is often well-resourced, maybe even a product at a sizeable company, or a pursuit of people who can afford to tinker with it in their free time. Of course, the "open source" label was arguably coined to normalise informal employment and various other practices of exploitative capitalism by sweeping aside all the apparently "socialist" aspects of Free Software. But even the FSF cultivates the practice of "volunteers needed", so entrenched are those practices and the adherence to a particular economic and social model even among supposedly progressive organisations. This was already quoted, but worth quoting again: "Many innovative and committed people have dropped out because it became impossible to counter proprietary for-profit corporations and still make a decent living. Some of the best among us were recruited by the very corporations we used to challenge and counter. And I believe that process is irreversible." Particularly during the time when software patents were being imposed on the industry, it became quite clear that while we were having to put in extra hours to counter the harmful "innovation" propaganda from the pro-patent lobby, on the other side were a bunch of people in corporations like Apple, Microsoft, IBM, and so on, all drawing a nice salary and presumably going home every evening and relaxing, knowing full well that they could spend the next working day pounding software freedom against the ropes and exhausting its advocates and practitioners, with a nice paycheque waiting every month from a grateful company profiting from their advocacy. And, as the quote indicates, it became too tempting for some people to resist the draw of that money in exchange for their compliance. What disgusts me more, however, is the way that some of those people now pretend that much of the hostility towards Free Software never happened and that their employers have somehow changed in character, anyway, as opposed to being more proficient at managing public perceptions. And worse still is the behaviour of some who not only behave in a toxic fashion towards the rest of the Free Software community, if I may even consider them a member, but who also excuse and even advocate for widespread and unregulated proliferation of even more "disruptive" - read "destructive" - technology such as "AI", "coincidentally" in line with their employer's interests. That is where we are now. Not content with exploiting Free Software as a way of diminishing the economic value of software, they are now gutting the legal framework around software freedom so as to allow unashamed pilfering of other people's work, obliterating its economic value and the viability of an entire profession altogether. There is plenty more that could be said about wasted opportunities for Free Software, but it almost has the significance of a footnote in comparison to the fundamental issues noted above. Paul _______________________________________________ Discussion mailing list -- discussion@lists.fsfe.org To unsubscribe send an email to discussion-le...@lists.fsfe.org This mailing list is covered by the FSFE's Code of Conduct. All participants are kindly asked to be excellent to each other: https://fsfe.org/about/codeofconduct
