Koen Hufkens, PhD
Scathing piece on Benevolent Dictators For Life (BDFL) by @pluralistic and how they go off the rails. I can't but think about academia. Getting tenure, defacto, is gunning for being a BDFL.
If a PI finds themself "... beset by people demanding that you confront your privilege, perhaps what's changed isn't those people, but rather the amount of privilege you have."
You can easily find yourself on the wrong side of history.
Koen Hufkens, PhD
@pluralistic @academicchatter The parallels with the worker abuse in big tech industry are no coincidence. I've often joked that doing academic research as a Phd/post-doc is like being a part of a startup without the option to cash out on stock options.
Karl Fogel
@koen_hufkens @pluralistic @academicchatter I've most often heard the phrase "Benevolent Dictator For Life" used to refer to founding leaders of open source software projects, and in that context there is a built-in mitigation of the dangers of a BDFL: freedom to fork.
At this point my best option is to quote myself, so... no point being embarrassed about it I guess! Here we go:
The potential for forks is the reason there are no true dictators in free software projects. This may seem like a surprising claim, considering how common it is to hear someone called the "dictator" (sometimes softened to "benevolent dictator") in a given open source project. But this kind of dictatorship is special, quite different from our conventional understanding of the word. Imagine a ruler whose subjects could copy her entire territory at any time and move to the copy to rule as they see fit. Would not such a ruler govern very differently from one whose subjects were bound to stay under her rule no matter what she did?
Eaton
@kfogel @koen_hufkens @pluralistic @academicchatter On the other hand, FOSS network effects are no less binding than those of (say) a platform like Twitter. If we use words like “dictator” to describe platform owners whose services we aren’t required to use, FOSS BDFLs aren’t fundamentally different. We can leave any time.
Karl Fogel
@eaton @koen_hufkens @pluralistic @academicchatter Actually, I think the network effects in FOSS projects are less binding than those of a platform like Twitter. Forks do happen, and they happen even in major projects with many contributors and a lot of corporate involvement (the modern GCC compiler is actually the ultimately prevailing side of a past fork, for example). The number of participants is far lower -- orders of magnitude lower -- than the number of users in a popular social network, and the influential participants tend to know who each other are and have some degree of familiarity with each others' thinking.
Empirically, FOSS BDFLs are fundamentally different from other kinds of BDFL. Not only can people leave at any time, occasionally they actually do. And the threat that they might do so is ever-present for any FOSS BDFL, thus tempering their behavior.
pettter
@pkraus @koen_hufkens @pluralistic @academicchatter Every day I count myself incredibly lucky to have avoided having shit advisors for my PhD. The stories I've heard from colleagues both on and offline...
Peter Kraus
@koen_hufkens @pluralistic @academicchatter I think doing a PhD is in a class of shit of its own. Even in places where candidates are officially employed, the idea that "it's a training" and therefore [insert abuse] is prevalent.
GNU social JP is a social network, courtesy of GNU social JP管理人. It runs on GNU social, version 2.0.2-dev, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All GNU social JP content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.