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   Glyph (glyph@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 18-Jan-2025 04:46:21 JST Glyph

   re: FOSDEM, I think a robust discussion of effective forms of protest is great, but after this is over and Dorsey’s talk has been evacuated due to a fire alarm, the even harder and more important conversation that we as a community are also not really prepared to have is “why does a fascist grifter billionaire like ‘free’ software so much that he sponsored our flagship conference and thinks he will be well-received by speaking at it”

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     Ax=b (melissawm@pynews.com.br)'s status on Saturday, 18-Jan-2025 08:56:01 JST Ax=b

     in reply to

     @glyph 💯💯

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     Glyph (glyph@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 18-Jan-2025 09:02:05 JST Glyph

     in reply to

     Deontological ethics are great but can we have a little consequentialism, as a treat?

     Ax=b repeated this.
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     Glyph (glyph@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 18-Jan-2025 09:02:05 JST Glyph

     in reply to

     By all means the FOSDEM attendees should throw rocks at Dorsey until he leaves and work to fire the leadership that took his money and allowed this talk to happen. But longer term, somehow we need to figure out a way to be a movement that is appealing to kids learning to code and activists empowering their communities and NOT personally interesting to billionaires because it aligns with and furthers their goals.

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     Glyph (glyph@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 18-Jan-2025 09:02:06 JST Glyph

     in reply to

     Stallman wrote “the right to read” and then spent decades volunteering to build billions of dollars worth of infrastructure to make it possible for a company to do this — https://ncac.org/news/blog/high-school-student-sues-amazon-for-deleting-1984-from-kindle — all the while screaming invective at anyone who dared to criticize his priorities or motives. I don’t think the community has really reckoned with that. I am still struggling to.

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     Glyph (glyph@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 18-Jan-2025 09:02:06 JST Glyph

     in reply to

     It’s not like this is a surprise either. The OSD specifically contemplates the possibility of this type of abuse, and worse, and decides that systemically it’s good, actually, because in a deontological framing any other set of licensing rules could create worse problems for the movement. Even worse: I agree. I still think this is correct and “ethical source” licensing is a dead end. But we can’t stop the conversation there! “Licenses can’t solve ethics, so, I guess we can’t have ethics”

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     Glyph (glyph@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 18-Jan-2025 11:37:58 JST Glyph

     in reply to

     I think that one of the major things to do here is actually to focus on applications, to talk to users, to do usability studies, to focus on documentation, to make sure everything scales *down*, to put scaled-down "runs on a busted 5-year-old laptop" environments a gating requirement within CI. This doesn't mean the infra people (like myself) should stop doing infra, but we need to find ways to explicitly serve audiences *not* doing enterprise-scale cloud deployments.

     Blaise Pabón - controlpl4n3 repeated this.
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     Glyph (glyph@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 18-Jan-2025 11:37:58 JST Glyph

     in reply to

     One salient cultural attribute of "free software" that you may notice this calls into question is one's affect with respect to windows support. It seems like "windows support" is doing free work for Microsoft, supporting a proprietary platform rather than getting users to install Linux or whatever, but in practice, projects that support Windows are projects that individuals without full control of their technology stack can run, but Linux-only means "server-only" for a huge majority of people.

     Blaise Pabón - controlpl4n3 repeated this.
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     Glyph (glyph@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 18-Jan-2025 11:37:59 JST Glyph

     in reply to

     I suppose I should have some kind of solution-shaped conclusion to this thread, so here goes. My own contribution here is not that policy & governance solutions are actually stopgaps, and we need to do something else. To the extent that policy & governance — i.e. "politics" — can solve this, it's just regular old politics to do things like institute a wealth tax. We should do that, of course, but it is, as the kids these days say, a "big lift".

     But not everything has to be policy.

     Blaise Pabón - controlpl4n3 repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Matt Campbell (matt@toot.cafe)'s status on Saturday, 18-Jan-2025 11:39:14 JST Matt Campbell

     in reply to

     @glyph

     > individuals without full control of their technology stack

     And note that this doesn't just mean people who can't install Linux because, for example, they're sharing a computer, but also people who can't practically use Linux because free software hasn't solved everything yet. I think it's safe to say that a lot of blind people, for instance, put up with Windows because, in some ways, it's the least bad platform with regard to accessibility.

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     André Polykanine (menelion@dragonscave.space)'s status on Saturday, 18-Jan-2025 11:50:40 JST André Polykanine

     in reply to

     @glyph That's because most of users, I mean, the vast majority of users won't install Linux to use given software. I see "no Windows support", I don't install, sorry not sorry. I can justify my choice because I'm blind and I need accessibility (pretty niche thing, yeah?), but many other people have other justifications. That's why you are basically forced to, yes, support a proprietary platform. To defend Microsoft, they open-sourced lots of stuff recently, including the whole .NET ecosystem.