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1. Embed this notice
   Glyph (glyph@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Jun-2025 15:45:05 JST Glyph

   after 25 years of a career of trying and mostly failing to make the world a better place with software it is truly soul-wrenchingly exhausting to watch a substantial plurality of the entire software industry decide that actually, it is more lucrative and easier to make the world worse instead

   • Embed this notice
     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 18-Jun-2025 03:19:39 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     @glyph TBF there was a big segment that pretended to be on our side. But too many folks were way too invested in believing that and way too slow to wake up to what I lie it had already become over a decade ago.

     FOSS principles and particularly how they were coopted by Open Source libertarian shitheads played a big role in this. These companies were allowed to pretend to be Not Evil by exploiting free labor and pretending they were honoring our autonomy & working with us rather than working to undermine it.

   • Embed this notice
     Glyph (glyph@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 18-Jun-2025 03:19:40 JST Glyph

     in reply to

     honestly this is more just a commentary on my own slow journey to maturity than of any substantive change in the economics of industry. it's not like Raytheon wasn't here the whole time. it's not like our industry wasn't always funded by defense spending. it was just easier to look away, easier to trivialize the costs, to rationalize the tradeoff, when I was younger

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     Glyph (glyph@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 18-Jun-2025 03:58:00 JST Glyph

     in reply to

     • Rich Felker

     @dalias as someone who spent quite a bit of time living in Boston some years ago, I have some bad news for you about the original FOSS Principlesers

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     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 18-Jun-2025 03:58:00 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     @glyph Oh, the FSF folks were there own kind of messed up, but it wasn't the whole ancap-libertarian thing that the wannabe-hacker who deemed himself the master of our stories brought later.

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     Janneke (janneke@todon.nl)'s status on Wednesday, 18-Jun-2025 20:48:41 JST Janneke

     in reply to

     @glyph don't be too hard on yourself. Many if not most never cared and were and are happy to work on proprietary [surveillance] software for evil big tech.