@grimalkina Consider this narrative: An author creates some software. A consumer then starts using this software. Author gives gift, consumer receives gift, consumer should be grateful. All rejoice. This (simplistic, wrong) model of open source social relationships is a single gift-giver to gift-recipient relationship, frequently gets described as "gift economy" in the early aughts. The giver-to-recipient relationship is transactional, and ephemeral.
@luis_in_brief@grimalkina I think the love for the "gift economy" model and language is that it spun the subtlety of the bidirectionality of the relationship, where the gift-giver receives some kind of "status" or "honor" but it sort of gave up after vaguely gesturing that some maintainers eventually got good jobs. so yeah it _is_ functionally unidirectional but it is mischaracterized as an equitable exchange
@luis_in_brief@grimalkina (and we don't do that, and instead everyone has a bunch of different, unarticulated, implicit assumptions about how these relationships are supposed to work, and that leads to a lot of bad feelings, and basically I wonder if anyone has done like a serious ethnography before I try to just vibe it out on my blog)
@luis_in_brief@grimalkina (although I could talk all day about how actually, it _is_ bidirectional, but the referents we have for gift cultures in anthropological literature actually explicitly acknowledge status and honor in a bunch of ways that we don't in open source, with literal rituals and ceremonies and whatnot)
@luis_in_brief@grimalkina the edge being the social relationship, and each edge being classifiable as a specific type, with a direction. once you have this graph grammar, you can impose it upon a particular project to ask "is this the role *you* are *trying* to inhabit with respect to *this* person and/or company? is this the role you *are* inhabiting"
@luis_in_brief@grimalkina so, okay, to get back to the question here: the "social relationship" in my thinking is a pair of roles that actors participating in a social fabric may occupy with respect to each other. I am really trying to avoid using the phrase "social graph" because of the connotations, but I am talking about constructing a model of open source that is a graph, and that has explicitly labeled roles for nodes and edges
@luis_in_brief@grimalkina that’s actually my question, really, is the taxonomizing of the relationship types. have there been any in-depth attempts to construct such a typology, or just the same shallow disagreements about entitlement vs. responsibility over and over again?
@powersoffour no worries, any info is better than none here, and these are good references to follow up on later! I wouldn't say no to more detail either, though :)
So, here's a proposition: those of us smart intellectuals in the open source world are constantly saying brave, insightful things like "open source is a social construct" and "software is made of feelings" or whatever, but has anyone sat down to actually *diagram out* the social relationships in the open source ecosystem? To straightforwardly analyze the social construct in concrete terms, rather than abstractly gesturing at its existence and lamenting that nobody pays attention to it?
Fellow #ADHD -ers: if you do time-blocking, do you have any tricks to make it effective? It seems like *sometimes* I can do it, but my attempts break down like:
"I time-blocked, and:"
1/3 "it worked, great, A+" 1/3 "I felt some resistance, forced myself not to switch tasks, and ended up sitting and fretting uselessly" 1/3 "felt some resistance and did some *other* thing, but I was time-blocking in the first place because that first thing really needed to get done and now I'm panicking"
I felt like Apple was playing catch-up in the AI space because they didn't seem to really talk about it in the same way as its other boosters, but thus far their AI offering has been a bunch of vague promises about "getting things done effortlessly" without saying what "things" are, and generating text and images to ambiguous poorly-described ends, the word "ChatGPT" awkwardly disconnected from everything else, then failing to ship anything. Now I think they understand AI better than anyone else
I feel like there's a weird dynamic in Millennial vs. Zoomer discourse because most generations kind of gradually age and get to experience life stages (for lack of a better word) "naturally" whereas Millennials were squeezed on both sides, on one end late to start families and late to own homes (for those of us even lucky enough to do those things) thanks to 2008, and on the other by a pandemic where we entered it as Kids These Days and emerged from it as Olds while it seemed no time had passed
one theme of a lot of my idle musings these days is "the massive amount of trauma that the pandemic and the response to it caused, and our pervasively inadequate response to it, remains weirdly unaddressed even in the most progressive spaces despite how much society at large talked about the disease itself and even how much some people continue to do so. it sure would be neat to treat the unhealthy responses to that trauma somehow"
whereas many Zoomers entered 2020 (after 4 years of deranged Trump chaos on the national political stage) as literal children and are emerging now as adults into 2024 like Troy coming back with the pizza
@mattly my favorite open source licensing fun fact is that that disclaimer of warranty—popularized by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology License—is not actually permitted by the Uniform Commercial Code of Massachusetts. you can't disclaim the implied warranty of merchantability. (Although if you didn't sell it I don't think that the implication attaches…)
@mattly I have so much to quibble with here, but I just have to endorse your key insight that IT IS NOT A SUPPLY CHAIN and the "supply chain" verbiage and assumptions are corrosive and they chafe a little more every time I hear them.
However, you *should* turn on 2FA on Github (and everywhere else) because of the position of social and infrastructural trust that your packages place you into. I really want better language to describe this role that isn't "supply chain" based, but I don't have it
@mcc@jalefkowit this one comes with a stronger commitment that it will be $0 than I have received from other providers that it would remain $N. My previous provider, who shall remain nameless, started at $5/mo and through a series of end-of-life shell-game maneuvers eventually expected me to pay $75/mo for an equivalent service. So I tend to think of these things as price-over-time, and remain able to pivot off to a new provider with continuous local backups and ephemeral containers
he/himYou probably heard about me because I am the founder of the Twisted python networking engine open source project. But I’m also the author and maintainer of several other smaller projects, a writer and public speaker about software and the things software affects (i.e.: everything), and a productivity nerd due to my ADHD. I also post a lot about politics; I’d personally prefer to be apolitical but unfortunately the global rising tide of revanchist fascism is kind of dangerous to ignore.