Me: socialism has a lot of schisms and factions, it is one of the reasons I don’t particularly love the label Also me: I am a card-carrying… whatever this is: https://kind.social/@wehpudicabok/112452415198620932
I was introduced last week to the concept of an “accountability sink”; a structural technique for saying “the rules/tools/processes made me do it” and therefore avoiding accountability. They aren’t universally bad but booooy is AI going to create a lot of them in bad places, like (checks notes) killing civilians. https://kolektiva.social/@danmcquillan/112377379849654399
@ntnsndr@mallory bingo. If one presumes that Threads is going to be harmful, the right response is "what weaknesses of the fediverse will allow them to harm the fediverse? how can we fix those weaknesses?" Because (1) they're real weaknesses and (2) others will exploit them.
Gotta admit I found it pretty irritating, in the xz discussion of the last two weeks, that some people declared confidently "you can't pay maintainers". (cc @ehashman)
It isn't *easy* to pay maintainers, but it can be done: at Tidelift, we've been doing it for years. So I figured I'd write up how we do it and what we've learned. And yes, it's a HOWTO. Be glad I also avoided an FAQ ;)
@jenniferplusplus I’m saying that one person, on their own, is a really ill fit for the entire notion of governance and commons, especially when they’re already struggling for time. The richness of the Ostromian commons model comes in part from the interhuman interactions; having those commitments to a void, or to hypothetical future participants, is a lot to ask in practice.
@jenniferplusplus But I am about to jump into four hours of meetings and then two weeks of travel, so want to stress that we’re probably about 95% agreed here.
@jenniferplusplus (loooooots of non-toot length nuance here, to be clear; eg you can conceptualize all of open as several layers of nested/polycentric commons, and we should think a lot harder about treating eg language ecosystems as commons both for governance and economic purposes, especially in the face of AI harvesting of code. But fundamentally individual packages with solo maintainers are difficult to shoehorn into the commons framework.)
@jenniferplusplus I have a lot of thoughts I can’t get out this morning, because time, but the tldr is that Ostromian commons are communally maintained, but the median FOSS project is maintained by one person. So, yes, I’m all for working more on commons governance[1], but it is only tangentially relevant for most open source.
[1] For large projects you can’t pay anyone until the commons governance problems are solved, which is part of why we don’t do big projects very much at Tidelift.
@ehashman@geofft@glyph@eb which isn’t to diminish the very, very real and wide-spread problems in C-land, especially (as you pointed out somewhere) in build tools. That’s a problem we’ve always wanted to tackle but have needed more growth first :/
@ehashman@geofft@glyph@eb that's... not our experience. Plenty of very trackable and nevertheless completely financially unsupported and problematically maintained packages in all the modern stacks.
I feel like a spammer for showing up so many places in the past 24 hours and saying “yo, the thing you say no one has built: we’ve built it, it’s right here, we’re paying maintainers every month”.
Tidelift isn’t perfect but it is real and targeting exactly these kinds of problems.
This text is not something we wrote in a rush this morning to meet the moment. We've had variations on this on our site from day 1. I believed it then and I believe it now.
@geofft@diazona@glyph@eb yup. Or they get hired with the promise that they’ll get 20% time to work on it, and that goes away for reasons (sometimes good, sometimes bad), or…. Etc etc
Programmer turned lawyer and community guy. Current: Tidelift, Creative Commons, OpenET, California HDF, 415/94110, dad.Previously: Wikimedia, Mozilla, Open Source Initiative, GNOME, LegOS, Duke, 305/MIA, more.