The Future of Open Source: On Imperialism and Idealism
datagubbe.se
datagubbe.se
This mix of ideological and corporate backing may make Linux and certain similar projects seem "too big to fail", but the only reason Russia, China and India (and indeed certain western corporations) hasn't completely ignored all or parts of the GNU Public License is because its rise in popularity coincides with the world turning unipolar: the Linux kernel was released in 1991, the same year the Soviet Union toppled over and fell apart.
This way of writing as if Russia, China and India are undifferentiated monoliths, often while affording "The West" the courtesy of being comprised of individuals, is really grating.
These countries also consist of individuals, and these people also create and contribute to FOSS. Perhaps to a lesser extent, due to cultural and economic reasons (as the author speculates), but they contribute nonetheless.
The author seems to ignore one of the most practical reasons for contributing to FOSS (and the argument behind the Open Source movement when it broke from Free Software). It's often cheaper and simpler to play ball (i.e. contribute back instead of maintaining your own patches in perpetuity).
I do buy the argument to some extent that American global dominance is helpful in enforcing free software licenses overseas, but it's definitely not the full picture and there will always be people contributing to FOSS regardless of whether there's a state that enforces licenses.
we probably shouldn't hold our breath waiting for anything substantial to show up in any FOSS repository from sanctioned countries
Nginx is Russian. I would call that pretty substantial.
The term you're looking for is "cultural racism" (or sometimes "neo-racism" or "modern racism"). As an aside, I dislike all those variants, and would prefer something like "culturism" or the perfectly applicable terms " nationalism, "xenophobia", and "mixophobia" (or, to mention a common highly specific form, "islamophobia").
On the other hand, "cultural racism" seems like an appropriate term when a highly diverse (nationally, linguistically, ethnically, culturally, etc.) group such as "Muslims" gets racialized into a prejudicial stereotype.
Anyway, it is basically essentialism applied to culture instead of race: the ideas and arguments of both are deeply tangled, with cultural arguments often used as proxies for racial ones where the latter would be rejected out of hand. For example you see it pop up in demands that immigrants assimilate, or claims that immigrants don't (or won't) assimilate used as justification for discrimination. It can also appear as a mixophobic demand for cultural segregation. Or, as here, cultural differences apparently used as a veiled form of nationalism.
As of China, so far it shows little ability to lead in the open source world, too little compared to the size of the industry in China in any case. I'm not going to make up theories on whether it is because of its isolationist culture, or lack of political freedom or just a temporary thing, but as of now, I don't see any risks of hostile takeover of open source by dictatorships. They will use it of course, regardless of whether we allow them to, but that is kind of the idea behind open source, isn't it?
1. IP requires enforcement and commonly agreed upon principles. In a global economy different states will have different rules. We all know that there are rogue states and entities out there who may choose not to enforce IP rules. Furthermore IP enforcement requires money. Even in countries where rule of law is the norm, it is often the case where companies making more money have more power to bend the rules. Hence, using IP as a business model is unsustainable.
2. IP in its nature is not proprietary. Two people can arrive at the same conclusion therefore you can't actually "hide" any information successfully.
I am not arguing that copyright as exists now is some universal good. It just dont seem failed to me at all. It generates a lot of money. Countries that ostensibly dont respect it seem to be mostly poor - their people dont have money to pay much in the first place.
Not to say that most people live in countries where copyright laws are either ignored altogether or enforced selectively.
I would agree that current IP protections are too extensive - I would be fine if copyright protection lasted just 20 years or if it required payment of yearly fees after a certain period - but its complete absence would upend a lot of the creative industry. Writing books is at least cheap, so we would still have hobbyist authors; but making a movie can be darn expensive. Who would invest into a next Lord of the Rings adaptation without IP?
Well, yeah, maybe Musk would. But then you end up with the old patronage system, where artists need to be on good terms with the ultra-rich.
Arguably, all current commercially unsuccessful authors (and there are a lot of them) are hobbyists as well.
> but making a movie can be darn expensive. Who would invest into a next Lord of the Rings adaptation without IP?
> Well, yeah, maybe Musk would. But then you end up with the old patronage system, where artists need to be on good terms with the ultra-rich.
I'm reasonably certain that part of the gap would be filled by crowdfunding (or the Street Performer Protocol), but we've already seen how that works best for creators that are already successful and have a following (or at least some sort of platform) or who have zeroed in on a previously unidentified and unserved niche. It doesn't work so well for "midlist" creators working within established genres.
Distributed patronage (eg. Patreon) is another option that can in theory work for the latter, though I don't think there have been all that many success stories there. Most Patreons seem to fund the creator's coffee budget, and not much more.
Even the theoretically pure anti-establishment shared-living hacker-squatter self-reliant punk that few open source contributors aspire to be are benefiting greatly from living in developed countries.
Ignoring the absurdity of relaying on hugely complex public infrastructure to access the internet (Sea floor cables, satellites, cell towers, etc) the abundance of food, healthcare, transportation, supply chains, education, and personal safety practically unprecedented in any other era have birthed and supports these anarchist lone wolves.
He talks about another level of reliance on power structures that those that want to break these power structures ignore and will ultimately lead to their extinction if gone.
I do not know if the new "World Order" is going to look like he predicts, but if it does I think it will indeed spell the doom to Open Source like he predicts.
As the saying goes: Hard times make strong men.
Strong men make good times.
Good times make weak men.
And weak men make hard times.
How do we explain the phenomenon of a culture which holds individual property rights in high esteem giving rise to a movement fundamentally opposed to the notion of intellectual property altogether? The fact that the output of the latter has been immensely useful to the former explains the continued existence of the free software movement, but it does not account for its emergence.
Is it coincidental or a necessary precondition that individual rights be enshrined in law and respected by custom for miracles like free software to happen? I'm leaning toward option two, especially given the author's salient point regarding the recent actions of countries that do not value individual rights and rule of law. I would venture to guess that the vast majority of free software contributors living in such places are politically at odds with their respective governments, whether they feel at liberty to admit it or not.
The world needs lean and simple, but able to do a good enough job, open source software, and that include the SDKs with their computer languages (excluding de-facto c++/java/c#/etc with their compilers).
Toxic companies don't need a copy-left licence to do vendor-lockin with open source software: they just need to write non-pertinent, grotesquely and absurdely complex and massive open source software which excluds all alternatives which would require much less developement resources.
This is exactly what's happening with google(blink/geeko) and apple(webkit) based browsers. Bonus: it mecanically creates a huge amount of planned obsolescence, brain-washed web devs and scammers are in their paradise.
There is no other way than technical regulation to protect the people against this.
One of the last bastions was SUSE. That moved it headquarter to Luxembourg, did IPO and pays million bonus to the management team https://ir.suse.com/download/companies/58206a/Annual%20Repor... so, IMO it's full corporate.
Anyways its because i just had a thought like Orwells -- the right thing to do is to have the prestige of Harvard without any of the fame
Or- maybe open source isnt really the achievement here.. after all finland is and was the borderlands of the west. Rather, Linus laid unassailable foundations for the ultimate OS and he kept it FO, like a real life Hari Seldon
Tell me a single proprietary web server and reverse proxy out there that beats Nginx, Traefik, HAproxy, etc.
What about databases? Is Oracle, or B2, measurably better than MySQL, PostgreSQL?
Let's go down to a personal anecdote. The other day I was sent a DOCX with a form to fill out. I tried it on Office365's Word. Some of the form fields I couldn't change to the correct answer. I opened the same file on LibreOffice and voilà, in 10 minutes I had filled out and sent the form.
Now, you talked about Linus... What about git? What proprietary SCM software is better than it?
Browsers. Is Edge better than Chrome or Firefox? Was Internet Explorer? Is Safari?
I could go on...
Edit: s/OpenOffice/LibreOffice/
hah - thx for this ref
"The two prequels—Prelude to Foundation and Forward the Foundation—describe Seldon's life in considerable detail. "
Well, the Ivies hold more status and better social connections because they're where the people in power went, but I'm not convinced that means the actual quality of education necessarily has to be worse. I for instance went to a public university which is commonly hailed as the world's best university (or "one of the best" depending who you ask...) for journalism. The closest Ivy competitor is maybe Columbia or Brown. Admittedly the electives were garbage, but the journalism education really was top-notch.
This worldview was an entertainable perspective in the preconnected era, in the age of standalone software. But the world today runs in an interconnected mode, is based on Services-as-a-Software-Substitute (SaaSS). People & nations dont respect the terms of service & licenses because they're in obesiance to the Empire, they do it because they just want in on, want access to the great vast online places that will kick em out of if they start mucking with the terms of service. Companys operate in cyberspaces lightly regulated supranational domain, and states have minimal leverage they can apply to force behavior upon greater cyberspace. Notably, EU is very much at the frontier of layering in steep requirements & regulations, setting an example for the rest of the world that any state has the freedom to make demands & push around online entities in any way the state pleases; somewhat ironic given what a boon to liberty & possibility & enablememt the open framework of cyberspace has created.
Viewing the cyberspace we have as a legal framework the rest of the world accepts is false. The internet is a dumb pipe, is connectivity. Anything in the way of connectivity is quite literally anti-internet. No nation or state may have their own take, their own legalistic roadblocks that are internet: they winniw down the whole to make a lesser thing below the internet with their impositions. The privilege of being interconnected to the global whole comes with a realizatuon that you are connecting to other places that wont follow your rules. Contrary to what the EU has insisted upon for itself.
Putting aside the absoluteness lf Cyberspace supranationalism, I dont see the clash & challenge this article describes as real. The modern software world revolves around software running deep inside data centers, not on our personal computers. Other mations simply dont have the mainframes in their jurisdiction to boss around or use force against, so rebuffing their business is merely an impact on the bottom line. The legalistic modes are self enforcing, the terms of service dont need marshals to be enforced: we simply turn off access to violators, cancel their accounts. There has not been an opportunity for non-Western nations to misbehave or flout the supranational cyberspace standards, because the new things we want to use are online services, or deeply integrated with services. This isnt imperialism or legalism, it's just a matter of were the desireable software runs & what possibilities remain to those not running the data centers.
Changing topics again, peering at my crystal ball, one of the things i really enjoyed about this article was itcs setup & it's exploration of the mature of open source. Drawing my own projections, I think the value based western mode ultimately shines through. Individual empowermemt & embracing possibility, idealistic hacking, & the whole panolopy of values that embrace letting people get good, letting them explore- it creates positive vibrancy, is how energy & creativity sustain & maintain.
In fact, the Invesco QQQ Trust Series I fund, which tracks the top 100 nonfinancial public domestic and international corporations in the NASDAQ, is heavily dominated by tech. Of the top 10 holdings, 9/10 are tech companies, with the remainder being Costco. In the information economy, these companies have taken the place of the steel, oil, and railroad giants of the 20th century. Instead of Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Vanderbilt, we have had Jobs, Page, Zuckerberg, and others. Of course this is a rotating cast, but the idea is the same.
So yes, accessing interconnectivity via the internet is more important to Europeans than the corrupted legislation of the US, but it's not like they don't have their own problems. Especially in regards to energy and the current conflict in Eastern Europe. The petrodollar is what props up the US economy, if Western Europe buys energy in anything other than US dollars, then our government cannot continue vigorously printing money without Weimar levels of inflation. That is really where imperialism comes into play, it props up the economy of Western Europe.
I agree that the ideas of exploration, self-education, and the drive of the individual is important to the Western and especially American tradition of technological innovation. In terms of individual empowerment, we also have the ability to delete social media accounts, to boycott companies like Amazon, and to use alternative search engines. In many cases, it is not a preference but a necessity to use an engine besides Google to sift through SEO optimized content and find the information I'm looking for.
This is in response to you and this article, because the narrative of Western decline is peddled so enthusiastically that it brings itself under scrutiny. If it was such a self-evident truth, then why does it have to be constantly pushed on us via mass media, via Wall Street billionaires, via foreign propagandists? Because it is a lie, it is a lie that serves the international ruling class, a global alliance of ultra wealthy oligarchs that are betting against their own people.
Yes, this has little to do with open source, but honestly this article has little to do with open source. It attempts to paint a historical narrative, which is the bread and butter of historically effective propaganda. To touch on this topic as this article has, open source and Linux in particular is great for circumventing tech monopolies like Microsoft and gaining full control and privacy over a machine that you own outright.
Similarly, boycotting tech giants, Amazon included, improves individual quality of life as well as living conditions for the entire nation. That is individual empowerment, speaking truth to power and making conscience decisions with your attention and consumption. Unless another Teddy Roosevelt comes along to bust up our tech monopolies and reign in the political influence of extreme wealth, this is really our only recourse to turn the tides and bring back real innovation.
That is what we need, real innovation, not frantic bids to explore and capture "data as oil" drilling sites. Innovation triumphs over brute force and human subjugation every time. That's what we need not just to protect our livelihoods, but to push the progress of humanity forward. Hewlett Packard, the birthplace of Silicon Valley, was not built on brainstorming ways to addict people to content aggregators and harvest their data.
It was bold ideas, real intellectual labor and not just psychological exploitation. Above all, technological innovation that contributed to the overall lives of mankind as a whole. It wasn't about exploiting, controlling, taking, but exploring, building, and contributing. That's the core idea of open source, passion and freedom. This is really at the core of the hacker ethos, freedom for the sake of freedom and innovation for the sake of wonder. The end result is a more free and open society. At the intersection of capital, the end result is an economy based on improvement and not exploitation. One is sustainable, the other is not.
really now? the entire world?
> People & nations dont respect the terms of service & licenses because they're in obesiance to the Empire, they do it because they just want in on, want access to the great vast online places that will kick em out of if they start mucking with the terms of service.
you have discovered the old ways; many Empires of old operated exactly this way, with speech, coin, writ of passage, conscription and income stability, all checked at the borders, just in meat-space time, not nand-gate time.
> Viewing the cyberspace we have as a legal framework the rest of the world accepts is false.
wait, I have a catchy name for your insights "code is law." Well the "code" is new, not the "law".. your timer frame of reference only sees in seconds it seems. Law is quite old, and works socially in ways you are describing, as if only computer networks do that!
> Companys operate in cyberspaces lightly regulated supranational domain, and states have minimal leverage they can apply to force behavior upon greater cyberspace.
tensions between merchants (with ships post-1500) and stationary govt, are not new! West coast of Europe, top to bottom, check it out yourself.
> The privilege of being interconnected to the global whole comes with a realizatuon that you are connecting to other places that wont follow your rules. Contrary to what the EU has insisted upon for itself.
don't get me wrong, I appreciate this insightful rant, BUT. you are describing the "outpost" experience.. who is interacting with whom? via what format or forum? most people do not sit at the edges of civilization.
> Other mations simply dont have the mainframes in their jurisdiction to boss around or use force against, so rebuffing their business is merely an impact on the bottom line.
yes, cloud computing anxiety, agree this is serious among people who take power seriously. Not everyone is an artist or decadent Bohemian.
> The legalistic modes are self enforcing, the terms of service dont need marshals to be enforced: we simply turn off access to violators, cancel their accounts.
"we" LOL .. you must be pretty comfy to think yourself as immutable part of "we." Get ready, life may have some unpleasant surprises for you in the "free" world!
> This isnt imperialism or legalism, it's just ..
LOL - absolute control of vital access for others is not a mean scary arm of industrial-capitalistic-militarianism, its a big cuddly services machine, with instantly strict rules, thats all! not!
Did they? I mean it in both meanings. Did they ever enforced copyright and piracy laws in the first place? And did they relaxed what laws they have last two months and did it changed anything?
Edit: Instead of downvoted me, I would really preferred if someone argued back here. Ideally by showing me source where they learned about relaxed copyright laws. Or any kind of analysis that shows these were taken somehow seriously in Russia.