The Coming Storm: Geopolitics and PostgreSQL in a Changing World | Hacker News Reader

The Coming Storm: Geopolitics and PostgreSQL in a Changing World

ledgersmbdev.blogspot.com

12 pointseinhverfr10 comments

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Geopolitical boundaries reduce the pool of people and therefore talent.

For an example in politics, larger expanding unions have typically dominated the world.

Roman Empire, Ottoman Empire, British Empire, arguable an "American Empire" spring to mind.

Isolationism typically causes the failure of these unions, cf. modern history "Brexit", USSR, North Korea etc.

The same holds for open source projects or any social endeavour.

Sadly it seems people are unwilling to put aside base tribalism in pursuit of a greater gain because of the fear that Johnny Foreigner may somehow better you by taking your work, isolating it and build on it, so you do it first. This fear is not without justification, isolation can be the start of power transfer and how empires start (USA splitting from the British Empire for example, or the EU/NATO becoming larger, arguably Russia could be attempting this now by changing world order). This policy now extends to our tech, including open source.

The only way to stop this that I can see is if the fear of loss from isolationism is greater (cf. the international space station, for Russia not having the ability to do cheap space research, for the US not be able to bring astronauts home or take up cargo cheap).

So that begs the question, how do you stop politics interfering in open source projects, how do you make the fear of loss of partnership outweigh the risk from Johnny Foreigner of stealing it?

Certainly geopolitical boundaries reduce the pool of people. This has good and bad effects. A major aspect of open source software though is that it ensures that these boundaries can be crossed by labor but not necessarily by capital. I.e. anyone can contribute but sanctions, laws, etc. are more effective at preventing businesses from accessing these markets. This represents a sort of bottom unity that's really powerful.

That is required is a global leadership perspective. One thing I fought for heavily in the PostgreSQL community was to try to have the Code of Conduct Committee be geopolitically and culturally diverse. I would say that any time you can have a geopolitically diverse leadership team, you can figure out how to avoid interference by building a positive leadership culture.

There's no escaping geopolitics and open source is part of it. It would be foolish of China, India, Russia and much of the non-colonized world to rely on american dominated open source/tech/etc.

> then we would risk the possibility of a fork forming around geopolitical lines.

The world's forked.

In the short term, it'll be bad for open source, but over the long term, I think it'll be a net positive as it'll lead to more diversity ( linguistically, culturally, etc ) in the open source ecosystem. The more forks the better.

the beauty of open source is that you can use it without relying on the other for development, but both are enriched by cooperation and sharing.

If a Russian fork of a project reviews changes from an American fork and uses whatever they want but the reverse is not true, then the Russian fork gets ahead. So the incentives stack up for interdependence.

I agree that is a big concern, but laws of some countries could make contributing to some projects a bit dangerous for some people.

For a weak example, old and potential crypto laws in the US and probably other Countries could be a concern for a project. see:

https://www.openbsd.org/crypto.html

> If any non-American cryptographer...

It seems to be hard to draw a fair line with these things.

Yeah that's a real problem. It's also interesting that this puts American contributors at something of a disadvantage.

Shunning community members in the "wrong countries" and refusing military contacts from the "wrong countries" seem like very different questions that could, and in my view should, have different answers.

If nothing else I imagine that accepting a pull request from a student in Iran and entering a business relationship with the Iranian Ministry of Defense have very different legal ramifications.

Well... I guess soon enough every major piece of software is going to get a liberal fork. It's only a matter of time. libhub, anyone?

The illiberal forks copy from the liberal fork but not the other way?

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