Cannot resist :)

First off, the discussion seems to have moved away from the stated premise,
as quoted by Eliot, which talks about morality. I will address that part
first.

I could not disagree more with the author's position. He seems a pretty
typical armchair quarterback, not contributing, yet pointing accusatory
fingers at the people who do. More than that, what he is accusing them of
is quite ridiculous: yes, openness and open-source might have been good
(sometimes), but why don't open source developers solve all of humanity's
problems? Well, duh, because that's not why they set out to do. People who
are actually doing something, especially people who are creating something,
need to focus on what they are doing. There are many people who earn a
living as programmers, and clearly not all of them are the creative type,
but, among those contributing to open source projects, I think a
disproportionate number of them are - that's what drives them to
contributing in the first place.
Similarly, while software in general is not quite a science or an art, it
is more so for the creative people who practice it. In that sense, they are
closer to artists or mathematicians or scientists, at least having similar
aspirations/drive. You don't/shouldn't expect mathematicians to solve
humanity's problems, they already contribute a lot, whether they even care
about the contribution aspect or not. Sure, there are exceptions like
Bertrand Russell, who seems to have been a very moral person, but at least
as likely one can find mathematicians closer to popular culture caricatures
of the character, people very awkward at social interaction and much more
removed from society than the average person. Somebody like Grigori
Perelman. Now that would be a funny image - somebody asking Perelman why
doesn't he do more for how mathematics are used, and why mathematicians are
always so focused on mathematics, resulting in a system that sadly neglects
people, And also if he thinks that mathematicians should maybe not publish
their work in the open, they should rather discard openness as an axiom.
Let us also not forget mathematicians of the past - why didn't Abel, who
died young, poor and unrecognized, neglect his moral obligation to stop
nefarious people like the NSA from using the results of his work?
Which brings us nicely to the reward for contributions part, and
acknowledging that most of us are more "normal" people, who would rather
not still live with their mother on her pension, I think we have to
recognize that, among the creative types that I mentioned, especially
artists, we (alongside mathematicians with their NSA jobs) are the lucky
ones. We do find employment, which, even if it does not allow us to fully
pursue our interests, it is at least close enough that it can give us some
satisfaction. We don't have to take jobs as waiters to allow us to do some
programming on the side. But on the whole, we do live in a city of pigs. We
have no use for poets, just like we have no use for pure mathematicians,
why should we programmers be treated any differently? It's true, unlike
poets, the powers that be do need our work, and there are a lot of us, so
theoretically we do have some potential power to influence things. But I
think this is all part of a bigger trend. A lot of jobs are going to
disappear pretty soon, and society will need to find a radical new
solution, hopefully one where we can all pursue our creative drive. Maybe
we can try to influence things in that direction, and I think this kind of
activism is a good thing, but I don't think it has anything to do with open
source, and it is certainly not the open source movement's responsibility

Florin



On Thu, Oct 17, 2019 at 6:14 AM Eliot Miranda <eliot.miranda at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Don Goodman-Wilson’s moral critique of Open Source; essential reading.
>
>
> “What if we look at Open Source values through the lens of moral
> philosophy, by applying Scanlon’s contractualist theory of morality? When
> we do that, I think it becomes pretty clear that we ought to discard
> openness as an axiom, and start thinking about other ways to build software
> collaboratively that do not make us accessory to horrors. We can create
> open communities, better communities, more inclusive communities, without
> Open Source.
>
>
> The Open Source movement has always been focused on code. The result is a
> system that sadly neglects people."
>
> ...
>
> “Here are some candidate principles to guide an ethical conception of
> collaborative development.”
>
> https://don.goodman-wilson.com/posts/open-source-is-broken/
>
> _,,,^..^,,,_ (phone)
>
>
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