In our FOSS movement and the social impact movements that favor the fediverse we value a set of principles we think are essential to improve all the things that need fixing, in order to move to a better world.
Fediverse as no other other online space can be considered a “humane technology field lab”. People care about the features of their app, and the impact it has on fedizens that use it. This focus on the human side, ethics, and externalities is highly laudible and much needed to become the norm everywhere. The only future of mankind is the one where we find equilibrium of our exploitation with what our planet can provide. Holistic sustainability.
But do we take all the externalities into account fairly? Or are we fooling ourselves that app-centric humane tech focus is enough. We aren’t able to collaborate at scale in our grassroots environment, as Big Industry™ under hypercapitalism is able to do. Yet we do work in public and give all our innovation away, also to the bad actors. Is that responsible? Are we really creating “humane technology” then?
Are we able to control what we create, as we introduce it into society in real-time?
Will our work remains commons based, for the people by the people? Or won’t we be able to avoid corporate capture of our tech followed by ‘business as usual’? Maybe the way we work together now is the best we can muster. But who is pondering if that is the case, and looking into better ways to work ethical and responsible in large-scale grassroots commons that keep sustainable technology ecosystems afloat?
Due to a bug in the #Discourse#ActivityPub plugin the image is included twice and with the wrong alt-text (the one that auto-generated on image upload).
The #ALT4you alt-text is the exact text of my toot at this location:
Around 1975 Abdul Qadeer Khan, a Pakistani spy, managed to steal nuclear secrets from the highly secure uranium enrichment plant Urenco in the Netherlands. This led to nuclear proliferation and Pakistan having the nuclear bomb.
The layers of security at Urenco could not avoid this from happening.
Now..
Are we in #FOSS enriching uranium fully out in the open in how we develop the decentralized #SocialWeb? Or are we reasonably #secure?
My ethics duties done for the day. It is not a popular subject anyway.
This is a fundamentally mistaken assumption. Throwing money around allows corporations to control the workday activity of more developers, which allows them to pump out polished product faster. But they are worse at collaboration than grassroots tech, not better. Which is why the vast majority of their successes are acquired, not generated in-house.
Everything they depend on for interop (the net, the web, hardware standards from electric sockets to USB) outside their vertically-integrated silos is created by engineers collaborating as public interest professionals (facilitated by standards bodies they establish for the purpose), not as loyal lackeys of Company X.
Exactly! Even in this highly securable situation, where state-level actors were highly motivated to prevent leaks, this information still got out. It’s almost like "information wants to be free "(1). It’s ludicrous to think we could keep anything important secret for long, in a loose network of people collaborating on software and protocols. Where most of us are only known by @handles that could be operated by anyone, because “on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” (1).
(1) These old hacker sayings have become cliches because they each express a grain of hard-won truth, tested and proven in practice again and again.
Corporations do not need to collaborate at scale with other corporations. Take as example React and GraphQL technologies whose ecosystems are vastly larger than the fedi community, and are run by a single enterprise. There are many more such examples.
Most open standards we have were created with a bunch of members in the standards groups on various corporate payrolls, representing the interests of their employers while writing the specs. SocialCG is one of the few exceptions to that.
The highly secure environment had a break-in, but at least it didn’t supply the technology to about anyone, if it had operated fully out in the open without security in place. In our fedi grassroots dev process we have no protection, and any corporation deciding to run a React/GraphQL-like development portal with money behind it, can quickly offer such an intuitive DX that their approach will be where the dev community flocks to.
This example undermines your arguments. Both React and GraphQL have huge numbers of companies using them, many of which contribute back to the codebase. But they only have a developer ecosystem outside their corporate silo because they released their software under a free license.
… despite the role of the corporation, not because of it. No amount of money could force anyone outside the company to care about their software if it didn’t prove useful to a wider community. Who have the option to fork it out from under that company if they agree they need better stewardship option. For examples, see the forking of OpenOffice after Oracle acquired it along with Sun, creating LibreOffice and the Document Foundation. Or the fork of the Koha community away from the control of LibLime.
I doesn’t undermine it. Only one megacorporation needed to create enough weight and uphold HUGE ecosystems.
Meta has a huge ecosystem and which includes many other businesses, yes. Ecosystems at such size provide huge network effects, and many parties provide value-added products and services, etc. Meta has a vested interest to not break this ecosystem, but at the same time they also are in control of the ecosystem and in particular its evolution. React has 1700 contributors, but only a handful of big contributors, all Meta employees. There’s a great lightweight fork, called Preact, which is popular. But Preact does not have the ecosystem, and must stay in lock-step with React, or lose most of its attraction. Meta decides on the design and specs, and that gives them unfair corporate competitive advantage.
Another example, more in an open standards setting is Google, with Chromium and its participation in the WhatWG with other players of the browser oligopoly. And in yet another areas we see them pushing Android, where Apple does (more proprietary) iOS lock-in dance.
