On Open Source and Free Software

[JohnTrent]

As I introduced in Thread Ideas, this thread focuses on topics such as the demand of Open Source, the Free Software Movement, and the devoted following attracted to this. Because the Thread Ideas page garnered a few replies about the subject, it would be better for it to move over to Gotterdaemmerung.
Recounting the initial pitch, figures like Richard Stallmann had written and contributed to the cause of open source software, with people railing against proprietary software and those companies that have forbidden its userbase to have possession of the code. One can compare this growth of code secrecy to companies like id Software, which released the source code of Doom in the 90s to its fans for their benefit. The impression of those who are aligned with the open source/Free Software Movement is that such secrecy limits the innovation and efficiency, and those individuals who seek to alter the code of proprietary software are Good Samaritans of software.
Despite the movement being of almost exclusive significance to Internet users, the growth of the Internet has not been aiding its popularity; instead, there is a greater and greater obscurity for the movement itself. It simply does not attract anyone new. Without doing a needless summary of some of the replies, it could be because a true widespread adoption of open source is an exploitation of autist efforts. Even if Microsoft and other companies had guaranteed its transition into an open source OS, the demand must rest on the most knowledgeable users without reward.
As said in the initial pitch, there could be a variety of reasons that the open source demand did not take root with a large Internet audience: it could be that the industry has experienced large growths in non-white influence, that are indifferent to this cause. Since the movement spans from an earlier time of software/OS development, those who have only recently arrived and been employed are separate from this history. The lessening of expertise among Internet users could also be an explanation, as the steady quantitative increase of Internet users poses a gradual loss of experience and skill with technology. And, lastly, it could be simply irrelevant compared to larger issues that face people today. "What good would it serve to attend only to this?", one might think.

Hopefully the discussion was not exhausted by the short discussion in the Thread Ideas page. If any of the users there want to revise and add onto their original insights, that could help.

[Guest]

I think the contemporary FSF-descended freedom/privacy-type techies are too LARPy and not real enough. Go on 4chan /biz monero general and you'll see people who are in love with privacy... but how many of them are actually doing something unique and powerful with that? It's sort of like slacktivism, except that some of them definitely are making/popularizing tools that increase the capacities of non-state actors.

You see them obsess over "glowie" schemes to entrap or shut down the fun. You see them talk about the tech itself, about the OPSEC mindset you need for using these sorts of privacy technologies, but how often do they actually use this stuff to do things besides chat and pay artists? I don't think they are even doing/selling much in the way of drugs or developing malware, though a good thing this just speaks to the lack of ambition. Wanting these tools out there because of liberty is a sort of hobby personality trait- one that is rather egoist and cool, but just a surrogate activity. At best, it is a case of mentally lesbian preparation-as-procrastination. If you've worked with lesbians, you'll know what I mean.

The lack of real discussion could be the ol' OPSEC, but even on something like bitchan or lainchan, where they can be actually anonymous without extensive setup and mild fees, they aren't full of ideas. These are reactionaries, libertarians and eccentric progressives who like anonymous money and communication- so it isn't just that they don't want to share how they are making money, etc. If you are making a bunch of anonymous money the first thing you would do is try to find good ways to spend that anonymous money like running bot campaigns on social media via VPS or training LLMs on scraped data. To clarify, I don't think there are more than a handful of idealists making more than beer money or vpn subscription money.

This wouldn't bother me so much if there wasn't clear potential. Not merely stuff that has a hard illegal federal-bureaus-dedicated-to-it-plus-interpol status. Anything currently suppressed by the civil reach of the lawyer class could flourish in a normie-adjacent darknet economy of sufficient scale. You know how every time your health, finances or the law could be related to a topic you only get "this is not advice" articles? Nobody is allowed to safely speak on things that are really important. I also think that the suppression and incompetence in academia and culture goes deeper than 13:50 and IQ denial. It would be the coolest thing ever to fund a sort of layered academic culture on the darknet where anons with solid reputation are payed to become verifiable experts on important subjects or audit translations, citations and statistical meta-analyses. Dunking on the blatant errors of contemporary historians and eventually even checking medical studies for the statistical signatures of fraud. Not to mention the artistic license. Imagine what you could do with a million dollars of anonymous funding and practical immunity from frivolous lawsuits. Limitless freedom from intellectual property restrictions and defamation lawsuits- some of which already plays out in the more autistic parts of the darknet. Crazy reality television shows set up by contractors, operated over text-to-speech, prizes paid out in crypto.

It also appears that "Bazaar"-style decentralisation" is losing cultural appeal. Most users of the Fediverse (a technology built from the ground up to be decentralised) cluster around a centralised group of heavily moderated instances that ban people with more right-wing opinions. This consigns RWers to a tiny-pool of fragmented servers, segregated from a mass audience. The public's increasing hostility to freedoms once taken for granted (most notably the freedom of speech) is a sign that the American zeitgeist of libertarian values is coming to an end. Freedom of all types (including computing freedom) is less and less valued.

I'd argue that the post-freedom trend is exaggerated by the technology. It is quite reasonable for a user to want to filter people they don't want to listen to. The real issue is that the technology makes it easiest to put this authority in the instance manager instead of custom crafting a custom blocklist based on personal preferences and recommendations from your favorite users.

[Mason Hall-McCullough]

Open Source Software isn't dead, in fact it's winning the war when it comes to software used by developers. The average end user is of course using almost entirely proprietary software, but all corporate software is certain to have dependencies on OSS somewhere down the line. The Free Software movement as it once was may no longer be relevant, but the spirit of Free Software is very much alive and relevant in its current form. There's so many powerful packages and utilities you can download online, it's never been this plentiful.

Before everything I'm about to say, don't forget the extent to which global tech companies purposefully behave in ways that are actively hostile, deceptive, and exploitative towards the user, this should be obvious. However, in situations where the average user of some piece of software is intelligent, well-informed, and coordinated, companies struggle to assail user freedoms.

OSS has won when it comes to software used by developers: Most programming toolkits are free software now or have a good free alternative, Linux is a very widely used server OS, support is available for free online, and if you need a license for something it's probably being paid by your employer because they're forcing you to use it for whatever reason. SaaS/Cloud stuff might seem like a counterexample, but I think that has more to do with renting out storage/processing/data which is something separate.

As an example that weirdly demonstrates OSS's victory in this space, consider that even after Microsoft have purchased GitHub and npm for billions of dollars, they stick to passively mining them for data rather than forcefully pushing any kind of exploitative subscription model. Microsoft know better than to try to squeeze money out of GitHub because if they were to try, developers would easily move to a freer competitor (of which many exist). In general, the developer community is also informed and coordinated enough to fork software if it stops serving the interests of the community (see uBlock/uBlock Origin).

And then we have the average end user: technologically illiterate, apathetic, often plain stupid. To a large extent this state of affairs was a consequence of widespread adoption of technology across the young, the old, and the Global South. This may have been inevitable, but I believe that the extent to which developers embraced this change was not inevitable. Many of these evangelistic types see themselves as enlightening the world by bringing software to new users, while they are often in fact making them more mindless. The rhetoric surrounding commonly cited values of accessibility, security and privacy has always felt like an infantilizing and leftist framing of the value that really matters:

• Accessibility - "You're too stupid to figure out how to use this on your own, so we made the text bigger and removed buttons."
  
• Security - "You can't be trusted to not install viruses, so we put up scary-looking warnings if you try to do anything that isn't officially certified (or prevented you from doing it altogether)."
  
• Privacy - "You're too naive, so we need to prevent you from giving out personal information to bad guys."
  

What really matters is user power. Oversimplifying software and preventing users from taking risky actions stops them from learning how computers work, and makes them more vulnerable and powerless in the long term. Of course, some people are just too stupid to ever learn these things, but it's certain that many Gen Z phone addicts never got a chance to know the full extent of their cybernetic birthright due to the convenience of "apps".

Privacy in particular is a value OSS people love to focus on, but it's not the right way of thinking about the issue. Unless you're committing crimes (which normies aren't), there is no reason to actually care on an individual level about companies or governments knowing your IP address or personal information. They aren't stalking you (though some have actually been led to believe this). The damaging aspect of software that doesn't respect "privacy" is the mass transfer of power from individuals to institutions via aggregate data harvesting.

Contrary to the example blanched_chards gave above, my view is that that while progressive diversity ideology is rampant throughout tech including OSS, the damage it can do to systems that are both inhuman and run by volunteers feels oddly limited. The worst that happens is that Mozilla wastes some of their funding on retarded blog posts, and sometimes communities have a twitter moment or unjustly exile good people. Even if packages get deleted, the community will rebuild with someone less unstable in charge. Anyone can still contribute code pseudonymously so long as it works, CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md be damned.

Almost all of the problems relating to consumer OSS (Linux, Firefox et al., some unraped Android version not sure I use a raped one) would be solved in a short time if everyone on the planet magically switched to using them overnight. After a short catch-up period, OSS would genuinely provide a better experience to users with few downsides. All major issues with OSS derive from network effects: not enough dev attention to add features, not enough dev attention to fix bugs, not enough users to create content (social networks), not enough dev attention to create 3rd party software (on a platform e.g. Linux), not enough integration with other software, not big enough for a political voice. Companies bypass some of these issues with money but OSS has to bootstrap everything from zero with no budget.

When the average user is so subhuman, efforts to overthrow proprietary giants with coordination and education are almost hopeless. I don't have any constructive proposals in this regard. I'm disappointed when I see OSS projects aping soy UI design since they're disempowering their own users, and I try not to discourage retards who rice their Linux machine and post desktop screenshots since it's at least positive that they have computers as a hobby. That doesn't mean that OSS is dead, though. I'm still pleased with how much I can freely do with my own computer, it just doesn't seem that this is likely to go mainstream any time soon.

[Guest]

Privacy in particular is a value OSS people love to focus on, but it's not the right way of thinking about the issue. Unless you're committing crimes (which normies aren't), there is no reason to actually care on an individual level about companies or governments knowing your IP address or personal information. They aren't stalking you (though some have actually been led to believe this). The damaging aspect of software that doesn't respect "privacy" is the mass transfer of power from individuals to institutions via aggregate data harvesting.

While your alternative focus on the mass transfer of power is definitely understated, the trite "heckin' gobbermint corpos STALKING ME cute nsa agent WATCHING MY PORN" is a miscommunication of the substantial risks that loss of privacy bring to the normie- although not in normal circumstances. There are men who are dead right now because incompetent debt collectors started a firefight in a car dealership, led there by illegally retailed silent phone pings. Granted, now that LEO don't sell phone pings causally anymore that falls back into the category of "it is a power imbalance involving specific authorities" rather than "it is a tool that anyone in the know with a grudge can abuse". Scott Locklin believes that we will soon see a murder coordinated and carried out using primarily advertiser data on the victim.

It isn't the google/apple ceo stalking you, but if a stalking victim or famous person goes to a typical privacy expert they are going to recommend switching from android/apple to a privacy-respecting open source alternative because you can't trust them not to leak your information. It isn't just that they are powerful, it is that they aren't competent.

[Guest]

The lack of real discussion could be the ol' OPSEC, but even on something like bitchan or lainchan, where they can be actually anonymous without extensive setup and mild fees, they aren't full of ideas.

Wrahs, I helped create BitChan. I was aware of this forum but have never posted before. Someone linked here from BitChan so I thought I'd stop by and say hey.

A small correction: running BC does not require any money.

It's true that the publicly available kiosk is not very active, but there is some activity off the kiosk. One of the interesting things about BC is that no one, not even the devs, can know who is using it. The public kiosk is just one anon who is allowing others to post on their instance.

The whole purpose of creating this software, which has been in development for around 3 years, was to provide an open source, secure anonymous imageboard which cannot be deplatformed or censored by anyone. I won't go into details unless asked, but BC achieves this goal. It cannot be deplatformed because it runs off of bitmessage, an open source, decentralized text communication platform which has been around for over 12 years.

Development of BC will continue regardless of activity, though, because I believe in this software and believe that it will become more important and more useful in the future as censorship continues to worsen.

[dane]

The problem as of late seems to me to be two trends of the foss development. The first one being an emphasis on making distros and software for "the masses" to make it more user-friendly. Essentially making the effort of switching from Windows to Linux easy. But the power of Linux lies in the command-line, in the stability of and easy-to-troobleshoot non-bloated linux experience which is centered around the command-line and requires some level of autism to manage. The bloated linux experience, the ones trying to be for "noobs" can be good as a learning curve to switch, but the general discussion around these distros seem to be that this is the optimal Linux Desktop setup, and non-psychos leave those distros for good because everything breaks all the time.

And then there is the second trend - basically Luke Smith type stuff - which requires learning and effort, but once learned makes Linux not just usable but better than Windows, not just for its "privacy" but also because it delivers on the promises that sold me on Linux on the first place: "This is your system. Do with it what you want, Linux hides nothing." But this line of thought is not something I ever think will really stick with normies. But who cares about them anyways! Linux is not for the masses and it shouldn't be.

(This is not to say development and optimizing shouldn't continue, but that the development shouldn't aim to be Windows-like)

[Guest]

And then there is the second trend - basically Luke Smith type stuff - which requires learning and effort, but once learned makes Linux not just usable but better than Windows, not just for its "privacy" but also because it delivers on the promises that sold me on Linux on the first place: "This is your system. Do with it what you want, Linux hides nothing." But this line of thought is not something I ever think will really stick with normies. But who cares about them anyways!  Linux is not for the masses and it shouldn't be.

(This is not to say development and optimizing shouldn't continue, but that the development shouldn't aim to be Windows-like)

Can't say I agree with this part. All Luke Smith's done is make a rickety setup that works for his autism, but isn't really something anyone should really want to aspire to. While it's perhaps admirable to create and assist others in creating, spending the time to make your own rudimentary desktop environment using various packages isn't really ideal. You're not using a computer for the sake of using one, you're using a computer to actually 'do' things. Edit images, watch 'me, process words and edit lines of code. You can have a good UX without locking down everything and turning your PC into basically a smartphone.

This isn't to say you shouldn't be able to screw around with your computer and roll your own solutions, but in my eyes it's the equivalent of buying a microwave, taking it apart a bit and replacing all the buttons with bottlecaps that have numbers drawn on them, then putting a hole at the top with the same diameter as your penis. You can do it, there's nothing stopping you, but most people would probably be better off with just having the microwave as is. You would be too, since it's not like those bottlecaps are going to merge better with the microwave than the buttons it came with. Trannies are fond of customizing their Linux environments needlessly in this way just like their bodies.

If you want to get something done, you'll eventually have to put trust in some entity to give you a reproducible clean slate to work with. That slate should give you the bare minimum of what you need to accomplish various basic tasks in a computer. A good example for something like this would be modern Linux Mint or Windows 7, in that they tend to present configuration options to you in a conventional manner that enables you to do work with a basic install.

[BillyONare]

^couldn't have said it better

[dane]

And then there is the second trend - basically Luke Smith type stuff - which requires learning and effort, but once learned makes Linux not just usable but better than Windows, not just for its "privacy" but also because it delivers on the promises that sold me on Linux on the first place: "This is your system. Do with it what you want, Linux hides nothing." But this line of thought is not something I ever think will really stick with normies. But who cares about them anyways!  Linux is not for the masses and it shouldn't be.

(This is not to say development and optimizing shouldn't continue, but that the development shouldn't aim to be Windows-like)

Can't say I agree with this part. All Luke Smith's done is make a rickety setup that works for his autism, but isn't really something anyone should really want to aspire to. While it's perhaps admirable to create and assist others in creating, spending the time to make your own rudimentary desktop environment using various packages isn't really ideal. You're not using a computer for the sake of using one, you're using a computer to actually 'do' things. Edit images, watch 'me, process words and edit lines of code. You can have a good UX without locking down everything and turning your PC into basically a smartphone.

This isn't to say you shouldn't be able to screw around with your computer and roll your own solutions, but in my eyes it's the equivalent of buying a microwave, taking it apart a bit and replacing all the buttons with bottlecaps that have numbers drawn on them, then putting a hole at the top with the same diameter as your penis. You can do it, there's nothing stopping you, but most people would probably be better off with just having the microwave as is. You would be too, since it's not like those bottlecaps are going to merge better with the microwave than the buttons it came with. Trannies are fond of customizing their Linux environments needlessly in this way just like their bodies.

If you want to get something done, you'll eventually have to put trust in some entity to give you a reproducible clean slate to work with. That slate should give you the bare minimum of what you need to accomplish various basic tasks in a computer. A good example for something like this would be modern Linux Mint or Windows 7, in that they tend to present configuration options to you in a conventional manner that enables you to do work with a basic install.

Very true. I cringed at myself at posting "luke-smith-type-stuff" because I am not really talking about his way of doing things as much as the software he showcases. The linux to tranny pipeline is very real and nobody wants to tinker with stuff until the end of time. Linux is by no means good but niether is any other tech. The best OS so far was Windows 7. I only use linux for PC since I already know most of it, I like the programs and - most importantly - I think that in the long run windows will simply be too obnoxious to use. Windows 7 is on the edge, Windows 10 IoT LTSC is better as "official support" first ends in 2032 meaning you can probably use it way longer.

You touched on the "why" you use a computer. I think this is key. I use Windows for actual work on a laptop, linux is just a long-term solution for a home pc.

I still stand by my point that a lot of development in software is aiming at the wrong point. This goes for all operating systems, software - even hardware to an extent, even though here it is much easier to just choose another option.

[Mason Hall-McCullough]

Temptations of an open-source browser extension developer

I recently came across this list of every solicitation attempt an open source developer received for a browser extension he maintains. Looks like he forked this extension in the first place from another one that was sold out. No doubt these are the kinds of emails that ended up capturing most ad blockers. This business model is parasitic: after an extension gets bought and made closed source, it will receive fewer updates and have features degrade if it doesn't totally die off.

Selling the entire extension can obviously achieve a lot because they can inject malware, but it's surprising to me how hungry some companies were for data that I wouldn't have thought was that valuable.

[Spingebill]

With the recent happening involving Unity Engine, I've seen lots and lots of chatter about Godot, which essentially bills itself as a non-jewish alternative to Unity. This showed that the image of Open Source as an unstoppable, incorruptible force is pervasive among the tech-normie masses. The idea that these sorts of projects are community-driven is chief among them, with them not acknowledging that the supermajority of work on Godot is done by paid staff (it also appears that Linietsky is using an inordinate amount of shekelmancy with the Godot Foundation to keep said staff paid).
There are plenty of ways it could go wrong, all of which are ways big Open Source projects have been destroyed in the past. The tactic Godot is arguably most vulnerable to is a company (be it Unity or some other cyber-synagogue) buying out Godot's current employees, meaning less people familiar with the engine would be able to support it, causing maintenance to slow down to the point where the only people still working on it are a few volunteer linux trannies. That said, there seems to be no sign of that happening right now, so Godot seems to be good for use for the immediate future.
As for Unity, what will most likely happen is they will go quiet for a bit, wait for the next big thing in the news cycle to get everyone's attention, and then quietly introduce the pricing changes in a similar way to how they regularly stealth-change their EULA. The Unity people who switched to Unreal will probably stay with Unreal, but the ones who switched to Godot will eventually go back to Unity due to constant tech-normie badgering about how Godot isn't capable of AAA-level graphics*. The few people who notice won't be able to generate a public outrage as big as the one that just happened, and over time they'll just accept it. 

*Not saying that it is, because it definitely isn't. I'm just bringing this up because it's by far the most common and tech-normie-characteristic complaint brought up about the engine.

[Mason Hall-McCullough]

IMO, making a foundation is what happens when these projects receive more donation money than they're able to spend, so they invent administrative roles and events to waste it on. I doubt they're at risk of being bought out (has that really happened to an open source project before?), it seems more like a passive corruption that leads to long term decline.

I would be interested to know if Blender or Krita (comparisons used in the article) had any issues with their foundations, since I wasn't even aware they had foundations. The Mozilla and Wikimedia Foundations are the ones that come to mind, and those have definitely become so parasitic that they have started hurting the project.

Ultimately, we want the Foundation to serve as a home for community initiatives, by allowing it to have its own funding lines (this means, so they can raise funding on their own for a specific goal, but the Foundation receives and uses it according to what was agreed), such as initiatives to promote education, communication and diversity.

What happened to making a game engine? Godot are clearly trying to grift money in full awareness of what a nonprofit tends to become. I guess we shouldn't expect anything better from a project run by South Americans.

The Software Freedom Conservancy (mentioned in the article as having helped Godot set up their nonprofit) seems to be providing parasitism-as-a-service:

Show Content

Spoiler
$4.3M revenue in 2021. Great people.

Rosanne DiMesio - Technical Bookkeeper

Rosanne DiMesio is the Technical Bookkeeper at the Software Freedom Conservancy where she handles incoming and outgoing accounting activities for all its member projects as well as financial operations for Conservancy itself. Rosanne has been volunteering with the Wine Project since 2008 where she focuses on user support and documentation. She has worked as an English teacher, a freelance writer and as IT support. She is passionate about helping free software projects improve their user experience. Rosanne received her Masters in Communication & Theater at the University of Illinois at Chicago and her Bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Chicago.

She was a mod on the Wine forums. I guess that qualifies one to be a secretary, no cronyism here. Can't tell if Italian or Jewish.

Denver Gingerich - Director of Compliance

Denver manages SFC's license compliance work, including its technical parts (such as triaging new reports and verifying complete corresponding source) as well as planning and carrying out our enforcement strategy (with advice and input from SFC's Executive Director and Policy Fellow). Outside of SFC, Denver also co-runs a FOSS business. Previously, Denver authored financial trading software on Linux. Denver writes free software in his spare time: his patches have been accepted into Wine, Linux, and wdiff. Denver received his BMath in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo. He gives presentations about digital civil rights and how to ensure FOSS remains sustainable as a community and financially, having spoken at conferences such as LinuxCon North America, Texas Linux Fest, LibrePlanet, CopyCamp Toronto, FOSSLC's Summercamp, CopyleftConf, and the Open Video Conference.

His job of "triaging new reports and verifying complete corresponding source" sounds impressive, here's what it's referring to:

5.2.1 Complete, Corresponding Source (CCS)

Under GPLv2 §3(a), the source code provided must be the “corresponding source code.” Here “corresponding” primarily means that the source code provided must be that code used to produce the binaries being distributed. That source code must also be “complete”. GPLv2 §3’s penultimate paragraph explains in detail what is meant by “complete”. In essence, it is all the material that a programmer of average skill would need to actually use the source code to produce the binaries she has received.

So he builds projects to check that they are compliant with the GPL. How often does he do this? Why would this even be the SFC's responsibility? It's not like they are some regulatory body enforcing the GPL.

Tracy Homer - Operations Manager

Tracy acts as Operations Manager at Software Freedom Conservancy. Bringing her super-skills of organization and love of bureaucracy, she helps things run at SFC smoothly behind the scenes. Tracy also serves on the board of her local hackerspace, an organization committed to teaching and promoting open technology exclusively. She feels that open techonology allows people to express their creativity regardless of their financial situation or technical background. Tracy is currently persuing a degree in GIS from the University of Tennessee.

Getting nothing done isn't easy without Tracy helping ensure it goes smoothly.

Bradley M. Kuhn - Policy Fellow and Hacker-in-Residence

Bradley M. Kuhn is the Policy Fellow and Hacker-in-Residence at Software Freedom Conservancy and editor-in-chief of copyleft.org. Kuhn began his work in the software freedom movement as a volunteer in 1992, when he became an early adopter of Linux-based systems, and began contributing to various Free Software projects, including Perl. He worked during the 1990s as a system administrator and software developer for various companies, and taught AP Computer Science at Walnut Hills High School in Cincinnati. Kuhn's non-profit career began in 2000, when he was hired by the FSF. As FSF's Executive Director from 2001–2005, Kuhn led FSF's GPL enforcement, launched its Associate Member program, and invented the Affero GPL. Kuhn began as Conservancy's primary volunteer from 2006–2010, and became its first staff person in 2011. Kuhn holds a summa cum laude B.S. in Computer Science from Loyola University in Maryland, and an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Cincinnati. Kuhn's Master's thesis discussed methods for dynamic interoperability of Free Software programming languages. Kuhn received the O'Reilly Open Source Award in 2012, in recognition for his lifelong policy work on copyleft licensing. Kuhn has a blog and co-hosts the audcast, Free as in Freedom.

Seems like a really accomplished guy. Wrote his own Wikipedia page a decade ago that reads like an advertisement. A careerist sociopath, just the type of person the Open Source Community needs.

Karen M. Sandler - Executive Director

Karen M. Sandler is an attorney and the executive director of Software Freedom Conservancy, a 501c3 nonprofit organization focused on ethical technology. As a patient deeply concerned with the technology in her own body, Karen is known as a cyborg lawyer for her advocacy for free software as a life-or-death issue, particularly in relation to the software on medical devices. She co-organizes Outreachy, the award-winning outreach program for people who face under-representation, systemic bias, or discrimination in tech. She is an adjunct Lecturer-In-Law of Columbia Law School and a visiting scholar at University of California Santa Cruz.

Prior to joining Software Freedom Conservancy, Karen was the executive director of the GNOME Foundation. Before that, she was the general counsel of the Software Freedom Law Center. She began her career as a lawyer at Clifford Chance and Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP.

Karen received her law degree from Columbia Law School where she was a James Kent Scholar and co-founder of the Columbia Science and Technology Law Review. She also holds a bachelor of science in engineering from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.

Sandler has won awards for her work on behalf of software freedom, including the O’Reilly Open Source Award in 2011. She received an honorary doctorate from KU Leuven in 2023.

Current executive of the SFC. Probably Jewish. Also has a Wikipedia page that reads like a resume and was probably created by her. I'm not even going to look into Outreachy or I'll lose my fucking mind. Nevermind I did.



Because apparently these organizations are all connected, $1.2M of the SFC's 2021 expenditure was spent on funding Outreachy and the Institute for Computing Research. Outreachy gives $7000 to mostly brown foids so they can write documentation for OSS projects. This was effective at increasing "diversity" which as well all know is a well-defined and unalloyed good with inherent value. Amusingly the list of events on Outreachy's Wikipedia page do not update past 2015 despite it continuing to run every year since then, because there is no organic interest in this project and even the parasites themselves got too lazy to update Wikipedia. The ICR offers a short program to teach high school students some programming and academic skills, pretty sure they don't pay the students despite calling it an internship. Looks somewhat wholesome although probably still a corrupt waste of money. Outreachy had 184 internships and ICR had 28.

I also noticed that Kuhn and Sandler have connections to the Software Freedom Law Center, another worthless scam organization.

Sage Sharp - Senior Director of Diversity & Inclusion

Sage Sharp is the Senior Director of Diversity & Inclusion at the Software Freedom Conservancy. Sage runs Outreachy, which is Conservancy's diversity initiative that provides paid, remote internships to people who are subject to systemic bias or impacted by underrepresentation in tech. Sage is a long-standing free software contributor, and is known for their work as a Linux kernel maintainer for seven years. They also founded their own company, Otter Tech, which has trained over 400 people on how to enforce a Code of Conduct.

Is actually an FTM, which explains why she hasn't achieved anything. No further comment necessary. Watch if ye dare: Becoming Sage: My Gender Journey from 2016 to 2018.

Daniel Pono Takamori - Community Organizer & Non-Profit Problem Solver

Pono joined Conservancy to help fill a community need for bridging technical and non-technical roles. Having worked at FOSS foundations and organizations for over a decade, his background in FOSS infrastructure led him to think more deeply about how to better use community intelligence instead of technology to solve governance questions. He is passionate about making FOSS a more equitable and inclusive space. With a background in mathematics and physics, he looks forward to mobilizing social intelligence and community goveranance as a basis for solving both technical and non-technical problems.

Daniel has years of experience in solving the problem of finding something to do at work.

This is a representative example of 90%+ of charities. I struggle to put into words how disgusting it is that these people have manipulated themselves into a position where individuals and organizations will give them money and feel that they have done a good deed. An entire class of parasites that most people seem to believe are exceptionally moral because "they don't do it for the money". Appropriating and tarnishing the efforts of people who actually create things for the benefit of humanity.

Alternatives to Unity/Godot/Unreal if you don't mind working at a lower level without a GUI: SDL, raylib. SDL has been around for decades and they don't even accept donations.

[Guest]

Open Source Software isn't dead, in fact it's winning the war when it comes to software used by developers. The average end user is of course using almost entirely proprietary software, but all corporate software is certain to have dependencies on OSS somewhere down the line. The Free Software movement as it once was may no longer be relevant, but the spirit of Free Software is very much alive and relevant in its current form. There's so many powerful packages and utilities you can download online, it's never been this plentiful.

Before everything I'm about to say, don't forget the extent to which global tech companies purposefully behave in ways that are actively hostile, deceptive, and exploitative towards the user, this should be obvious. However, in situations where the average user of some piece of software is intelligent, well-informed, and coordinated, companies struggle to assail user freedoms.

OSS has won when it comes to software used by developers: Most programming toolkits are free software now or have a good free alternative, Linux is a very widely used server OS, support is available for free online, and if you need a license for something it's probably being paid by your employer because they're forcing you to use it for whatever reason. SaaS/Cloud stuff might seem like a counterexample, but I think that has more to do with renting out storage/processing/data which is something separate.

As an example that weirdly demonstrates OSS's victory in this space, consider that even after Microsoft have purchased GitHub and npm for billions of dollars, they stick to passively mining them for data rather than forcefully pushing any kind of exploitative subscription model. Microsoft know better than to try to squeeze money out of GitHub because if they were to try, developers would easily move to a freer competitor (of which many exist). In general, the developer community is also informed and coordinated enough to fork software if it stops serving the interests of the community (see uBlock/uBlock Origin).

And then we have the average end user: technologically illiterate, apathetic, often plain stupid. To a large extent this state of affairs was a consequence of widespread adoption of technology across the young, the old, and the Global South. This may have been inevitable, but I believe that the extent to which developers embraced this change was not inevitable. Many of these evangelistic types see themselves as enlightening the world by bringing software to new users, while they are often in fact making them more mindless. The rhetoric surrounding commonly cited values of accessibility, security and privacy has always felt like an infantilizing and leftist framing of the value that really matters:

• Accessibility - "You're too stupid to figure out how to use this on your own, so we made the text bigger and removed buttons."
  
• Security - "You can't be trusted to not install viruses, so we put up scary-looking warnings if you try to do anything that isn't officially certified (or prevented you from doing it altogether)."
  
• Privacy - "You're too naive, so we need to prevent you from giving out personal information to bad guys."
  

What really matters is user power. Oversimplifying software and preventing users from taking risky actions stops them from learning how computers work, and makes them more vulnerable and powerless in the long term. Of course, some people are just too stupid to ever learn these things, but it's certain that many Gen Z phone addicts never got a chance to know the full extent of their cybernetic birthright due to the convenience of "apps".

Privacy in particular is a value OSS people love to focus on, but it's not the right way of thinking about the issue. Unless you're committing crimes (which normies aren't), there is no reason to actually care on an individual level about companies or governments knowing your IP address or personal information. They aren't stalking you (though some have actually been led to believe this). The damaging aspect of software that doesn't respect "privacy" is the mass transfer of power from individuals to institutions via aggregate data harvesting.

Contrary to the example blanched_chards gave above, my view is that that while progressive diversity ideology is rampant throughout tech including OSS, the damage it can do to systems that are both inhuman and run by volunteers feels oddly limited. The worst that happens is that Mozilla wastes some of their funding on retarded blog posts, and sometimes communities have a twitter moment or unjustly exile good people. Even if packages get deleted, the community will rebuild with someone less unstable in charge. Anyone can still contribute code pseudonymously so long as it works, CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md be damned.

Almost all of the problems relating to consumer OSS (Linux, Firefox et al., some unraped Android version not sure I use a raped one) would be solved in a short time if everyone on the planet magically switched to using them overnight. After a short catch-up period, OSS would genuinely provide a better experience to users with few downsides. All major issues with OSS derive from network effects: not enough dev attention to add features, not enough dev attention to fix bugs, not enough users to create content (social networks), not enough dev attention to create 3rd party software (on a platform e.g. Linux), not enough integration with other software, not big enough for a political voice. Companies bypass some of these issues with money but OSS has to bootstrap everything from zero with no budget.

When the average user is so subhuman, efforts to overthrow proprietary giants with coordination and education are almost hopeless. I don't have any constructive proposals in this regard. I'm disappointed when I see OSS projects aping soy UI design since they're disempowering their own users, and I try not to discourage retards who rice their Linux machine and post desktop screenshots since it's at least positive that they have computers as a hobby. That doesn't mean that OSS is dead, though. I'm still pleased with how much I can freely do with my own computer, it just doesn't seem that this is likely to go mainstream any time soon.

Hello Luke Smith.

[Guest]

The worst that happens is that Mozilla wastes some of their funding on retarded blog posts,

It is worse than that. If you look at their finances, they redirect money from their most popular stated goal ("We develop a browser!") to all sorts of other stuff more in the culture-shaping realm of "charity". At some point nonprofits should be held accountable for fraud. It doesn't matter that you aren't technically exfiltrating value as profit if the money still doesn't get used as advertised.

[Mason Hall-McCullough]

The worst that happens is that Mozilla wastes some of their funding on retarded blog posts,

It is worse than that. If you look at their finances, they redirect money from their most popular stated goal ("We develop a browser!") to all sorts of other stuff more in the culture-shaping realm of "charity". At some point nonprofits should be held accountable for fraud. It doesn't matter that you aren't technically exfiltrating value as profit if the money still doesn't get used as advertised.

I totally agree (see my previous post in this thread) and this definitely applies to Mozilla in particular, my point was that leftism isn't to blame for this. An organization or community becoming infested with women and troons is more of a symptom of this general organizational corruption that pervades nearly all charities/NGOs, than it is a cause.

[Mason Hall-McCullough]

IMO, making a foundation is what happens when these projects receive more donation money than they're able to spend, so they invent administrative roles and events to waste it on. I doubt they're at risk of being bought out (has that really happened to an open source project before?), it seems more like a passive corruption that leads to long term decline.

Ultimately, we want the Foundation to serve as a home for community initiatives, by allowing it to have its own funding lines (this means, so they can raise funding on their own for a specific goal, but the Foundation receives and uses it according to what was agreed), such as initiatives to promote education, communication and diversity.

What happened to making a game engine? Godot are clearly trying to grift money in full awareness of what a nonprofit tends to become. I guess we shouldn't expect anything better from a project run by South Americans.

And we already have funding drives to support the salary of a "Community Manager" (Discord moderator). Surely there were equally competent people lining up to do it for free? No financial statements for the Godot Foundation yet, but they claim to be making $50k a month from donations. I'll check back later.

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