Don Goodman-Wilson’s moral critique of Open Source

Hi Eliot,

I think it's not the first time to point us to that kind of resource. Highly on topic IMHO. Will read it because we (Squeak Dev) are affected.

Thanks,

Herbert

Am 17.10.2019 um 13:13 schrieb Eliot Miranda:

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)

Ron,

> So now the hard part.

I started working on this in 1986. Brad Cox tackled these issues in his
"superdistribution" work. At the time I asked around if people would put
up with ads to be able to get software for free and the reaction was so
negative that I didn't expect our world to become what it is now.

> How do you determine the value of a contribution?  

By 1997 I was working on the idea of bulding a metering system into the
virtual memory code. So a contribution (which could be any objects, like
a drawing of a cat, and not just code) would be rewarded a portion of
the user's monthly software bill proportional to how much it needed to
be kept in RAM compared to all other objects.

Distribution would be for free and there would be no cost to having lots
of software on your disk that you didn't actually use.

As a software stack grows, people are less and less willing to pay for
the older fundamental parts even though these still provide a lot of
actual value. So someone might think of forking $90 for just the Trumpet
WinSocket TCP/IP stack to access the Internet in 1995 but would think
even $1 totally absurd for just a TCP/IP stack in 2005 when it was such
a tiny part of an OS. This race to the bottom happens even without no
cost Open Source competitors, though that does speed things up.

My scheme was meant to avoid this trend as well as make each individual
contribution values (so you can get money for a single font and not have
to bundle it with 200 more before you can make any money with it).

> How do you determine the value of the software to a company
> to determine what they should pay? 

The companies wouldn't pay anything at all, but could just build stuff
on top of other people's works. The end users (which might also be these
companies, but that is a different story) pay, and part goes to the
company for its efforts and part to all other authors.

-- Jecel

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)

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 <[hidden email]> 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)