@cyberquixote Literally every 20 seconds I hear a new thing best answered by the Black Panther "we don't do that here" meme. It actually casts a very poor light on some stuff I didn't even think to criticize early on in the video, where the guy acts like his proprietary experience is a valuable credential for open source, and that he's "atoning" for working at the worst companies, by bringing these valuable skills as a gift to FOSS.

The problem is, a word I've come to really find useful lately, *proprietisms.* I don't want to use Audre Lorde's "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's palace" as a thought-stopping cliche, but this guy comes from a world of milking users for money, data, and emotional investment. A world of moat-building. Many of the tools that work in that domain, for those goals, are toxic and unsuitable outside the non-consensual orgy of relentless user-fucking that Apple and Google embody.

@MaddieM4 @cyberquixote

There’s a useful generalisation of Conway’s law that software architecture follows not just the org chart of the company that produced it but the economic system that the company existed in and its goals within that system.

This is why I find most F/OSS reimplementations of some proprietary thing misguided. Almost every design decision in producing the original was driven by the requirements of the proprietary business model. Proprietary software is incentivised to:

Lock users into the ecosystem and make switching to an alternative hard.
Provide a platform that other companies can extend, but only in ways that encourage lock in.
Create complex artefacts that no other entity can recreate.

And so on. You can do all of these in a program that is technically free software, but then an end user will not see any of the possible benefits of Free Software other than the cost. And you train users to favour cheap software, when you should be training users to favour software that they can modify and extend in ways that you didn’t consider and don’t necessarily want (so they get their own version that shares most of the code with yours, and that’s fine, you have different requirements).

Designing software around user modification and extension requires a very different set of engineering principles.

Sorry for the repetition if I’ve said this to you before. It’s one of my more frequent rants, so there’s a reasonable chance that I have.

@datarama @MaddieM4 @cyberquixote

100%. My thinking in this space is heavily biased by work done at Xerox Park and VPRI, as well as designs for mainframes that were discarded because they didn’t work with desktop computers that were a couple of orders of magnitude less powerful than the cheapest smartphone you can buy. But I wouldn’t claim to have explored more than one tiny corner of this design space.

@datarama @david_chisnall @MaddieM4 @cyberquixote No doubt! Like Ruha Benjamin says, technology always ships the culture of its makers. And the vast majority of our technology comes from a couple of monocultures, Silicon Valley and fossbros to name two. That leaves a lot of other cultures unrepresented, unprepared for.

@bright_helpings @datarama @MaddieM4 @cyberquixote

I’m not even convinced that these are distinct monocultures. There’s a narrative that the east and west coasts had different engineering cultures, but they were both spin outs from the UNIX world. Most of the non-UNIX-derived cultures have been sidelined (even Microsoft tends to hire NT kernel engineers who have experience on some open-source kernel, which is normally a UNIX derivative).

@david_chisnall @bright_helpings @datarama @MaddieM4 @cyberquixote Am reminded of Prof. Regehr's blog post on _inversions_ in computing: https://blog.regehr.org/archives/1204 . Some techniques in computing are impractical/useless or practical/useful merely due to particular pressures (e.g. parts of a system happen to be faster or slower than others).

@tkchia @bright_helpings @datarama @MaddieM4 @cyberquixote

@regehr is here too!