Sarah Drinkwater
@sarahdrinkwater
Knowledge beachcomber interested in the ownership economy, flourishing communities, ecosystem building, magic, and knowledge as an end to itself.
Sarah Drinkwater
Open Source Software and Collective ownership, Coops, and User Owned Platforms
I would argue that this is roughly the state of "open source" today. It is the modern software developer’s marmelade, with the OSI as our Konfitürenverordnung, continuing to aggressively enforce a phrase that has since evolved in the popular vernacular.
"open source" is not the logical negation of "closed source"
Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement.
Now that Open Source is heavily depended on by nearly every commercial company, we’re running into sustainability and maintainability problems. These are problems that really didn’t exist at scale before. A very famous recent example of this is the XZ Utils backdoor exploit, where an open source maintainer accepted a subtle but significant compromise from a bad actor, partially due to burnout and harassment of the maintainer.
However, I see this in nearly every maintainer that I talk to. It’s almost impossible to make money by writing and maintaining Open Source software, due to several factors. Everyone wants and expects free shit, and nobody feels that they need to support the people making this all possible.
The strange new truth is that most open source developers and maintainers are now patronized by large corporations.
What would be more ideal is to have not one company paying each developer, which is subject to the whims of corporate KPIs and management changes, but instead to have thousands of companies pay a very small amount to professional maintainers.
The main problem is that there is no good way to do this currently. There is little to no incentive for companies to do this and there are few ways to aggregate and disperse such funding.
The second growing problem in the Open Source ecosystem is the problem of the new generation of Commercial Open Source.
Developers have now been growing up for decades loving Open Source and open communities, and when they start companies and projects, by default they want them to be open. However, there are corporate sustainability issues with Open Source, just as there are with individual maintainer. Somewhat ironically, The Man is now using Open Source licenses to stick it to the developer!
Truth, the provider of meaning and orientation, is also a narrative. We are very well informed, yet somehow we cannot orient ourselves. The informatization of reality leads to its atomization — separated spheres of what is thought to be true.
NOEMA • All That Is Solid Melts Into Information
on digital maps & consumerist city
eugenekudashev.com
maps and Psychogeography
I want this to work, furthermore, whether those people are sharing a random thought every day, a blog post every week, or an art project every two years.And I want it to work, of course, across media, so I can follow writers, musicians, programmers, theorists, troublemakers …
Robin Sloan • Specifying Spring '83
If you think where our food comes from, particularly in colder climates, you’ll realise it’s grown someplace else. As our bananas, apples, lettuce, corn and rice grow, they extract nutrients from the land. That food is then trucked, shipped and flown to where we live – and where we eat it and excrete it. Yet, we don’t return that organic matter... See more
Lina Zeldovich • Our excrement is a natural, renewable and sustainable resource – if only we can overcome our visceral disgust of it
They win through speed, empathy, and expertise. By avoiding firm politics, solo investors can move more quickly, committing to a round in hours or days. Many are current or previous operators, giving them empathy for founders’ journeys. Some bring unique expertise to the table, too.