Sarah Drinkwater
@sarahdrinkwater
Knowledge beachcomber interested in the ownership economy, flourishing communities, ecosystem building, magic, and knowledge as an end to itself.
Sarah Drinkwater
Creators lead the way. Many members of this movement built their reputation as creators, amassing large audiences in the process. This influence has been translated into securing allocation in competitive rounds. Those that tell powerful stories about their portfolio businesses can drive remarkable results.
Mario Gabriele • The Future of Solo Capitalists | The Generalist
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!
Status Signaling and why curation...
Just proved the thesis of this piece - on the endless selfish human desire to signal - in adding this to my sublime nail painting emoji
Bennington College, the wildest and wickedest school in America. In the last great decade: the 1980s. Bennington class of ’86 includes Bret Easton Ellis, future writer of American Psycho and co-leader of the literary Brat Pack; Jonathan Lethem, future writer of Motherless Brooklyn and MacArthur Fellow; and Donna Tartt, future writer of The Secret... See more
Once Upon a Time… at Bennington College on Apple Podcasts
Secret Societies, Network States, Burning Man, Zuzalu, and More: Thoughts on New Political Communities
Matt Prewittradicalxchange.org
Community Building and Network States
knowledge shared between friends, while relatively unknown to the rest of the world, anchors many of the strongest social bonds.
strong communities tend to feature mutual commitments and common moral obligations, or relatedly, a sense of shared fate