Speech opportunity. [LWN.net]

Speech opportunity.

Posted Jan 29, 2025 18:36 UTC (Wed) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325)
In reply to: Speech opportunity. by marcH
Parent article: FOSDEM keynote causes concerns

> Fighting _individual_ "bad guys" like him is emotional and immature. As long as he has not done anything illegal, what needs to be fought is the _system_ that allows people like him, not the persons themselves. And who knows that system better than the people exploiting it the "best"? In other words, we need _more_ billionaires questioning why their tax rate is "lower than their secretary's" and we certainly need to engage with them. They have a lot to share.

Speaking as someone who works at a giant corporation that does a fair amount of FOSS work, I can tell you right now that any talk with the title "Infusing Open Source Culture into Company DNA" will be entirely content-free. It will be filled with vague platitudes about the "power of open source" and buzzwords such as "synergy." You will not learn anything the least bit useful from it.

to post comments

Speech opportunity.

Posted Jan 29, 2025 19:27 UTC (Wed) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

This may comes as a shock but billionaires are not all carbon copies of each other and they don't all behave the same and all follow the same standard policies. Also small fraction of their being is still unpredictably human - as incredible as it may sound. Especially in some unscripted interview context. Not in a scripted keynote: agreed.

That's why it matters to be open and curious and willing to listen. Not to anything in any context of course, but not to "nothing ever, BAD (tm)!" either.

I honestly don't know whether Dorsey is the best billionaire to pay attention to. I'm just saying that "lalalala never listen to billionaires" is a pretty "primal" attitude going nowhere. Dorsey seems to have a relatively complex history, for instance he left BlueSky because it was becoming "another Twitter".