Rebecca Giblin on chokepoint capitalism

Nah, this is pretty good stuff. You can't libertarian yourself out of enshittification.

> political activism campaigns

I was at the talk, and yes, it was about a political activism campaign, created in response to the negative effects of a monopsony on some people. I think you are right in saying it didn't have much to do with open source directly.

But those monopsonies were made possible by advancements in the last two decades made by computers and communications (the internet), and such advancements are built largely on the back of open source plus a layer of proprietary glue and candy. I found this explanation of the left field effects on society created by what is effectively both my profession and my hobby to be both unexpected and enlightening.

But more to the point, while it is true to say it didn't have much to do with "open source" directly, if you remove just one word, "source", then what's left ("openness" or "transparency") turned out to be very relevant. The companies went to great lengths to hide what their systems/algorithms were in their proprietary software. Only when that was stripped away (by what was effectively an unintentional data leak by the companies themselves), did the politics kick in.

Effectively the companies are using the monopsonies they built to redirect money from the supplies to their shareholders. I don't want moral discussions about whether that is fair or not here. What is interesting to me is that while the large reduction in money paid to the suppliers has been self-evident for a long while, it didn't trigger much of a reaction in society as a whole. I presume that was because most assumed it was just the market being efficient or something else people found morally acceptable. It was only after a light was shone on the mechanism they were using to do the redirect that this political movement took off. Thus, the political activism we are seeing is a direct effect of "openness". I suspect that will resonate with many here, just as it did at Everything Open.

I expected the worst when opening this article, but was pleasantly surprised. There's no culture war noise, just a discussion on how our industry affects the rest of the world. Something to think about for when tech recruiters ask you to come "change the world" with them.

This article is about free market failures, induced by confluence of technology and copyright, affecting creative workers everywhere - including tech workers. Seems very on-topic to me. And free market failures arising out of predatory behaviour by large companies who built monopolies or monopsonies should be a concern to everyone, whether right-wing or left-wing.

I have a somewhat dislike of CD... BUT, while he's involved in the book, the article is incredibly on-topic and calling it "political activism" is a bit like Wernher von Braun saying "WWII rockets were very successful, they just landed in the wrong place". Opensource/Linux has been key in proliferation these types of "societal weapons".

Yes, the entertainment industry was infamous for their creative book keeping almost from the start but due to technological constraints, was somewhat contained (proliferation/distribution was expensive; micropayments not possible due to that expense). Micro-pay is key to all of this and the volumes involved make hiding the details easy.

The mantra of "move fast/disrupt/break things" allows for even more lack of responsibility in the area.

FOSS/freedom is about about the impact that freedom has on the world around us, not just the freedom to code what you want.

It's quite simple - if the topic doesn't interest you, well, then don't read the article!

But don't tell us others, who find this article about usage consequences of technology to the point and fitting for the topics that LWN.net covers, that it shall not be here.

Hand waving this away as “politics”, i.e. forgiving Amazon for the same crooked demeanour Microsoft had in the 90s and which it *has been doing* in the tech industry (keyword: AGPL3), does not sit right with me. There's something insidious in the current state of civilization about tech sector people who fixate on Technology™ as an imagined self-sustaining concept in a context-free vacuum, a perpetual motion machine of thinkpieces that don't require one to think, who then balk in disgust at anyone who dares to lay bare the consequences all this has on real people. Never *at* the consequences. It's why the FSF has been an ineffectual joke for most of its existence.

I'd rather read things like this than the next instalment of the 10,000-comment systemd soap opera. That, to me, is also politics: a bunch of incredibly boring talking heads loudly incorrecting each other over something of infinitesimal consequence. Computing as a two-way medium is inherently political; I for one would rather see politics that try to *do* something than surrender the stage to a crowd that gets violent in a 16th-century way over ini files on their hard disk.

That comment could be posted verbatim under an article about codes of conduct and be no less semantically valid. The tone and intent would be a lot less ambiguous though. Would you feel comfortable doing that?

This is extremely relevant to 'Open Source'.
GIt was designed as a distributed system where everybody could publish with just a website.
Github redefined GIT as a client server system when they own all the servers.
Even when one keeps a server, the pressure from the community to host the project on github is enormous.
The e14n of github has already started with compulsory participation to Copilot.
In some way we are back to 1989 when Microsoft controlled all usable software by controlling the OS.

Open source software is intrinsically political. Few things aren't political actually.
I despite those spaces which try to be "apolitical" because they easily end up being conservative (thus political), for the simple reason than preventing discussion favours political immobility and eventually conservativism.

I therefore welcome any article about digital rights and the politics of free and open source software.

> political activism campaigns

good thing that Free Software never had anything to do with any sort of political campaign then

wait,