KDE devs & other hobbyist programmers, beware: upper management at FAANG hates your guts [LWN.net]

KDE devs & other hobbyist programmers, beware: upper management at FAANG hates your guts

Posted Jan 24, 2024 1:25 UTC (Wed) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136)
In reply to: Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system by khim
Parent article: Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

Contrary to what you seem to be implying with all of this pro-"Open Source" / anti-"Free Software" us-versus-them rhetoric that you've been posting here recently: pretty much every so-called "Free Software zealot" who's risen to prominence in recent years (such as Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow, maybe) are much more similar in terms of their general ethos, sensibilities, and worldview to both the original "Open-source software" advocate from 1998 and the main person to whom Firefox & Thunderbird users owe their gratitude for the fact that those two apps exist in the first place — neither of whom have ever been pro-FSF partisans or (in your preferred terminology) "Free Software zealots" — than they are to pro-FAANG partisans who want the general public to believe that the upper management at those megacorporations are good guys who usually act in the best interests of "Joe Average" (i.e. the general public), I'd say.

> I know how the world is run, that's the issue. Free Software zealots don't know that (or, more precisely, refuse to accept that knowledge).

From reading your comment above while keeping in mind the fact that, at roughly the point in time that ESR mentioned in this part of his book from 2003, a sea change took place in the way that "the world" (or, more precisely, the IT industry) was run:

By late 1993, […] the long-awaited dream of a cheap Unix system for everybody had snuck up on them from an unexpected direction. It didn't come from AT&T or Sun or any of the traditional vendors. Nor did it rise out of an organized effort in academia. It was a bricolage that bubbled up out of the Internet by what seemed like spontaneous generation, appropriating and recombining elements of the Unix tradition in surprising ways. (emphasis mine)

…and also keeping in mind what jwz wrote (in his anti-Instagram polemic from 2016) about another sea change in the IT industry that also occurred in the mid-1990s (and was at least partially caused by the exact same event that ESR referred to above):

All of the "social media" services want to lock you in. That's been the case for a while. They love their "walled gardens" and they think that so long as they tightly control their users and make it hard for them to escape, they will rule the world forever.

This was the business model of Compuserve. And AOL. And then a little thing called The Internet got popular for a minute in the mid 1990s, and that plan suddenly didn't work out so well for those captains of industry. (emphasis mine)

…I get a strong impression that what you actually WANT to happen sometime soon is for the IT industry to revert to being run in a very similar way to how it was a few years before those two sea-changes took place in the mid-'90s!

So then, in order to accomplish that goal, you've called for national governments to hold every last bricoleur/hobbyist programmer to the same level of legal liability that smartphone hardware companies (like Motorola/Lenovo, Asus, or even Google themselves with their Pixel product line) will be held to in the near future, thereby ensuring that never again will any such hobbyists be allowed to develop software that poses a threat to any present-day equivalent of the "traditional vendors" that ESR referred to there (such as SaaS vendors in general, and/or any of the current "Big Five" tech companies), as happened throughout the 1990s.

At least twice recently, you've almost explicitly said that you want EU legislators to enact laws that would have that effect on to hobbyist developers, for example here:

> if you are creating a GitHub page and write README there then now you are marketing something

…and also here:

> And you may bet pretty large sum on the desire of EU legislators to keep these small guys around. [with "these small guys" being some hypothetical hardware company "that produces DVR based in MythTV"]

> That, by necessity implies that large open source “forges”, if, maybe, not individual contributors, would have to deal with liabilities.

If a law like that were ever to be enacted, it would likely end up preventing any new bricolage (meaning a hobbyist-led project, like KDE) from bubbling up out of the Internet to eventually reach KDE's level of fame & popularity ever again! Do you really want that to happen?

(Remember: back in KDE's early years, approximately 100% of its developers — including Lars Knoll, David Faure, and Matthias Ettrich, among many others — fit the aforementioned "hobbyist programmer" description while at the same time not being pro-FSF partisans. Even today, most of the commits/contributions to Git repos hosted on invent.kde.org come from hobbyists, IIUC.)

But, fortunately for anyone who fits any of these descriptions:

someone who runs Plasma on their own "daily driver" desktop PC;
or, someone who is a currently-active KDE contributor;
or, someone who has any Git repos with README.md files hosted on invent.kde.org or anywhere else on the Web;
or, most importantly of all: someone who has (or wants to have) a publically-readable portfolio/showcase of their own programming work available on the Web, so that the HR departments of their own potential future employer(s) can take a look at it

…it looks like several other LWN commentors disagree with khim on the topic of what kind of law the EU legislators really want to enact, e.g. bluca here:

> A readme, or a website, are not equivalent to marketing a product.

…and also Wol here:

> The crucial words here are "and markets them". If you look up the definition of marketing, it does not include "making available for J Random Passerby to help themself".

And I strongly suspect that those two commentors are correct in what they said there.

In conclusion, here's the TL;DR version (written for a target audience of any LWN readers who've ever used their own self-written open source software as a showcase for their programming abilities while searching for a job):

Whichever corporation you might have believed was your ally (against Microsoft, or against AOL/CompuServe/Prodigy et al.) during any of the past 3 decades is probably your enemy right now. That's because there are various big-money interests out there who see hobbyist-developed FLOSS projects — along with the hobbyist-oriented forge sites that host them (such as invent.kde.org, SourceHut, Codeberg, etc.) — as things which in the future might become existential threats to their own business model(s). This even applies to some corporations which on the surface appear to be FOSS-friendly (case in point: this).

Consequently, right now there's a danger that some people with deep pockets might try to lobby national governments into strangling those hobbyist-led FOSS projects with red tape!

to post comments

KDE devs & other hobbyist programmers, beware: upper management at FAANG hates your guts

Posted Jan 24, 2024 11:27 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (4 responses)

It's true that when RMS wrote his essay there was no separate well-defined “open source camps” and “free software camps”. That happened later when free software zealots rejected the peace offering.

And yes, we have to admit that free software zealots even managed to convince some people to release some software for free (Netscape, StarOffice). Credit where credit i due.

It's absolutely not clear how much that helped, long term (most browsers these days tack their ancestry not to Netscape source release, but to work of KDE guys who were, very much, an open source group (as evidenced by the fact that free software zealots rejected their work and started an alternate project instead, which very much split the community and in general probably caused more harm than good (although it's very hard to say for sure because we couldn't just look on the alternate history where GNOME never happened).

And what code these people have created recently?

Before the introduction of Open Source software two worlds were intermixed and it wasn't as obvious. Especially because some of most active “free software” proponents were also prolific coders (starting from RMS himself, but also Tridgell and some others). But after “grand separation” (which, again, happened because the free software camp insisted on it) number of people who were producing anything notable in the “free software” camp was dwindling and today it includes almost entirely people who try to force other people to act against their wishes and don't themselves create much new code.

It's not about about what I want, but about what may happen and what may not happen. And no, IT industry is not reverting to how it was run in the mi-'90s. Government control would be much more strict and chances of anarchy developments taking over would be slim.

That's what happened to every other industry, after all.

I guess some governments would fail to apply a tight leash and these government would fail… but that wouldn't lead to free software nirvana but to the proliferation of failed states where development of the software (free or otherwise) just wouldn't happen.

So then, in order to accomplish that goal, you've called for national governments to hold every last bricoleur/hobbyist programmer to the same level of legal liability that smartphone hardware companies

If you seriously think that I have this level of influence then you need to have your head examined. That's not what I want governments to do, that's what they will do, whether I like that or not.

If a law like that were ever to be enacted

When, not if. The question is only how many steps would it take to reach there. The end position is more-or-less clear.

Do you really want that to happen?

If you are sitting on the bottom of the mountain and notice that avalanche danger is increasing… do you want your lawn to be destroyed or not? If not then you don't scream at the mountains and don't threaten them, but rather prepare for the time when avalanche would actually happen. Sometimes it's even prudent to trigger avalanche early to reduce it's power. But crying about the fact that winter have come is just simply stupid.

IT industry wasn't regulated for too long and have grown too big and too influential to be left alone. That means governments would react harshly and would enact laws that would be more damaging than if industry would have guided them.

But free software zealots are still in denial and still believe they may stop that process if they would yell loud enough. Not gonna happen. And you know it, or else you wouldn't have been so angry.

And I strongly suspect that those two commentors are correct in what they said there.

They may be correct in describing the law as it's drafted today. If that's true then it just means that there would be a different law later, which would bring control and responsibility into the IT industry.

Consequently, right now there's a danger that some people with deep pockets might try to lobby national governments into strangling those hobbyist-led FOSS projects with red tape!

Wow. So much cope.

No, there are no such danger. Or maybe there is, but that part is pretty much minor and insignificant. We have just arrived at the time where products made by hobbyists would stop being used by non-hobbyists.

Like people are no longer using cars designed and made by hobbyists or radios designed and made by hobbyists. Except if they are hobbyists, of course, and even then they have to pass strict checks to be allowed to drive on regular roads or use their radios (except in certain niches dictated by governments).

That's the tectonic shift that IT industry would pass soon. Like every major industry passed before.

And if you want to say that this wouldn't happen then you should explain what differs IT industry from any other industry where that have happened already. Not try to write long screaming texts.

I, for one, couldn't see why IT industry should be different from dozens of other industries that have passed that path before.

KDE devs & other hobbyist programmers, beware: some "captains of industry" see you as a threat to their business models

Posted Jan 26, 2024 11:00 UTC (Fri) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136) [Link] (3 responses)

> when RMS wrote his essay

(Note: that link goes to Eric Raymond's 'Goodbye, "free software"; hello, "open source"' essay from 1998, not to anything that RMS wrote. Did you mean to write "ESR" there instead of "RMS"?)

> That happened later when free software zealots rejected the peace offering.

As of right now, there are very few people anymore who still believe that "separate well-defined “open source camps” and “free software camps”" ever existed.

The hard-binary distinction to which you're referring was more-or-less an illusion, not a real state of affairs. And from 1999 onwards, there have been an ever-increasing amount of hobbyist developers posting their work on forge sites, and this trend accelerated rapidly in the next decade when GitHub and Gitorious appeared on the scene. Collectively, these hobbyist developers definitely do not fall into separate well-defined “open source camps” and “free software camps”, and that's the way it's been ever since SourceForge debuted.

Now I'll pose this question: what, exactly, motivates those hobbyist developers to post their work on forge sites? Here's one major reason why they do that (which I already mentioned once): in order to publicly showcase their own programming work, so that people from their own potential future employer(s) can read & evaluate said programming work as part of the job-application process.

If regulators were to regulate these forge sites (Codeberg, SourceHut, invent.kde.org, etc.) out of existence, then that would have the effect of economically harming tech workers, by making it next to impossible for tech workers to showcase any fully-functioning software they've written themselves on their CVs, and thereby benefitting the employers at the expense of the workers.

> most browsers these days tack their ancestry not to Netscape source release, but to work of KDE guys who were, very much, an open source group

The historical background of KDE isn't very important in the context of the upcoming Cyber Resilience Act. Here's what really matters currently: KDE e.V. and Codeberg e.V. are both nonprofit orgs, neither of which have anywhere near as much financial resources as a giant corporation like Google. If the CRA were to cause KDE or Codeberg (or individual developers hosting their own software there) to be fined the same large amount of money for a security vulnerability in some software hosted on their GitLab/ForgeJo instances (invent.kde.org and codeberg.org, respectively) as Google would be fined for shipping a security vulnerability on tens of millions of Google Pixel handsets, that likely would ultimately cause this to happen: no hobbyist-developed software will be allowed to be hosted anywhere on the Web anymore, because all of the "forge" sites would have either been fined/sued into oblivion.

And if the CRA (or other similar legislation) is being lobbied for by Google thmselves or other similar giant companies, then that's a textbook example of regulatory capture! (However, I don't believe that's actually what's going on now w.r.t. the CRA itself — more details about this below…)

Alternately: regulation might instead cause forge sites to end up being "locked down" to the point where they host nothing but Git repos belonging to big corporations rather than hobbyists, along with requiring the companies hosting their software on the forge sites to sign contracts in which the company agrees to accept all legal liability for bugs in their own software so that the forge site itself isn't held liable for any bugs on software hosted there. That would have the same effect, though, of forcing hobbyist-developed software off of forge sites.

As for the historical background of KDE, though: your own timeline of events contradicts the statement that they "were, very much, an open source group". KDE Beta 1 was released in October 1997. That was before the point in time when (according to what you said) "free software zealots rejected the peace offering" (note: RMS wrote that essay in 1998, according to the copyright notice at the end of that webpage), and consequently before the point in time when (again, according to what you said) "separate well-defined “open source camps” and “free software camps”" sprung into existence.

(Also note: the earliest version of KDE's HTML rendering engine was part of kfm (KDE File Manager). I'm not sure what its exact release date was… maybe July 1998 (KDE 1.0) or March 1999 (KDE 1.1)? Though, as far as I'm concerned, that makes no difference as to which one of your so-called "camps" was the one to which the original group of "KDE guys" belonged… because, once again, any such hard-binary distinction between "camps" was really just an illusion.)

> as evidenced by the fact that free software zealots rejected their work and started an alternate project instead

Now you're calling Miguel de Icaza a "free software zealot"? If you really believe he was a "zealot", then here's a little something about the GNOME's early-ish days that you might have overlooked:

In the early 2000s, Nicholas Petreley occasionally wrote about Miguel de Icaza in his weekly editorials in Infoworld (an influential IT trade-press magazine, where Petreley was basically "the Linux and Java advocate guy" on their editorial board), and had nothing nice to say about him. Why? Because de Icaza is a dyed-in-the-wool Microsoft fan who made his own clean-room reimplementation of .NET and C# — that is, the Mono project — who also wanted Mono to become the main platform API for GNOME app developers to target, despite the fact that other people (including Nicholas Petreley, plus some developers of GNOME itself, plus some GNOME app developers) raised concerns that Microsoft might sabotage Mono — and, by extension, also sabotage GNOME and Linux as a whole — by using their patent portfolio to sue users of Mono or of any other clean-room reimplementation of .NET.

(Those worries about Microsoft and their patents are probably among the various causes that led to the creation of Vala.)

According to his Wikipedia article: de Icaza would later go on to work for Microsoft, even winning a Microsoft MVP award in 2010. (It also says that he had a job interview at Microsoft as long ago as 1997, but they couldn't hire him at that time due to legal restrictions.) That sure doesn't sound like someone who, even if we're only considering the 1997-through-2001 timeframe (note: 2001 was when Mono began), qualified as being a "Free Software zealot".

(Side note: if it weren't for Nicholas Petreley's weekly editorials, along with his XOOPS-powered (and at other times WordPress-powered) news/forum website — VarLinux.org, which, sadly, no longer exists — I might not have ever found my way to LWN.net in the first place.)

Also, keep in mind the fact that GTK+ and GNOME's core API libraries were LGPL-ed from the very beginning. By contrast, the zero-cost/gratis variant of Qt went through a series of license-changes throughout the years: at first it was under the "Free Qt license" (non-FOSS), then the "QPL" (FOSS but GPL-incompatible), then the plain GPL, until at long last, in 2009 (version 4.5) changing to the LGPL. For that reason, prior to 2009, developers of proprietary-commercial Qt needed to pay Trolltech (or their successors-in-interest) fees for commercial Qt licenses. What's more: the native Windows variant of Qt wasn't for available for zero-cost at all until 2005 (version 4.0), and (similarly) the native Mac OS X variant of Qt wasn't available for zero-cost at all until 2003 (version 3.2). I suspect that the higher-ups at Red Hat took note of all those things, and decided to favor GTK+ and GNOME (over Qt and KDE) and even fund the development of GTK+/GNOME, so that 3rd-party proprietary app developers wouldn't be required to pay licensing fees to Trolltech.

So, no, I don't believe it's correct to characterize GNOME devs as being anti-corporate "Free Software zealots" in contrast to KDE devs who (supposedly) are a pro-corporate "open source group". That's not the way things were back in 1997/1998, and it's still not the way things are.

> And no, IT industry is not reverting to how it was run in the mi-'90s.

I said "a few years before" the mid-'90s, i.e. the era when Novell NetWare and (later) Windows NT ruled the roost in corporate America's datacenters (and in U.S. local/state-level governments's datacenters, too). To pick a specific point in time for this, I'll say 1990, i.e. the year when Windows 3.0 was released. Or, for a larger timespan, let's say approximately 1986 (when NetWare version 2 was released) up until 1995 (when Red Hat Linux version 1 was released).

> Government control would be much more strict […]

If the government in question were to put Codeberg — and/or programming work by individual developers being showcased there — equally strictly as it's going to treat the current "Big Five" tech companies, then that kind of government control would in practice amount to regulatory capture by the "Big Five"!

However, judging by LWN's recent article about the Cyber Resilience Act and especially the comments posted there by people who (judging purely by what they wrote in those comments) live in Europe/UK and consequently understand how current Euro/British vendor-liability law works, I'm not worried that the CRA is going to do any serious harm to hobbyist-oriented forge sites (like Codeberg) or to hobbyist-developed Git repos hosted on them. That's because the intended primary target of the CRA appears to be consumer-electronics manufacturers/vendors, particularly smartphone makers, and also IoT / home-automation gadget makers.

> […] and chances of anarchy developments taking over would be slim.

Well, since you mentioned "anarchy", I'll pose a question: out of either the U.S. (which is all of the current "Big Five" are headquartered) or Germany, which one of those two countries do you believe is the one that's closer to anarchy? With that question in mind, I'll re-post here a YouTube comment (originally posted on this video) that was written by someone who lives in Germany:

On the "German Model": In Germany, we in fact have 3 "levels" of Board participation: The one mentioned above, for most companies between 500 and 2000 employees, one for Heavy industries and some other cases with parity between employer and employee representatives, and one for Companies over 2000 employees with parity of employer and employee representation, with the President of the Board having double votes in case of a stalemate.

The companies that are exempt from employees on the board are those with under 500 Employees.

The real deal about the Employee participation in Germany is the workers council, which has a lot more power (They have co-decision or veto rights on things like including, but not limited to: work time, measues controlling workers, worker protection, (Paid) time off rates, firing of employees...)

As far as I'm concerned, this famous 1975 movie's depiction of an "anarcho-syndicalist commune" is a lot closer to the aforementioned "German system" of corporate governance than it is to the U.S. system of corporate governance (which is the way that all of the "Big Five" tech corporations are governed); that's because, in the U.S. system, major shareholders are the only people who choose people to serve as directors on the board. That "German system" of corporate governance has been the law of the land in (West) Germany since 1976, so as of now it appears to be a tested-in-practice system that's successful.

For that reason, I'm guessing that the EU regulators will act to reduce, not increase, the amount of political power held by those "Big Five" U.S. corporations… and probably also act to improve the negotiating position that European tech-workers hold relative to their bosses (e.g. by ensuring that those tech-workers are able to showcase their work to other potential employers).

(Side note: two of the Democratic Party's candidates running for U.S. President made Co-determination a.k.a. Workplace Democracy part of their campaigns in the 2020 primary election cycle. And if a political-activist organization such as Citizens Trade Campaign were to successfully get that kind of public policy enacted into law — via international trade treaties — throughout the entire USMCA trading bloc, and the entire EU, and all of the BRICS countries, then imagine what human society as a whole might end up being like from that point onwards. It'd be a damn sight better than what we've got right now, that's for sure! For example, if the Philippines had that kind of public policy in place, it might do away with the CONTENT-MODERATION SWEATSHOPS that Facebook et al. are using right now, thus preventing content moderation at scale from being even remotely feasible and forcing a return to pre-2005-style small-scale web forums like phpBB or its modern equivalents like public-inbox and Discourse, and likewise forcing Discord users to abandon it in favor of Matrix, and so on.)

> That's what happened to every other industry, after all.

Those kinds of grandiose sweeping statements about history tend to be massive oversimplifications of what really happened, and the people who make such statements often are motivated do so as a means of advancing their own present-day political agendas, or sometimes religious agendas, or other times financially-motivated agendas.

(Remember back in 2016 when you predicted that "Android for the desktop" or something similar would replace all current desktop Linux distros Real Soon Now™, or maybe only replace the ones made by nonprofit orgs like Debian, in the same way that Tim O'Reilly predicted Mac OS X would replace desktop Linux back in the early 2000s? That still hasn't happened… though, now, it's looking like the Steam Deck is making some inroads in that direction…)

Yes, things happened the way you described them in the three examples other industries that you gave: the car industry (which had a bunch of regulations put on it due to collision-unsafety in the '50s/'60s and Ralph Nader's exposé, and more recently had more regulations put on it due to ecological/air-quality concerns… though even in that industry the regulations were enacted surprisingly recently in Europe relative to the U.S., because Europe's transit system is less car-dependent than the U.S. one is), the food industry (again due to risks to human health), and bridge builders (ditto). One more industry regulated about as heavily as those three is terrestrial & satellite radio/TV broadcasting (due to inherent limitations of the EM spectrum & the laws of physics themselves — despite that, though, Wi-Fi hasn't been regulated out of existence by the FCC or anyone else).

But every other industry… really? What about the paper industry, or the textile industry, or the clothing industry, or the furniture industry, or the home-audio-equipment industry, or the professional-grade A/V equipment industry, etc etc…

There are certain smaller industries (which, generally speaking, are currently not regulated as much as the car industry is) — in particular, hobbyist-oriented SBC makers such as Raspberry Pi and their competitors… note, by now they have lots of competitors (if in doubt then just take a look as Christopher Barnatt's "Explaining Computers" YouTube channel), because RPis tend to be out of stock most places for the last few years (because there's so much demand for RPis from businesses, who want to use the RPis in scenarios such as electronic signage, that there aren't any RPis left over for hobbyists to buy) and so a bunch of RPi competitors have sprung up to sell to the hobbyist customer base the RPi Foundation has partially abandoned — which apparently qualify (by your standards) as being mere "cottage industries" that are unimportant in the grand scheme of things. And yet, when taken as a whole, those industries collectively make up a not-insignificant portion of the world economy. So, I'm not convinced that European regulators will disregard the economic impact that the CRA will have on those industries (or consider it to be unimportant), like you seem to believe they will… nor am I convinced that they'll disregard the impact those regulations will have on tech workers' negotiating position (relative to their bosses / managers / HR departments) in the labor market.

(Remember also that there's a historical throughline from a state-funded "Computer Literacy Project" (that was its official name) in the UK to Eben Upton and the RPi Foundation. This goes to show that the Thatcher-era British state considered it important for general-purpose computers to be available for use — including programming-education use — to the public at large. And if today's British & European governmental bodies see things the same way — note, in 2013, the European Commission did see things that way — then they might take action to resist American BigCorp-led efforts like this recent one on the basis that it's important for societal reasons that a non-negligible portion of the general public must be able to use and program general-purpose computers.)

Here's something else from recent history that goes to show just how unpredictable lobbyists & legislators can be — look at what happened in the U.S. as compared to Japan in the '80s/'90s with regard to the packaged-media rental industry:

Home video (VHS/LD/DVD) rentals: legal in both the U.S. and Japan
Music album (LP/CD/cassette) rentals: illegal in the U.S., legal in Japan
PC software (on floppy diskettes or any other physical media) rentals: illegal in both the U.S. and Japan
Console video game (cartridges / CDs or other optical discs) rentals: legal in the U.S., illegal in Japan

So, apparently, lobbyists from the Japanese equivalents of the RIAA and the MPAA failed in their attempts to get rental shops outlawed… whereas in the U.S., the RIAA's lobbyists prevailed over the rental shops (e.g. Blockbuster Video) but the MPAA's lobbyists lost their struggle against the rental shops. Just how predictable was the outcome of that lobbying battle?

(And here are two more examples of how difficult it is to make accurate long-term predictions about the IT industry and human society more generally: in France back in the 1980s, X.25 and Minitel looked set to become what TCP/IP + the Web + SMTP email would go on to become in the mid-1990s; and didn't Andrew Tanenbaum once say that "microkernels have won", citing Windows NT as an example of a microkernel OS, but later had to take back that statement in part because NT turned out to not really be a microkernel OS after all?)

> I guess some governments would fail to apply a tight leash and these government would fail… but that wouldn't lead to free software nirvana but to the proliferation of failed states where development of the software (free or otherwise) just wouldn't happen.

Regulatory capture is the American way of doing things, to a greater extent than it is in Germany, and right now the U.S. is already dangerously close to being a failed state (to a far greater extent than Germany is)! Or at least that's how things in the present-day U.S. seem to be going as seen by most "Joe Average"-type Americans, who (unlike ultrawealthy people such as Marc Andreessen or Jack Welch) neither have nor ever will earn a living by working in upper-management and/or enterpreneurship and/or professional investment.

Next, here's a personal story:

I've watched in despair as lots of my own coworkers in the private sector (note, working conditions for public-sector employees are a lot better than what I'm about to describe here, due to labor unions such as SEIU) have spent only somewhere around 4 to 6 years working in any given engineering/technical job role (as opposed to a managerial role) before leaving that role in one of these 4 ways: being promoted upwards into management, or moving "sideways" within the org chart (i.e. moving from one internal "team" to another), or moving to a separate project within the same company, or leaving the company altogether. Why do they do that? Because climbing the corporate ladder is a major life goal for them, isn't that why?!

And for those employees who care more about long-term maintainability of a codebase than (so-called) "career advancement", guess what happens: work turns into a never-ending barrage of "oops, it's 5:30 PM, but this problem we discovered at the last minute, and you must fix it TONIGHT, and stay up all night long working on it if necessary" demands from bosses!

Consequently, the developers with the most working knowledge of the codebase suffer from severe burnout, and long-term maintainability of codebases falls by the wayside. In other words: when the turnover rate of employees is that high, the company's institutional knowledge deteriorates, causing code rot to set in, until finally the entire codebase is so messy/incomprehensible that it must be thrown away in its entirety. Lack of long-term maintainability is what led to the downfall of dBASE, and also to the original Netscape Navigator codebase (that is, Navigator's codebase as it was before the changeover "from the old layout engine to the new layout engine (Gecko/Raptor) [which] constituted an almost-total rewrite of the browser").

That is how software development is actually done in the milieu of big business today. And if new government regulations were to strangle all hobbyist-oriented forge sites (like Codeberg and invent.kde.org) with red tape, then that would likely prevent any new software project that values long-term maintainability like this one:

No manager of a [Linux] kernel developper can say "I know it's half baked but merge it now beacuse marketing wants it" and Linux largely maintains the "it'll ship when it's ready" and "longterm maintability is important" mindsets that are missing in most commercial projects.

…from ever being created in the future. You've said that you want government regulations to "bring control and responsibility into the IT industry", but kicking all hobbyist-developed software off of forge sites, or fining all of the forge sites (or the individual hobbyists hosting their work there) into bankruptcy, will just have the effect of putting big business in charge of most or all software development, where they do everything not in a controlled-and-responsible way, and instead do everything this way: "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead; we don't care if it's buggy, just get this thing done RIGHT NOW!"

> If you seriously think that I have this level of influence then you need to have your head examined.

Maybe books such as the aforementioned "Chokepoint Capitalism" (and its authors), along with activist organizations such as the FSFE (which, I'd say, is much more effective in getting their message out to the general public than the American FSF has been for a long time by now), might influence the actions of regulators/legislators in European countries that reject the U.S. style of so-called "laissez-faire capitalism" (especially Germany).

And, aside from that, it sure looks like you have a tendency towards pro-"mass market consumer electronics" / anti-"old-fashioned desktop Linux" partisanship, ever since that time in 2011 when you said (to someone who, apparently, was one of the HP webOS developers) "The standard phrase applies: you [referring to corbet] don't exist", and also when you said that "most users value "pretty pixels" way, way, WAY above network transparency".

(That's similar to the "user-friendliness to Joe Average User must be priority #1" kind of rhetoric that Apple fans were known for in the '80s and '90s, and despite that, the Macintosh got soundly trounced in the marketplace by the more bricoleur-friendly option — that being Wintel PCs — that gave rise to Linux during that same era… which in turn recently led to the Steam Deck, which for now at least appears to be a commercial success story.)

Having read those and also this, it gives an impression of motivated reasoning like this: "you can't make a business out of [supporting niche use-cases*] since there are no money in it**". When viewed in that light, a lot of your comments could plausibly be read as FUD and/or Stop Energy directed towards hobbyist-developed FOSS projects.

(*: in that instance, the use-case in question was reading email on a smartphone from a self-hosted IMAP server with a self-signed TLS certificate.)

(**: although, to be fair, you did acknowledge that "certain niche markets appeared where GPLv3 is not considered large enough liability to try such software" that time.)

> And you know it, or else you wouldn't have been so angry.

No, I don't know that the CRA will be bad for forge sites, and neither do you. And neither do several other LWNers who've posted comments about the CRA… but at least they seem to have first-hand knowledge of how European laws (about liability for selling defective products) work, so I suspect that they are correct about how the CRA will play out in practice, and that the Apache Software Foundation is incorrect.

(And as for the angry tone: I meant that to be directed toward the "Big Five" companies and big businesses in general, not towards EU legislators.)

> If that's true then it just means that there would be a different law later, which would bring control and responsibility into the IT industry.

"[Bringing] control and responsibility into the IT industry" shouldn't involve "making it possible for forge sites to be sued into oblivion", as far as I'm concerned… whereas it should involve cutting the Big Five down to size.

> Wow. So much cope.

If you're implying that I'm worried about the CRA in Europe, then you're mistaken (as I explained above).

OTOH, it does look like someone at Google is worried that FOSS might pose a threat to their business model, and if that worry spreads to the board-of-directors, then they might start lobbying the notoriously big-business-friendly U.S. federal government to allow them to (as jwz said) "rule the world forever"… but on the other other hand, some U.S. legislators want a 2020s-era version of this to be imposed on the "Big Five" tech corpos, and no one knows which side will get to have things their way…

> No, there are no such danger.

That contradicts your earlier claim that "there would be a different law later". It also contradicts this ("if you are creating a GitHub page and write README there then now you are marketing something [and therefore you will be held legally liable for bugs under the Cyber Resilience Act]") and this ("That, by necessity implies that large open source “forges”, if, maybe, not individual contributors, would have to deal with liabilities.").

> Or maybe there is, but that part is pretty much minor and insignificant. We have just arrived at the time where products made by hobbyists would stop being used by non-hobbyists.

That's (conditionally) OK with me, as long as it remains possible for these 2 kinds of events to continue happening in the future:

A large (though maybe not exactly huge) company like Valve can put on the market a consumer-electronics product whose pre-installed software includes a Linux distro derived from one that's written by hobbyists with a desktop environment that's also written by hobbyists; and,
someone like this developer can develop a FOSS-licensed microblog web-app that (6 years out from its initial release) gains enough users to make it famous enough for The Guardian to publish news stories about it & for its original developer to found a gGmbH non-profit organization dedicated to continuing its development… and then someone like this hobbyist developer can come along later and develop a forum/link-aggregator web app that's interoperable with the aforementioned microblogging app and which eventually has a bunch of non-profit orgs like this old one which began as a dialup BBS all the way back in 1987 running instances of it.

In conclusion, here's one more quotation from ESR, this time taken from the front page of his personal website:

I will not tolerate having general-purpose computing hardware, which should be an instrument of liberation and creativity, reduced to a locked-down delivery pipe for "content". By trying to cripple my tools, the big-media machine has made me its enemy. DRM delenda est!

You keep saying that, since 1998 up through the present, there exist "separate well-defined “open source camps” and “free software camps”", and (at least implicitly) that the "open source camp" is pro-corporate whereas the "free software camp" is anti-corporate. But that ESR quotation goes to show that the original "Open Source camp" was never 100% pro-corporate, and that their general ethos, sensibilities, and worldview are much different from the (in jwz's terminology) "captains of industry" who are in charge of Google, Facebook, etc.

It's a shame, though, that ESR is a capital-L Libertarian, because that minor U.S. political party's economic policy preference (i.e. "laissez-faire" capitalism) is basically the main reason why both "the big-media machine" and the current Big Five U.S. tech companies were able to gain so much political power in the first place. Anyone who wants to have a hobbyist-friendly national economy ought to look to the parts of the world from which Linux and KDE (which might qualify as being the "top two" most famous hobbyist-developed FOSS projects) as the model to follow, and push for this kind of corporate governance to be mandated by law worldwide.

KDE devs & other hobbyist programmers, beware: some "captains of industry" see you as a threat to their business models

Posted Jan 26, 2024 23:09 UTC (Fri) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link] (1 responses)

Just a small addition to your comprehensive response.

The real deal about the Employee participation in Germany is the workers council, which has a lot more power (They have co-decision or veto rights on things like including, but not limited to: work time, measues controlling workers, worker protection, (Paid) time off rates, firing of employees...)

They're actually called Works Councils in english and exist in many European countries, though they are the strongest in Germany. There's even a Works Council Directive. CxOs in English speaking countries have a hard time distinguishing them from unions but they have distinct roles. The Works Council represents the workers in the business and the goal is to improve the running of the business whereas unions are more focussed on the workers. From personal experience being on a Works Council having to decide whether to approve the firing of a significant number of colleagues to save the business is no fun at all. And that's just in the Netherlands where they're not as strong.

99% of the benefit of a Works Council is the mere fact that management actually has to motivate their decisions and it's surprising how many CxO-level decisions have no more motivation and analysis behind them than fits on a back of a postage stamp. Getting more than a slide-deck the first time round is rare. Once management can actually articulate what they want, the proposal is almost always a good idea.

As an aside, people seem to confuse the terms liability and responsibility with respect to the CRA. When it comes to fixing bugs in Apache, of course the Apache Core Team is responsible. No else has commit rights, so no-one else can fix them in the Apache source. That's different from the responsibility of a manufacturer to deploy any fixes. And completely different from liability which arises from the breaking of specific promises. The CRA is not about that your product in 100%-bug free. That's not possible, just like 100% error free hardware products don't exist. What matters is the process behind it: preventing, finding, reporting, fixing (security) bugs and deploying those fixes. All of which have had well known "best practices" for years, we just don't do them.

work turns into a never-ending barrage of "oops, it's 5:30 PM, but this problem we discovered at the last minute, and you must fix it TONIGHT, and stay up all night long working on it if necessary" demands from bosses!

I'm so glad I've never worked in a place like that. I can't be held to deadlines that I did not agree to. If I gave a deadline and got it wrong, that's on me. But more often it's: that sound you're hearing? That's the sound of your deadline flying past. I honestly don't understand what motivates managers to give deadlines without asking the people who have to do the work if they're even feasible.

KDE devs & other hobbyist programmers, beware: some "captains of industry" see you as a threat to their business models

Posted Jan 27, 2024 8:59 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

I sort of had one of those (it's very rare) last night.

"Something has messed up in our team, and tomorrow will break if we don't put it right".

Don't get me wrong, it's a great place to work, and there is a STRONG management recognition that our practices are broken. As far as I can tell, this particular incident was a bugfix that seemed to work, but then made matters worse. So we just reverted it.

But when a large amount of your work is "we just need tomorrow to happen!", then the odd thing like this does come along :-) I'm desperately trying to reduce technical debt, but when we have a huge database implemented in Excel VBA, there are limits ...

Chers,
Wol

KDE devs & other hobbyist programmers, beware: some "captains of industry" see you as a threat to their business models

Posted Jan 29, 2024 14:09 UTC (Mon) by geert (subscriber, #98403) [Link]

> (Also note: the earliest version of KDE's HTML rendering engine was part of kfm (KDE File Manager). I'm not sure what its exact release date was… maybe July 1998 (KDE 1.0) or March 1999 (KDE 1.1)?

Probably the former, as it was present in the first version of KDE I tried, which must have been just before or at the 1.0 release.
Typing a full URL in the file manager's path dialog box and seeing the rendered web page was very cool, and impressed quite a few of my friends!

KDE devs & other hobbyist programmers, beware: upper management at FAANG hates your guts

Posted Jan 24, 2024 14:28 UTC (Wed) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link]

> Whichever corporation you might have believed was your ally (against Microsoft, or against AOL/CompuServe/Prodigy et al.) during any of the past 3 decades is probably your enemy right now.

Businesses do not have feelings. They have always acted in what they think are their best interests. I think all open-source developers develop because they think it's in their best interests in some way. Open-source is where it is because sufficiently many people and businesses think it's better than the alternatives.

If FAANG are contributing to open-source, it's because they believe its the best thing for their bottom line.

> Consequently, right now there's a danger that some people with deep pockets might try to lobby national governments into strangling those hobbyist-led FOSS projects with red tape!

Hobbyist developers are basically on the same level as hobby model train builders, or you paying the neighbours kid to clear your gutters: in theory it would be great if they followed regulations, but there's no public policy reason to spend any effort on it. And no legal avenue to enforce it either.