Criticisms and choices
Paul Boddie
paul at boddie.org.uk
Thu Mar 17 16:57:46 UTC 2022
On Thursday, 17 March 2022 09:54:42 CET Bernhard E. Reiter wrote:
> Hi Paul,
>
> to me your statements are too general to lead to more insights.
> You draw specific conclusions from observations made on a much larger scale,
> so I cannot see a valid chain of arguments.
> The follow paragraph is an example, but others display the same problem.
I know what you are saying - that I have made claims but provided few specific
examples or evidence - but having been editing a certain collaborative Web
site over the last couple of years, and having chased down citations for lots
of claims and assertions (or, alternatively, correcting what has been written
and also providing citations), I didn't necessarily feel that I had to
multiply the amount of time spent writing what was a fairly casual message in
order to take it to that other level.
> Am Mittwoch 16 März 2022 16:33:05 schrieb Paul Boddie:
> > There's a pervasive attitude in Free Software thanks to the influence of
> > broader commercial and social culture, particularly American-style
> > capitalism,
>
> A lot of Free Software initiatives are located around the world,
> e.g. KDE is very strong in Europe.
>
> Here are some numbers on geographic distribution of Free Software
> contributers and it shows that the US is contributing less then a fourth
> (<25%) so it is 75% from the rest of the world.
> (See table 1 of Wachs, et. al 2020 [1])
I was imprecise by saying American-style capitalism. What I actually meant was
"West Coast capitalism". In other words, a culture that promotes aggressive
competition and the rapid growth of businesses at the expense of healthy
competition...
> To me it is unlikely and unplausible that "American-style capitalism"
> is the decisive influence of a "pervasive attitude" in the Free Software
> movement and leads to
>
> > where there apparently has to be a winner and, therefore, losers.
This is not about where the contributors are, but about the dominant cultural
mindset, rooted in myths about technological progress and the companies
involved. I have just spent two years in academia again, albeit in a support
role as opposed to actually doing research. What is increasingly evident (and
has been for some time) is the prevalence of the West Coast paradigm in
academia and educational institutions, and in more than one respect.
Firstly, universities are now "incubators" for start-up companies,
"innovation" and commercial exploitation. Read the pontification of university
executives and while they may talk about noble things like academic freedom,
collaboration and the traditional "bread and butter" issues of such
institutions, what mostly seems to excite them is the potential for
researchers to monetise their research and make lots of cash. Of course, one
cannot merely make lots of money without denying others the chance to do the
same, so naturally the "intellectual property office" has to be involved to
patent everything.
Parallel to this particular stream of influence is the effect on the tools and
technologies used by the students, researchers and institutions themselves. It
is quite evident that where computing technology is concerned, most of the
people concerned pick and choose the latest and greatest brand-name products
without any further thought about what such choices entail. Some of that is
driven by supposed economic necessity: why invest in solutions when you can
buy them?
So, one encounters a pantheon of different tools and solutions (Google
products, Microsoft products, Zoom, Slack, Mattermost and so on), some of
which are actually not supposed to be used due to privacy and security issues,
but does that stop anyone? In my experience, even institutionally approved
tools can end up on the list of forbidden products, but that is hardly a
surprise when people lobby so hard to get their hands on the latest toys.
Even in the more mundane area of getting work done in the field of writing
software, there is a parade of tools that emerge and become the new best
thing, obviously at the expense of what existed before. Some of them do
address use-cases which need addressing, but others are just seeking to
displace existing solutions in order to chase revenue.
For example, Docker became the fashionable solution for distributing software
(never mind that practically all containers are based on existing software
distributions), but then there was Singularity and this was the hot new thing,
although it has now been forked by the Linux Foundation and renamed Apptainer.
(Do keep up!) Meanwhile, the Python-related software distribution companies
who have never willingly collaborated sensibly with operating system
distributions are trying to carve out maximal market share: today, Anaconda is
the darling, but ActiveState wants to reclaim the throne.
> For communication software like instant messangers (and chat rooms)
> this can also be explained by the
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
> and it is not limited to Free Software or software.
>
> And it is very natural. Your personal choice is under pressure if many of
> your peers or people you want to communicate with are on a certain
> platform. So even without any suggested special attitude there is a
> competition. And competition can be a good thing as it creates choice.
> (It can also be a bad thing, this depends on more factors, I won't expand on
> this here and yet, just explain why your argument is not conclusive.)
Of course the network effect explains why people want to use particular
technologies, but you don't get a network effect without building a critical
mass to start with. And the way people usually believe that this might be done
is to get "mindshare" at the expense of the competition, because all the
investment that is required in hosting such platforms needs to pay off at some
point, and that isn't likely to be forthcoming if a company is not
"dominating" a particular market.
Obviously, if there were broader investment in infrastructure and an
investment paradigm that did not demand stratospheric rates of return (due to
most investments being so speculative that they fail), investors would settle
for less and be more tolerant of the existence of viable competitors. As I
noted before, it was rather telling that when "open" Facebook competitors
emerged, Diaspora was anointed as the chosen one, following the familiar
narrative of one winner and everyone else the loser.
> Hope it is helpful to see why most of your writings do not convince me and
> they are often not specific enough to be able to answer them without a lot
> of time and research.
>
> I'd profit from shorter contribution that cover more specific details
> or arguments drawn on your knowledge.
I could certainly get into the details on some of these topics, but I don't
have all day to spend doing so. Maybe it is my fault for raising broad topics
and writing so much about them in the first place.
I actually think that it is pretty uncontroversial to say that consumerism,
which definitely intersects with capitalism, American or otherwise, is
pervasive, influential, and motivates people's behaviour. Indeed, I think that
unless one is living in a society that is very different to those most readers
of this list are living in, the burden should be on anyone to claim the
opposite.
Paul
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