Post #1748318

"Learning from mistakes" as individuals is hard if those lessons are not (or can not be) percolated up or are even rejected by larger groups or society in general, if the behaviors one might consider a mistake on a personal/ethical level are actually rewarded and encouraged (or imposed) by those larger social structures. So many people have tried so hard for so long to share their knowledge and tools, trying to teach & inspire others, to build communities to help make the world at least a tiny better, enabling people to do more with their tech than just consuming or being "entertained". People have been sacrificing years and hard-earned savings to keep the work/projects/momentum going... only to have these efforts being outright stolen & upended now, declared meaningless, and at the same time being called to our faces "entitled", "self-important", "gate keeping" for attempting to retain some form of humanity in these projects (all phrases taken from an email received on weekend about my anti-LLM stance for my own 200+ projects — always so amazing for motivation! 😭) Has this all been meaningless? The same entities who've been benefiting the most from 20-30 years of this culture of openness, are now regularly talking about it as weakness, "supply chain risk" and "threat vector"... People who've never ever run a project themselves are just as happy to chip in with this narrative. Sure enough, mistakes were made, many of them (a small selection): A large mistake was to systematically devalue our own labor, to believe a participatory, postspectacular[1] society would be possible, that more people/orgs would not just consume, but actively participate, reciprocate, feed back, wanting to learn/build together, to create & co-own their tools of production and seeing the true value of that. Of course, not everyone is able to divert time & energy, but many more people/orgs/unis/govts would and should have been! Support for these projects can take so many different forms! Instead it's always been left to so few people to do it all... and then punish them (in many direct/indirect forms) for trying (or not being perfect)! A mistake was not to set strict boundaries early on what these shared assets/knowledge could be used for and by whom. We allowed large corporations (and countless smaller bad players[2]) to harvest the fruits of our labor as free, high-quality raw material, them never contributing anything back. We didn't organize to demand more rights, have proper legal frameworks or even interest from larger society to help creating or enforcing terms & constraints. For years, we were labeled naive altruists and were stuck with the issues of existing FLOSS licenses which were written by people who (mostly) explicitly rejected any ethical/moral constraints of use and instead sold this lack as "freedom to use for any purpose", a core pillar of these licenses. A mistake was to believe a culture of resource-poor decentralized entities could meaningfully influence or even outcompete the centralized infinitely funded structures whose ONLY interest is in exploitation, sustaining/cementing/expanding their own imposed hierarchy and grasp of power/control at all costs. These mistakes (and many more) are all fractal in nature, from the individual, projects, to governments and entire cultures... If you personally or organizationally have benefited from open source culture, but never once acted on any of the above, you're simply part of the problem and the mistakes made! It's time to learn from them, together, and before it's too late (if it isn't already)... If you want to keep on benefiting from open source culture (not the corporate or agent-regurgitated neo-interpretation), get active, show some support to the projects and esp. people involved, in whatever form or gesture you can! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle [2] Over the past 25+ years, I know of at least that many businesses & people who built their entire early careers on my open source work, without ever contributing, donating or acknowledging... #OpenSource #Culture