Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

@slightlyoff My experience was that the early Node.js/npm package ecosystem very much had shared values where it was about more than just software distribution (although the exact values varied from person to person, but typically fairly radical), but that that part of the ecosystem kind of got overshadowed as it got caught up in a hype cycle, and a heavier and heavier emphasis came to be placed on "products", glossy marketing pages, frameworks that promised to do it all, and so on.

It definitely felt like there was a significant cultural shift that the ecosystem has never really recovered from, towards a much more individualistic culture where people do open-source because it helps their career or markets their company, rather than to be of help to others. Which seems to match up with what you're describing, except it wasn't just on the frontend!

I feel like at some point we need an explicit collective label that means "FOSS for ethical reasons", as opposed to "FOSS for practical reasons", or even more specifically the "in the public interest" you mention. Open-source vs. free software isn't really cutting it there either, as it's tied up in copyleft associations and there's plenty of the ethics-free stuff over in free software land too...

(Ironically a lot of the 'modern', hype-y ethics-free tooling is still built on the legacy of the early JS ecosystem, without ever really acknowledging it or the ethics that originally were associated with it. Very frustrating.)

I know that there are complicated economic theories about what determines inflation and wealth and such, and that particularly capitalists love claiming that it's a really complex system, but every time I've looked into that supposed complexity, almost all of it was just proxy metrics for something really simple.

So... is inflation actually influenced by anything *other than* the relation between 'amount of money in the economy' and 'change in wealth inequality'? Or is it just all smoke and mirrors again?

(Please do not repeat economics textbooks at me, I'm looking for a well-reasoned answer that approaches the topic critically, not "everybody knows that..." type answers)

Please, tech people, learn the lesson that startups and other tech companies will only hire you and fund your 'social good' work for as long as it makes business sense for them, regardless of what they promise, and that you really do actually need to build your own community infrastructure that doesn't rely on corporate funding!

Sure, if someone offers a bag of money that can be put to good use, and accepting it doesn't come with strings, go for it - but you really need to be working on your own thing in parallel instead of expecting your employer to keep bankrolling things forever. Corporations are not your allies in social matters, no matter how friendly a face they put on.

(This was inspired by a toot elsewhere but is not intended as a subtoot of that - I've been seeing this pattern for years now and most people don't seem to be learning from it)

Every once in a while there are calls to "pay/charge for your FOSS software because developers" need to eat, and while that's true, it's not really that simple either.

Poverty can be seen from (at least) two perspectives; income and expense. On the one hand poverty can mean having no or insufficient income, or being a victim of eg. labour theft. But it can also mean being unable to afford the things you need, or them being so expensive that you don't have enough money left for other things.

These are really one and the same thing when it comes down to it, but the point I am trying to make here is that there's more to it than just not getting paid. For example, consider people who use FOSS software *because* they cannot afford to pay for software.

None of this changes that developers need to eat, and that people should be paid for their work, but it *does* mean that you should think carefully about *how* to do it - maybe charging a flat purchasing fee is not the right option. Pay what you want? Income-dependent cost? Donations? Regional pricing? Free licenses under certain conditions?

There are lots of possible ways to approach this in a way that the developers are fairly compensated *and* you are not excluding people from your community or software based on their wealth; but the important thing is that you actually think about the right option here, and don't just leave it at "charge for the software and consider the problem solved".

Likewise, how are you dealing with dependencies? It's easy to charge for end-user software, but charging for libraries is much more difficult - even though those often do a lot of the heavy lifting, and a lot of expertise and work has gone into their development. How will you ensure that *their* developers get to eat too?

You don't need to always get everything right the first time, but be cautious of simplistic narratives that only say "pay people for their work" and leave you to draw the rest of the owl. There's a lot more to it than that.

Reading this guide about DHTs (slightly paraphrased)...

"Imagine you uh, want to share books with friends, and uh, you need to keep track of who has what books. And your friend group is a million people large.

This is a contrived example, but uh, oh by the way look at IPFS which is cool"