/tech/ - Technology

yes
coding being seen as an identity revolving around boring PMC incels was a disaster

>>13845
They were always the same. Still are. I'm an old nerd. And there are all sorts among nerds just like in any other field, you have people ranging from being white supremacists to being non-white immigrants.
The tech environment was also similar, only you had IBM, Microsoft, Unix vendors, etc. instead of Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, etc.

The difference is that the political climate of today is way more polarized so if you don't choose a side you're automatically assumed to be the enemy. Case in point
>>13850
>coding being seen as an identity revolving around boring PMC incels
The only people who think this are terminally online twitteroids looking for people it's acceptable to hate so they ascribe this identity to programmers despite programming being probably one of the most diverse fields with plenty of contributors from
all around the world, and on the other end actual PMC incels on places like /g/ adopting it like some badge of honor and rejecting anyone not like themselves as not being a real programmer but some webdev troon or a pajeet codecoolie.
It's not the reality as can be seen from a glace at any tech company or project, but it's very convenient for a lot of people to believe in.

>>13880
>codecoolie
Damn, that's a new term to me.

>>13880
i'm talking about chauvinistic PMC's with unwarranted elitism, yes

Free software is accidentally leftist. The Stallman fsf types have always been libertarian meritocracy believers. The whole rock star programmer shit was a trap.

>>13887
i find it pretty hard to believe there’s lolbertarian or meritocracy ideology behind the free software movement. it’s underrated how widely derided they are even among “hacker” circles specifically for how much they demand software to be open, to the detriment of capitalist interests, and the backlash is stronger than ever now

>>13887
Extremely ignorant post. FSF types have typically been either progressive liberals or outright leftists.

http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/dcm.html

They're still there OP. They're just lurking for the right topic.
A few weeks back, and exquisite piece of nerdbait dropped, and the oldfags swarmed out and mogged the new-things-good zoomers with overwhelmingly superior tech knowledge.
It was comfy and nostalgic, and took me back 20 years.

>>13890
>i find it pretty hard to believe there’s libertarian or meritocracy ideology behind the free software movement
What do you think the BSD license is?
<Here's my code, I couldn't figure out how to monotize it but if you can then good luck. May the best fork win.

>>14021
that’s why you use GPL

>>14021
>What do you think the BSD license is?
The free software movement generally encourages the use of the GPL over BSD and other permissive licences.

>>14051
BSD predates anything GNU.

when i think "technology nerds of old", i dont think of these khaki wearing doofuses
the original hacking culture was wiped out by AT&T and IBM back in the 70s and 80s

>>14066
>i dont think of these khaki wearing doofuses
so to be a true nerd you need to be a slob?

>>14133
back to your cubicle wagie

>>14137
i dont wear chinos because im a "wagie", i do it because im post-punk

>>13887
It's weird to apply those labels to FSF types. I think anti-corporate is a better descriptor, not necessarily pro or anti capitalist.

>>14379
they’re not anti-corporate by any means. stallman has defended capitalist firms and GPL code is regularly used by corps

>>13892
They're just liberals. At best, Free Software was always reformist to its core. Their leveraging of bourgeois copyright law against Silicon Valley (especially after the creation of the Linux kernel) was not too dissimilar from the Luddites petitioning British industrialists after setting fire to their mills. Richard Stallman wanted to preserve the experimental atmosphere he enjoyed while working as a graduate student at MIT. Proprietary software proletarianizes programmers (say that three times fast, lol), and I think he's always been implicitly aware of this. But his insistence on 'moral' over 'pragmatic' arguments is why over 40 years have passed and we've got nothing to show for it.

>>14382
The moment someone writes an actual, comprehensive critique of intellectual property as private property will be the moment the FOSS movement can finally move past itself.

>>14382
>over 40 years have passed and we've got nothing to show for it
I don't know what in the fuck you're talking about but I use libre software on a daily basis.

>>14387
>I use libre software on a daily basis.
So does he. He's just too ignorant to know how many routers, dns servers, cdns and web servers running open source software are between him and his facebook cat memes.
>my PC runs Windows therefor Windows is the only thing that exists

>>14382
>Richard Stallman wanted to preserve the experimental atmosphere he enjoyed
That's wrong. Stallman started GNU because a printer driver stopped working and because it was closed source he couldn't just look at the code and fix it himself. The purpose of open source is to have full control over the software you depend on, instead of being at the mercy of a 3rd party to fix problems and keep it updated.

>>14382
I don't understand this insistance by some anons of /leftypol/ to shit on Stallman and the free software movement whenever possible, under the pretext that he is a lib or a lolbert.
What the fuck do you want? You think Stallman should have been LARPing as a hardline ML instead of being a left-wing hippie? Nobody would have taken him seriously if he did back in the 1980s.
Btw, I remember Stallman writing in an email that he liked Marx (but not Lenin) and that his 1D waifu is Emma Goldman. What else do you fucking need?
At the time when Stallman formulated the basis of the free software project, all the Soviet Union did was copying Intel's designs for CPUs. They didn't innovate in any way whatsoever.
So shut up and appreciate the good things in life. Feel free to formulate a better way of producing software that is more socialist than GPL, but I get a feeling that you will never do so, that it's all posturing.
The greatest thing about GPL software is that it is truly leftist and radical – communize the means of production of binaries, instead of relying on trade secrets – and yet it brings together people with many different political opinions. It's something socialist that truly works within capitalism, and yet you faggots can't help but shit on it, because Stallman isn't as autistic as fucking Grover Furr. Get a life.

>>14396
>I don't understand this insistance by some anons of /leftypol/ to shit on Stallman and the free software movement whenever possible, under the pretext that he is a lib or a lolbert.
Could be purists and for them nothing that can exist in reality is ever going to be good enough. That's the most likely culprit.
For the sake of covering all the bases, there are corporate shills that don't like gpl stuff and they will use any pretext to dunk on it, tho it would be strange if any of those found their way here.

>>14383
Seems to be a pretty clear demand here:
>>13892
<The measures by which we advance that struggle will of course be different in different countries, but the following will be pretty generally applicable:
<1. Abolition of all forms of private property in ideas.

>>14396
>>14399
why do people dislike the openly anticommunist radlib?

>>14396
What are you being so sensitive about?
Do you want everyone to suck his dick in every political conversation and consider him flawless because he founded a great movement?
Get fucked.

Compare with Bernie Sanders in USA. He has done seriously impactful work in normalizing the idea of socialism in USA and I would even say in the anglosphere. He has gained a massive platform, opened millions of people to new ideas and showed the failings of both the Democrats and Republicans, breaking down the traditional left-right for many. He has even publicly praised social aspects of the socialist enemies of the USA.
He is also a capitalist revisionist.

So does me knowing Bernie is useful and helpful to the left mean that I can't complain also that he's a fucking capitalist? Of course not. You can like someone and their work without idolizing every part of their entire existence. Do you want me to clap when he eats something off his foot?

>>14405
Fair comparison with Bernie, and no, I'm not asking you to be in awe each time RMS says something autistic or eats his toejam.

However, I don't understand what you want the Free Software movement to achieve within the current material conditions.
The Free Software movement isn't a political party, it's solely concerned with software, and it doesn't have a political line outside of freeing software from restrictive licenses.
If the Free Software movement had the politics of the average /leftypol/ user, loudly proclaimed "Stalin did nothing wrong" and so on, it would have never worked, it would have been a bunch of ineffective weirdos no one would have wanted to collaborate with.

My question is: What do you want more from the Free Software movement?
That they invade the headquarters of West Coast tech companies and force them to put their source code under the GPL license at gunpoint? Good luck with that.

To me, it sounds like empty virtue signalling to say that Free Software is just a bunch of reformist liberals, so you can feel good about being holier more radical than thou on /leftypol/. It achieves nothing.
Worse than that, as >>14399 pointed out, it plays into the rhetorics of corporate shills you can sometimes see on social media like HackerNews: "If Free Software is just liberal reformism, I might as well use proprietary software and ignores FOSS as a useful tool within capitalism". I don't see the point.

The beauty of free software is that you can be a free software activist and have your own political opinions on the side. There is 0% incompatibility between free software activism and being a socialist/communist activism, despite what Stallman might have said about "actually existing socialism".

>>14404
Stallman doesn't like "actually existing socialism", but he is a socdem and pretty critical of the US foreign policy. It's alright, I'm not asking more from him, he isn't a political theorist, and at least isn't a lolbert nutjob like Eric S. Raymond. If I want communist theory, I will turn to someone else.

>>14407
>If the Free Software movement had the politics of the average /leftypol/ user, loudly proclaimed "Stalin did nothing wrong" and so on, it would have never worked
Bold of you to proclaim that currently the FSF isn't impotent as fuck too.

>>14395
I wouldn't have made that post were I not already aware of the impact the FOSS movement has had on our daily lives, and for that I'm thankful. But if you work in tech in [current year], relying on Stallman's arguments alone just makes you come across as incredibly naive.
>Stallman started GNU because a printer driver stopped working and because it was closed source he couldn't just look at the code and fix it himself.
That's not even half of it. The printer driver issue was indeed the catalyst, but Stallman and his 'hacker' colleagues at MIT's AI Lab were already showing concerns over the numerous contradictions in their workplace. What freedoms they enjoyed in a professional academic environment were constantly at odds with the demands of their university's government contractor, DARPA.
>>14396
>What the fuck do you want?
See pic related. I don't care about Grover Furr. I just wish people would more openly talk about the limits of free and open source software, and the free culture movement that formed in its wake. I grew up on (and was in part radicalized by) both and a lot of the people I looked up to in my youth still treat it as if it's the be-all end-all. These alternative networks parallel to capitalist production made up entirely of unpaid contributors are nice and all, but what can they do in the struggle for socialism? What have they done in that vein, really? In an era where tech workers are finally unionizing, what place do organizations like the FSF or hell, even Omidyar Network affiliates like the EFF have? Should they?
>>14400
While it's a wonderful demand, that's not what I meant. I'd love to see a critique of intellectual property rights / international copyright systems, and their relationship to credit. Not just a retread of the 'dotCommunist' and 'Telekommunist' manifestos. I've heard that the stuff that came outta 1960s and 1970s Italy (operaismo and autonomia) provide a great foundation for doing this, but apparently most of the post-autonomist thinkers haven't quite accomplished it yet. Makes me wonder why; I'll get to the literature soon though (I'm very close to finishing Capital v03).

>>14407
>The Free Software movement isn't a political party, it's solely concerned with software, and it doesn't have a political line outside of freeing software from restrictive licenses.
A Stallman-esque political line already sort of existed in the Pirate Parties of the late 2000s and early 2010s, but their aspirations never went beyond what was already being demanded of European social democracies at the time. Even if you fashioned yourself a Marxist-Leninist with no delusions about the efficacy of bourgeois elections, that must've been pretty underwhelming. I had much more 'anarchist' sympathies back then and still found myself disappointed.
>What do you want more from the Free Software movement? That they invade the headquarters of West Coast tech companies and force them to put their source code under the GPL license at gunpoint? Good luck with that.
I mean, that'd be a lot more exciting to be sure. I'm reminded of when people joked about the possibility of Maoist cadres raiding a Texan crypto mine and redistributing GPUs to the gamer masses, lol. You could follow in the footsteps of Joseph Konopka and start a revolutionary cell molded after the Realm of Ch@os (but communist). It's important to remember that stuff like this wasn't unrealistic even in Stallman's time—the New Communist Movement had reached its peak while he was attending Harvard and MIT, after all. If you're comfortable with fighting on a readymade battlefield where the enemies of free software continue to define (and circumvent, as was the case with open source) the rules of engagement, that's fine. Just don't come at me with the pretension that you're actually doing socialism 'within capitalism' or whatever. We should probably look at free software (and free culture) in the same way Marx analyzed the luddites and utopian socialists: well meaning radicals with some fantastic ideas, but ultimately misguided on a few key points. Which brings me back to what I said here >>14383

>>14407
>The beauty of free software is that you can be a free software activist and have your own political opinions on the side.
If you can be a free software activist and hold your own political opinions on the side; what good is your activism? It's like you're admitting to your own impotence; it's really bizarre.

>>14407
People with boring and impotent politics are so quick to call others "ultras" and "purists".
Funnily enough Stallman is considered an "extremist" by many, especially for his lifestyle of complete rejection of anything proprietary.

>>14411
>I'm reminded of when people joked about the possibility of Maoist cadres raiding a Texan crypto mine and redistributing GPUs to the gamer masses
yfw after finding out the Texas power grid is responsible for nearly half of all Bitcoin mining capacity in the US

https://web.archive.org/web/20220520123829/https://www.dallasnews.com/business/banking/2022/05/20/texas-quietly-tries-to-steal-silicon-valleys-thunder-as-the-go-to-state-for-crypto/

>>13919
What is this referencing?

Nerds of old were not all Free Software types. The original PC nerds were closer to those messing with Arduino now where micros was an advanced electronics project. By the time you get to Refund Day in 1999, the average user was far more resistant to change even among those in IT and development and you get to the point there were "nerds" that only knew Widows and were scared of Unix and Linux.