professionalization

Open source as a hobby has a right to exist. If I put some fancy tricks in a repo for all to see and can't be fucked to write a readme, I have not Done A Crime. If a million folks want to use that code, there is still no obligation to productize it, though we might struggle to resist the sense that we have to.

A top down demand that opensource behave in "businesslike" ways in order to be more amenable to capitalism is a complete violation of the spirit of open source. It is akin to a demand that we all annotate our code to be training data for those who wish to exploit and replace us.

verified identity

Open source should not depend on you knowing my government name, or on me "disclosing" my identity to some escrow business like github.

Among myriad reasons (lets not rehash the facebook real name policy), these sorts of proposals are always harmful to trans folks.

lest you mistake this for alarmism, "software supply chain" was the reason github gave when they forced me, a mostly noncontributing rando, into 2FA. I am more afraid of losing access to my account if I lose my phone than of being hacked. as a friend said, I am my own threat model. why am I being held to corporate standards?

forging a maintainer class

Maintaining software is undeniably a skill in it's own right. However, stratifying who gets to write code and who must "do the work" in an echo of IT vs devs, QA vs devs, tech writers vs devs, release engineers vs devs, etc. seems to be more about a) lowering the wages of some labor and b) preserving the status and "fun" of software development.

We should resist efforts to subdivide our community, even into users vs developers.

"the police"

I saw this pop up at least once, though not as stridently as in the wake of police executions or #metoo disclosures.

I have to laugh because given the international nature of open source and who has the greatest claims over "cybersecurity", it would seem an intelligence agency is a more likely responder :host-shock:


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