How to devalue a project and it's community.

Ancient History

At the turn of the century, I was in the middle of an industrial placement in a Corporate Office. As part of the placement I got to experience two different aspects of the infrastructure that a large corporate needed at that time.

For the first six months I got to play around in the business information unit. Kinda training folks how to navigate the file structures in the company drives. We were also librarians who's job it was to order information from Document Archives. I got to coordinate a Document Management system Pilot which lasted the whole year.

The second half of the placement was downstairs near the server rooms in the applications group. I got to learn how to package software for the companies common desktop. I got to sit in change control meetings to understand the importance of not breaking our systems as it would disrupt the company operations. I had my own services to manage and not break, including the antivirus update that went to 300 desktops in the UK group. For a twenty year old student, I felt this was a pretty big deal. They put a lot of trust in me.

I learned that infrastructure's job was to be a stable foundation for the companies processes to run on. I kept that lesson with me.

Time went on, gradually, I had a sense of those very foundations starting to be replaced by sand. It started with the process of Dev Ops. The era of “Move fast and Break things” broke the promise of Infrastructure.

I'm old fashioned, I always felt that software needed to be tested and released only after ensuring it doesn't break user systems and processes. Over the years we've seen interfaces change seemly on a whim. We've seen our functionality be taken away as our ability to easily access the controls is abstracted away from us more and more. Our infrastructure isn't stable any more.

Users generally want stuff to just work and not change too much. Which I know from being on the ground in user support for decades while keeping our infrastructure services running without too much change. If the infrastructure had been sand I wouldn't have had the time to provide the support to end users that they needed.

I wouldn't have had the time to have the empathy for end users. As I look around our landscape, I'm seeing a huge lack of empathy for this next generation of end users.

Does the FOSS social contract exist?

I used to think that it did exist, but now I'm not so sure.

My understanding was that Developers put up their software to give to the world and a community formed around it. Everyone had something to bring, even folks who weren't involved in public. I mean that. FOSS used to spread through word of mouth and hobbyist doing activism in their other communities, weither those communities wanted it or not.

I'm not kidding, I've had to smooth over a new clients contact attitude when I mention Open Source. Sometimes I even succeeded. I've helped to run mixed environments. Nowadays I'm not sure I should have. I'm not so sure we did ourselves any favours with our current crop of software stacks. It's all becoming a little tainted by the fascism, our politics does inform our tech. You cannot separate tech from the Politics of the people who create that tech.

Perhaps I can see a little clearer now.

There's an attitude from some Devs who seem to feel that users are a black hole who will always demand more and never contribute back.

Which is puzzling to me. Were you not the folks who always seemed to show disdain for folks still on Windows? Were you not campaigning for Free Software as an alternative solution to proprietary software?

Oh silly me, some of you never were. You were content to scream RTFM at folks who are new and don't understand how to ask the question. Some of you even idolised the Bastard Operator from Hell, and like I did as well in my early twenties before I came to FOSS.

I think I'm fortunate as the folks I've directly worked with providing services to end users using FOSS software helped me to develop my empathy. To appreciate the Devs and the folks who kept using our services for as long as we cared to give them. Now I'm in a small FOSS project and trying to build something better.

It would be a lot easier if the systems we're using to do our project work didn't feel like they are eroding from under us. I work for a small FOSS project. We're a Human Rights Project masquerading as a FOSS project. So the ideologies of the folks we work with matter. The hardware we choose as our next daily drivers matter, on the very rare occasion we have to replace them. We do not replace our machines until they are unrepairable and so dead. We still have some systems from 2011. Which in this economy and well, for the climate is a must.

We've always ran our infrastructure longer than most. Partly because we wanted to lessen disruption. Some of our clients ran infrastructure from the nineties. Outside of our web focused landscape that's normal. Some offices run systems that are older.

We've always been infrastructure focused, and that includes what end users use as their daily drivers. It's why until last year I was still helping folks who ran windows, despite running my desktop and my servers on Linux since 2006.

I started using KDE because of Kubuntu, Ubuntu was the first distro for me that felt easy to use and easy to setup. I installed it on an old HP laptop that couldn't run windows anymore. That laptop ran Linux for several years, until it couldn't power up.

Ubuntu also had a period of stability. Last year I switched to Debian and chose to keep using KDE. Short term I'll keep using them. Long term, well I'm looking with great interest at the work that the MNT Reform community are doing to reduce LLMs being in their ecosystem. There's already folks in that community looking at creating a NetBSD image and others looking at the rest of the stack.

Community is what matters

I also like the community that is forming around the MNT Reform ecosystem. It's on IRC and runs a discourse.

Community is what drew me in from Windows land. Folks willing to help and ask questions and be pesky users. The fact there was an environment that folks could ask these questions and the fact that the questions were not limited to the specific community spaces. It felt like the cool areas of fandom, where folks were happy and sharing. Folks just helping each other and creating things for other folks to enjoy.

With generative AI, it feels like we've forgotten that. But the LLM discourse has been useful for one thing. It's reminded us of the rot that's ALWAYS been through STEM. The attitude of you should be grateful and not complain about what I'm giving you for free. Unless you contribute directly and visibly then we can freely ignore you.

Which ignores the support work in our communities outside our public spaces. You will never see the in person support of an install party. Or the folks loading Linux on their parent's and children's hardware.

But let's turn back to the idea of FOSS devs putting up their code for free.

It often wasn't for free. When a project gets big enough, folks can charge for support. They get a platform, some power and we give it to them. Because we need our daily drivers. We need our software stack. We can't just go and live in the woods because the stack is in the very fabric of our modern societies.

It's infrastructure. We've put our stuff out there and people use it. That code becomes infrastructure. Except now It's sand and with LLMs we're putting more loose sand in with the extra benefits of fascist aligned technology.

So forgive me, If I a mere end user who contributed nothing back would like FOSS projects to consider not allowing AI code into their codebases and therefore my infrastructure.

Clearly I have contributed nothing back specifically to various projects, other than quietly advocating for FOSS (including KDE) and undoing the reputational damage that FOSS folks did to our community by advocating for Open Source to my clients. I wasn't aware that the social contract had to extend to contributing to all projects.

Some of us won't make that mistake again. You're clearly better off without us scolding you.

Time for some of us to build our infrastructure elsewhere and to support folks that won't allow fascists in the bar.

Community thoughts and a wish for accessibility affordances – @onepict@chaos.social