Aaron Wolf [email protected]

clearly you forgot the uppercase number

URL: http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2016/02/19/kuhns-paradox.html

I've been making the following social observation frequently in my talks and presentations for the last two years. While I suppose it's rather forward of me to do so, I've decide to name this principle:

Kuhn's Paradox

For some time now, this paradoxical principle appears to hold: each day, more lines of freely licensed code exist than ever before in human history; yet, it also becomes increasingly more difficult each day for users to successfully avoid proprietary software while completing their necessary work on a computer.

Motivations & Causes of Kuhn's Paradox

I believe this paradox is primarily driven by the cooption of software freedom by companies that ostensibly support Open Source, but have the (now extremely popular) open source almost everything philosophy.

For certain areas of software endeavor, companies dedicate enormous resources toward the authorship of new Free Software for particular narrow tasks. Often, these core systems provide underpinnings and fuel the growth of proprietary systems built on top of them. An obvious example here is OpenStack: a fully Free Software platform, but most deployments of OpenStack add proprietary features not available from a pure upstream OpenStack installation.

Meanwhile, in other areas, projects struggle for meager resources to compete with the largest proprietary behemoths. Large user-facing, server-based applications of the Service as a Software Substitute variety, along with massive social media sites like Twitter and Facebook that actively work against federated social network systems, are the two classes of most difficult culprits on this point. Even worse, most traditional web sites have now become a mix of mundane content (i.e., HTML) and proprietary Javascript programs, which are installed on-demand into the users' browser all day long, even while most of those servers run a primarily Free Software operating system.

Finally, much (possibly a majority of) computer use in industrialized society is via hand-held mobile devices (usually inaccurately described as “mobile phones”). While some of these devices have Free Software operating systems (i.e., Android/Linux), nearly all the applications for all of these devices are proprietary software.

The explosion of for-profit interest in “Open Source” over the last decade has led us to this paradoxical problem, which increases daily — because the gap between “software under a license respects my rights to copy, share, and modify” and “software that's essential for my daily activities” grows linearly wider with each sunset.

I propose herein no panacea; I wish I had one to offer. However, I believe the problem is exacerbated by our community's tendency to ignore this paradox, and its pace even accelerates due to many developers' belief that having a job writing any old Free Software replaces the need for volunteer labor to author more strategic code that advances software freedom.

... a hollywood actor tells you he loves the internet and wants to save it, the next moment you follow THE LINK and you get told the latest Firefox isn't a "modern" browser.

WTF Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

Long overdue, I'll close my Twitter account today.

I'll be as always in the #freenetworks

If you want to follow me, don't know how: email me

URL: http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2015/12/02/sjw.html

I have something to say that I'm sure everyone is going to consider controversial. I've been meaning to say it for some time, and I realize that it's going to get some annoyance from all sides of this debate. Conservancy may lose Supporters over this, even though this is my personal blog and my personal opinion, and views expressed here aren't necessarily Conservancy's views. I've actually been meaning to write this publicly for a year. I just have to say it now, because there's yet another event on this issue caused yet another a war of words in our community.

If you follow the types of Free Software politics and issues that I do (which you probably do if you read my blog) you have heard the phrase — which has become globally common in general politics — “Social Justice Warrior”, often abbreviated SJW. As anyone who reads my blog probably already knows, SJW is used as a derogatory catch-all phrase referring to anyone who speaks up to on any cause, but particularly on racial or gender inequality. While the derogatory part seems superficially to refer to tactics rather than strategic positions, nevertheless many critics who use the phrase conflate (either purposely or not) some specific, poorly-chosen tactic (perhaps from long ago) of the few with the strategic goals of an entire movement.

Anyway, my argument in this post, which is why I expect it to annoy everyone equally, is not about some specific issue in any cause, but on a meta-issue. The meta-issue is the term “SJW” itself. The first time I heard the phrase (which, given my age, feels recent, even though it was probably four years ago), I actually thought it was something good; I first thought that SJW was a compliment. In fact, I've more-or-less spent my entire adult life wanting to be a social justice warrior, although I typically called it being a “social justice activist”.

First of all, I believe deeply in social justice causes. I care about equality, fairness, and justice for everyone. I believe software freedom is a social justice cause, and I personally have proudly called software freedom a social justice cause for more than a decade.

Second, I also believe in the zealous pursuit of causes that matter. I've believed fully and completely in non-violence since the mid-1980s, but I nevertheless believe there is a constant war of words in the politics surrounding any cause or issue, including software freedom. I am, therefore — for lack of a better word — a warrior, in those politics.

So, when I look at the three words on their face: Social. Justice. Warrior. Well, denotively, it describes my lifelong work exactly.

Connotatively, a warped and twisted manipulation of words has occurred. Those who want to discredit the validity that various social justice causes have bestowed a negative connotation on the phrase to create a social environment that makes anyone who wants to speak out about a cause automatically wrong and easily branded.

I've suggested to various colleagues privately over the last two years that we should coopt the phrase back to mean something good. Most have said that's a waste of time and beside the point. I still wonder whether they're right.

By communicating an idea that these social justice people are fighting against me and oppressing me, the messenger accusing a so-called SJW has a politically powerful, well-coopted message, carefully constructed for concision and confirmation bias. While I don't believe all that cooptive and manipulative power is wielded solely in the one three-word phrase, I do believe that the rhetorical trick that allows “SJW” to have a negative connotation is the same rhetorical power that has for centuries allowed the incumbent power structures to keep their control of those many social institutions that are governed chiefly by rhetoric.

And this is precisely why I just had to finally post something about this. I won a cultural power jackpot, merely by being born a middle-class Caucasian boy in the USA. Having faced some adversity in my life despite that luck, and then seeing how easy I had it compared to the adversity that others have faced, I become furious at how the existing power structures can brand people with — let's call it what is — a sophisticated form of name-calling that coopts a phrase like “social justice”, which until that time had a history of describing some of the greatest, most selfless, and most important acts of human history.

Yes, I know there are bigger issues at stake than just the words people use. But words matter. No matter how many people use the phrase negatively, I continue to strive to be a social justice warrior. I believe that's a good thing, in the tradition of all those who have fought for a cause they believed was right, even when it wasn't popular.

I wasn't aware of this nice FreedomBox demo.

Just awesome! I need to try out the latest version again.

Didn't realize how much I missed XScreensaver until I had it back again.

Wow, OSCON EU has a keynote from a Ninh Bui and Hongli Lai from Phusion wherein they argue that (a) non-profit models of fundraising for Open Source will never work and should never be used (I have proven this wrong for decades of course), and (b) that "passive income" through proprietary software add-ons is the only revenue model that is reasonable, because you have to "work too hard" to do other models. They further claim that people who have a problem with "Open Core" proprietary add-ons are a vocal minority that won't cause you too much trouble.

TL;DR: "Proprietary software can make you wealthy so you don't have to work hard, so you should do that, and try to exploit your Open Source community. Those software freedom advocates are a minority so shout them down and they'll shut up, becuase you should be allowed to get wealthy, no matter what you have to do"