In Debt: The First 5,000 Years, anthropologist David Graeber explores the fascinating history of debt and economies. It starts out by debunking the common myth that prior to coinage, everyone were trapped in this inefficient mode of barter. If you had a chicken to give and wanted sugar from Gandalf, but Gandalf was a vegetarian, you ha...
Well, it’s early, I’m caffeinated, it’s on a topic I’m interested in, here are some takes
The author’s approach feels fairly abstract and I feel this undermines his analysis.
It’s easy enough to psychoanalyze the scarcity mindset instilled from 5,000 years of class society, but also, actual individuals who are prisoners of class society still have to pay rent.
He ignores the collective economic and political project of building a software commons – the “pay it forward” incentive of free software is that you know future work on your code will be public in a society that otherwise places absolutely no value on this. Seems kind of weird to act like capitalism’s approach to the commons isn’t a problem.
He ignores that companies all over the world, as long as companies have existed, have rapaciously exploited to the point of exhaustion every single common resource they can figure out how to tap into. The risk that open source as such could become untenable because all it does is create value for shareholders is very real.
This guy dismisses literally everybody’s ideas other than his own as irrational, psychologized reactions and tbh it’s kind of gross. His critique of Richard Stallman’s essentially libertarian take on why free software would matter is fair enough – who really wants to spend time defending Stallman anyway – but he ignores that even within the FSF Stallman is just one guy and that much of GNU and most of Free Software in general is not written or maintained by Stallman.
He also misses the exploitative dynamic – parallel to dynamics in the non-profit industrial complex and in more traditional workplaces – wherein open source software developers are guilted into maintaining core infrastructure for hundreds of software companies for free or a pittance because of everybody relying on their ever-so-important code. This is also the same tactic used against workers who might consider withholding their labor for improved working conditions – has anyone ever observed the reaction to nurses or schoolteachers going on strike? “Won’t someone please think of the patients?” “What will families do?” etc etc etc. The end result is the same – some poor person with bills to pay generates vast amounts of wealth for private capital but still barely scratches a living by.
But he also ignores the impacts on users, who are also victims of the exploitation of open-source, when companies skimp on R&D by using someone’s spare-time volunteer project without spending a dime to make sure it’s up to par and not spending a dime to make sure it’s being adequately maintained. This is how we end up at disasters like log4j. This affects working-class people’s lives literally because they have to interact with businesses that are built on top of volunteer projects that don’t have the resources to do Q&A needed for use in production. Because, again, disturbing amounts of important or critical infra are held together by volunteer projects. Why did this guy forget this aspect of the whole discussion? What companies do with their code matters because they monopolize social production.
Dismissively psychologizing any effort to resist exploitation within capitalism as “trauma from 5,000 years of class society” necessarily presupposes the people considering using a proprietarian framework (within an oppressive class society that violently coerces all of us into participating in a proprietarian framework to survive) are not being exploited and are not struggling to survive
You know who else takes the perspective that they don’t care if some company makes a fuckton of money off their work and gives nothing back? Well, academics with a bit of job security seem to be fine with it, because they keep creating permissive licenses named after their institutions – MIT, BSDL, etc – that them for their work. They don’t have to directly hack it on the market like the rest of us, so they can afford to be generous.
EDIT – also, this guy co-owns a privately held company with $7.9m in annual revenue and one of their main projects is maintaining Ruby on Rails so he is explicitly speaking from a position of like, extreme privilege and does in fact appear to be being paid for open source
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I mean, the point of open source as against free software was to make it easy to make money off of. It’s a little contradictory to turn around and call developers greedy for wanting literally exactly what big companies want from open source – value – especially when developers are trying to keep the lights on and these companies are literally just trying to extract as much value as they can.
I can’t really view this differently from, say, workers being called greedy for wanting better wages. It’s the same. Of course people want to be paid for their work, especially if they’re going to be expected to maintain something important for a private, for-profit business – or depending on the code in question, hundreds to thousands of them – especially when we still live in a capitalist society.
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Right, but my point is, they learned about the pragmatic benefits of cooperation from the ecosystem the free software movement had already pioneered for explicitly political reasons.
Free software, for all the faults of the FSF, is valuable but not just because the development model can help companies cooperate where it makes sense and soak up contributions from the community – it’s valuable because it aims to establish ecosystems of software (and increasingly hardware) that allow people to use their devices on their own terms.
But that doesn’t matter to big companies who showed up and saw – a variety of ways to lower costs by externalizing them in a variety of ways (getting other companies to underwrite part of development, using open source without contributing anything back, in Amazon’s case, copying the competition to undercut them, etc) and spun off open source into its own thing that explicitly had no higher aims regarding the need to establish a copylefted software commons to safeguard user and developer autonomy.
Showing up to an economic and political project to build a commons and turning it into a corporate cash cow in a variety of ways seems pretty inherently exploitative to me. Also, it’s not mainly about AWS creating “Amazon Basics” versions of open source software, although that’s definitely an interesting one. It’s much more about situations like, for example, how so many people used, but nobody thought to fund OpenSSL until there was a catastrophic security bug and the only explanation was “OpenSSL can afford exactly one developer to maintain mission-critical encryption software for like, everybody, because nobody contributes back.” Only then did companies start pledging money to make sure their “mission-critical” infrastructure was up to snuff.
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