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The Ethics of Unpaid Labor and the OSS Community (2013)

ashedryden.com

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Re: The Ethics of Unpaid Labor and the OSS Community (2013)

#41

Post by treve »

yaauie wrote: post #37
treve wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think 'The Hacker Community' knows that others benefiting from code you freely provide is one of the extremely obvious side effects of open sourcing. It sounds a bit like you're buying a round of beers for everyone in the bar, and then you're upset people didn't compensate you for it.

Or more likely that you're buying a round of beers for everyone in the bar, and are just frankly exhausted by the continuing flood of entitled recipients complaining about the quality and/or usefulness of the beer.

That's an entirely different problem in itself.

Re: The Ethics of Unpaid Labor and the OSS Community (2013)

#42

Post by avsbst »

WhitneyLand wrote: post #18

The article bounces around to touch so many different social issues its nearly incoherent. Regarding the main point I think it's a non issue. Companies are only interested in hiring OSS contributors to get a feel for their work. There are many other ways to do this. For example since a lot of my work is visual I maintain a demo reel. For others it may be articles you've written or even Stackoverflow contributions. It…

Notepad++, granted they were called out on it hence the apology:

http://notepad-plus-plus.org/news/response-and-apology-4-sex...

Re: The Ethics of Unpaid Labor and the OSS Community (2013)

#43

Post by mhurron »

dreamdu5t wrote: post #23
mhurron wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Releasing software that others are legally allowed to use, and then them using it is being 'exploited financially.' Interesting.

Because you want to split hairs over terminology, I will rephrase: I did not want to contribute to OSS anymore because watching other people make money off of my unpaid work made me feel undervalued and resentful. It also made me realize I didn't have to do any OSS contribution to get good jobs and spend unpaid time coding stuff for other people to use. There I didn't use the word "exploited".. are you happy now?

I'm not splitting hairs. You made work freely made available for others to use, they used it, this somehow exploited you.

> I did not want to contribute to OSS anymore because watching other people make money off of my unpaid work made me feel undervalued and resentful.

Again, what did you think was going to happen to work you freely made available for people to use as they saw fit. They used it as they saw fit.

You are complaining that people did what you expressly allowed them to do. It's probably best that you stopped contributing, you clearly didn't understand what you were doing.

Re: The Ethics of Unpaid Labor and the OSS Community (2013)

#44

Post by SrslyJosh »

WhitneyLand wrote: post #18

The article bounces around to touch so many different social issues its nearly incoherent. Regarding the main point I think it's a non issue. Companies are only interested in hiring OSS contributors to get a feel for their work. There are many other ways to do this. For example since a lot of my work is visual I maintain a demo reel. For others it may be articles you've written or even Stackoverflow contributions. It…

Lucky for you that you can show your work to people outside of your company, right?

> Also the author says she knows "many" women who have had trouble contributing to OSS based on how they were treated. GitHub should make it easy to provide examples of this right?

Now you're being deliberately obtuse. Not everyone uses github, and not all communication happens through github.

Re: The Ethics of Unpaid Labor and the OSS Community (2013)

#45

Post by SrslyJosh »

Palomides wrote: post #2

I'm not sure I have any good arguments either way, but seeing an argument that open source software is uncompensated labor that devalues programming work and serves the corporate establishment makes me very uncomfortable.

It's a compelling argument for stronger "viral" licenses, for sure.

Re: The Ethics of Unpaid Labor and the OSS Community (2013)

#46

Post by SrslyJosh »

Justsignedup wrote: post #6

As a father of 1, I must agree to this: - I lose ~ 2-3 hours a day every day on commute alone. - I lose an additional 1-2 hours daily on getting my daughter ready, taking her to school, pickup from grandparents, and other daily needs of my daughter. - My income is SIGNIFICANTLY lessened by the expenses of my daughter If I was not a father, I would have the following: - I could live 15 minutes away from work by foot,…

> As a father of 1, I must agree to this

Yep, and people who are disabled (or act as a caretaker) are in a similar boat.

Ironically, you are probably a better bet for a lot of employers than that average young single male because you value stability. You're not gonna jump ship because you want a foosball table or expect to have lunch catered every day.

Re: The Ethics of Unpaid Labor and the OSS Community (2013)

#47

Post by multiplicity »

SrslyJosh wrote: post #44
WhitneyLand wrote: post #18

The article bounces around to touch so many different social issues its nearly incoherent. Regarding the main point I think it's a non issue. Companies are only interested in hiring OSS contributors to get a feel for their work. There are many other ways to do this. For example since a lot of my work is visual I maintain a demo reel. For others it may be articles you've written or even Stackoverflow contributions. It…

Lucky for you that you can show your work to people outside of your company, right? > Also the author says she knows "many" women who have had trouble contributing to OSS based on how they were treated. GitHub should make it easy to provide examples of this right? Now you're being deliberately obtuse. Not everyone uses github, and not all communication happens through github.

Keep in mind this is Ashe Dryden, who thinks being called a professional victim is misogynist. Paper-thin skin, but throwing stones from her glass house like there's no tomorrow. Open source's results-over-feelings approach turns off many, not just women.

Re: The Ethics of Unpaid Labor and the OSS Community (2013)

#48

Post by tomjen3 »

timwaagh wrote: post #12

i liked the article until it became feminist. the notion that because there are less women in industry recruiters cannot use a selection criterium that has intrinsically nothing to do with gender, however somehow guys score better on that criterium, doesn't sit well with me. like i'm evil and deserve less favourable treatment because i'm white and male.

Agreed. I am tired of being told I have all this "privilege" just because I was born with a penis and have to wear sunscreen when I am outside.

Okay I can pee standing up, but other than than?

Also whenever these kinds of arguments are made Asians are always counted as white, even though more Asians work in the tech sector than should by chance.

Re: The Ethics of Unpaid Labor and the OSS Community (2013)

#49

Post by cwyers »

mhurron wrote: post #43
dreamdu5t wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you want to split hairs over terminology, I will rephrase: I did not want to contribute to OSS anymore because watching other people make money off of my unpaid work made me feel undervalued and resentful. It also made me realize I didn't have to do any OSS contribution to get good jobs and spend unpaid time coding stuff for other people to use. There I didn't use the word "exploited".. are you happy now?

I'm not splitting hairs. You made work freely made available for others to use, they used it, this somehow exploited you. > I did not want to contribute to OSS anymore because watching other people make money off of my unpaid work made me feel undervalued and resentful. Again, what did you think was going to happen to work you freely made available for people to use as they saw fit. They used it as they saw fit. You…

Think of it this way.

Community-developed software kinda runs on a stone soup model -- everyone brings something to the pot, everyone gets something back OUT of the pot, everyone gets something that is better than the sum of the parts contributed to it. This can be a good thing. It doesn't stop you from being miffed if you figure out that there's a restaurant in town that's coming, dropping off a bit of mirepoix, hauling off a cauldron's worth and selling it the next town over.

And in the macro sense, there are a lot of companies who have figured out how to use the communities that have developed around open source and free software as a low cost to free source of labor. And important infrastructure products like OpenSSL end up being used EVERYWHERE but starved for resources because everyone can just freeride off the work of a few people until something like Heartbleed comes along and exposes the costs of it. And there's probably at least a few products that are in the same boat as OpenSSL and we just won't know what those are until the next Heartbleed. And it makes it really, really hard to solve these problems when we can't even talk about them openly without people being personally attacked for discussing it.

Re: The Ethics of Unpaid Labor and the OSS Community (2013)

#50

Post by edleafe »

glyph wrote: post #29
craigcabrey wrote: post #3

Is it just me or does this article twist the (rather simple) idea of meritocracy? What you contribute and the quality of what you contribute defines the respect and influence you receive as a result (in a given community, of course). I don't see how that can be tied into "normal" social statuses as this author is trying to imply. Thoughts?

"Meritocracy" is not a real concept of how to run a community, but rather a satirical term used to lampoon the idea that "merit" is a 1-dimensional concept which can be measured linearly and used to judge people and rank them. The term was invented as satire. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy Thinking that it's a good idea is like what happened with "waterfall" development. Someone described a…

Symphony orchestras used to claim to be the equivalent of a 'meritocracy' (don't think that they used that term, though). They selected strictly by audition, relying on the ears of the (male) conductor/director, and less than 10% of the musicians selected were women. When they changed to have the musicians perform behind a screen, and without identifying them by name, the number of women selected increased dramatically.

A similar dynamic happens in the tech world. The people determining 'merit' have that same built-in bias against females, and will judge their work as lower than it should be. The bias need not be conscious, and in most cases the men think that they are being fair and honest, but it's there.

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