One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

I feel like most (capitalist) people don't actively spend their existence in a driven pursuit of excessive wealth with the intention/moral imperative to fuck everyone else over to get there or stay at "the top".

Or at least I like to hope.

Also, here's the thing about "liberty": If you're not a hypocrite, you don't attempt to control other people or decide what decisions they're allowed to make (barring things that would directly harm others) whether you agree with them or not.

I do not agree with the behaviors of these hyper-capitalist, exploitative people.

But it would make me a massive hypocrite with double-standards to say "Well, actually now I think you have enough, you don't get to have any more money."

If you spend your life getting to this position (legally), it's not my right or place to take it from you.

And this philosophy of "Okay fine, but I don't necessarily condone/agree" is the difference between freedom and oppression.

I VERY FIRMLY believe nobody has the right to push their ideals on others.

This kind of thinking is how you get things like gay marriage being illegal, preventing women from having abortions, and all numbers of unsavory things.

Genuinely believing in liberty, individualism, and personal freedoms means standing by those ideals even when you don't agree with the way these freedoms are exercised by others.

Anything else is being nothing but a hypocrite.

As someone who has been contributing to Linux for a few years now, which uses mailing lists exclusively for all development (and not only do they use Git, they wrote it) I've found that mail-based workflows are in some ways better to GitHub/GitLab/etc:

1. You can review individual patches, you cannot do this in GitHub at all (commenting at the bottom of a commit doesn't count because it's not tied to the PR and the comment is lost to ether on force-push). GitHub also defaults to you reviewing the full diff and make reviewing individual commits kind of frustrating (you're just dropped into the commit history view rather than a proper review view).

2. All code reviews end up being line-based because the patch is the main body of the email. Design discussion happens as replies to the cover letter of the patch set, meaning you can easily tell which kind of discussion is happening. You can also directly comment on the git commit message, which the kernel community values a lot more than most projects.

3. You can far more easily be notified on patches sent to sections of the tree (though this is slightly tied to Linux's development workflow with subsystem maintainers). GitHub only lets you watch a repository and get the firehouse of events -- which is about as useful as subscribing to the main LKML and trying to keep up with the notifications.

As for difficulty, honestly the bar to entry to send a patch to a mailing list if you're using Git is just:

  $ git send-email --to ... --cc ... origin/master

That is exactly the behavior that capitalism incentivizes. Two facets:

1.

I'm assuming we agree that capitalism is mostly about markets and free consumer choice. So you have a set of produces competing for purchases from consumers. Consumers have finite resources to acquire information about the producers they consume from.

This means that if it takes less resources for a producer to hide a negative externality than the externality provides, that producer will be more efficient on the market and defeat other producers who don't. Thus the market rewards negative externalities and deceit.

Meanwhile, the market incentivizes no systems to produce consumer organization or better consumer information. We do see that happen sometimes with things like the USDA, Consumer Reports, etc. but all of that happens outside of and in opposition to the capitalist system.

2.

Producers don't want to compete, they just have to if one producer feels they can secure a relative advantage by competing with another. But it is almost always more effective for both producers to instead collude and cooperate against consumers. Since producers generally massively outnumber consumers, and have a lot in common culturally and structurally, it is natural for them to form anti-competitive cabals or to simply merge into larger and fewer corporations.

Capitalism produces monopolies, which history shows any time you have a "free" market without very strong trust-busting from the government.

These two points exacerbate each other. The fewer producers there are, the more they become the sole experts in their field and the better able they are to hide their negative externalities.

"Economies of scale" work in harmful directions too. Bigger companies are more efficient at scaling up the damage their negative externalities cause.

Capitalism may form a part of a functioning, efficient system, but it is always only a part. When you treat it as the whole, you get... well, climate change and a dying Earth.