Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: quality, bazaar, arch, etc.

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

>>>>> "Thomas" == Thomas Lord <address@hidden> writes:

    Thomas> Please remember that volunteers and other participants in
    Thomas> the GNU Arch project are not now and never have been my
    Thomas> employees or people whom I've funded -- they could not
    Thomas> ever have been "human resources" from my perspective
    Thomas> except in a con-artist sense which I reject.

That's exactly what I mean by your blind spot.  You need to get over
it.  There are almost 10 billion people on this planet.  To say
"hello" in a friendly voice to each one would take about 10 billion
seconds.  If you take that as your full-time job, with the US standard
of two weeks vacation in a year and no allowance for travel time,
language training, etc, you'll finish in 3394 AD.

Yet you almost surely have indirect economic and social relationships
to textile workers in China.  How many of them have you ever said
"hello" to?  That establishes that humans can, and in a world that can
produce software engineers, must, constitute abstract economic
resources to each other.  The ethical problem we must then face is how
to avoid turning that indirect relationship between our consumption of
clothes and their labor resources into a completely dehumanized
society, such as the Marxian characterization of capitalism.

Of course the term "human resource management" is terribly abused, but
so are the terms "democracy" and "equal opportunity" and "Defense
Department".  The point of attaching the modifer "human" to "resource"
is that labor (including management, staff, engineers, and all who do
something useful) should not and cannot be reduced to the commodity
resource "labor power", though HR departments by and large fail pretty
badly at grokking that.

Human resource management includes charm and persuasion and "getting
to yes" as well as pure suasion by contract.  Now, if an individual
tackles a task, there's no alienation of management from directly
productive effort.  But when a group does the same thing there
necessarily is some degree of alienation, because satisfaction of each
members' goals is dependent on the others' work.  Such a group
relationship *is* management of human resources in some abstract
sense.

However, when the structure becomes larger than a partnership of
equals with no employees, HR inevitably becomes institutionalized.
That is what you object to, I suppose, but you seem unaware that there
is no existing alternative, not that can support the kind of lifestyle
you aspire to (== writing the software you think is valuable as you
believe you should, rather than according to others' requirements and
specifications) and a modicum of freedom too, and you (and Andrew[1])
offer none.

As you know, there are people who have given you money and other
support, including both code and scutwork, and you've turned around
and said truly horrible things (some in public, even worse in private)
about them merely because they stopped, and decided to work instead
with somebody who would provide the software features they believed
they needed, where you had adamantly refused.  That's treating them as
abstract, non-human resources IMO.  (That doesn't mean that their
behavior isn't dumb and morally reprehensible---I'm not taking a
position on that.  It just means that you're not really treating them
as human beings with values and opinions that are in principle just as
valuable as yours.  "Pay me so I can tell you how dumb and morally
reprehensible your specified software is while writing software you
didn't ask for."  "Fat chance!")

You say "that's not what happened", but that's what it looks like from
the information I have.  Rather than give up on you, I asked for more.

It's true that you gave them Arch, but I see no justification for
saying that gives you a claim on their resources, money or work.  It's
free software and you believe that's morally imperative.  There's an
inherent contradiction here.  You disclaim any proprietary right in
Arch, but you cite Arch as the basis of your claims on people who use
it.

    Thomas> In the first year of the Arch project their turning their
    Thomas> backs on me was a plausible thing.  The plausibility seems
    Thomas> to me to have monotonically decreased over time, from all
    Thomas> perspectives.

*gentle chuckle*  Have another perspective.  I see it increasing
exponentially.

In the human realm, you admit their humanity, then turn around and
call them "immoral", "poster child for socially irresponsible
engineering", "responsible for my suicide".  You claim the moral high
ground as if you were the Ayatollah of Software.  It's saddening, but
not surprising, that you are treated by typical Westerners as though
you were an ayatollah advocating jihad.  (It's saddening that the
Westerners treat ayatollahs that way, too, but that's a harder problem.)

In the business realm, you demand that they contribute resources for
you to use as you see fit, while offering no promises in return.  That
is, if you think something is wrong or dumb, you'll refuse to do it,
even though you don't offer a correct and smart functionally
equivalent alternative by the delivery date.  I doubt you plan to
return the money and other resources received in that event (if so, I
doubt you'll be able to), and I don't blame any potential partner for
harboring such doubts.

    Thomas> The unexamined life is not worth living.  Examination
    Thomas> sometimes compels hard choices.

Which is, of course, exactly what I'm saying to you.  I think you owe
the fundamental contradiction mentioned above closer examination.
(Also your penchant for letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.)

I'm examining it, too, but I've made little progress in the last ten
years.  It still looks like a contradiction to me, and I still resolve
it the way I did ten years ago: by admitting the morality of (some
kind of) proprietary claims on software, specifically the ones you
make[2], while denying the usefulness to society of much of the current
legal framework.

Footnotes: 
[1]  When I wrote "Andrew may be shucking us" I meant that I suspect
that he's aware of this, but though he finds it extremely distasteful,
doesn't plan to do anything about it except tease people who are more
embedded in that reality than he is.

[2]  I know you'd like to call your modest claims something other than
"proprietary".  I call that "dumb and reprehensible behavior", aka
"fooling yourself."

-- 
School of Systems and Information Engineering http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
               Ask not how you can "do" free software business;
              ask what your business can "do for" free software.