05: Faith and software
Hello!
If you’ve been following along for a bit, you may have noticed that I’m sort of rabidly private in certain ways, but I’m trying to push myself on that a little more, which is why I co-created and released a short podcast series about faith + open source this month.
You can read more about the backstory here; the short version, beyond it just being an interesting topic, is I want to talk about more hard things in public, but I want to do it in ways that are thoughtful and longform and sometimes make us feel weird, but it’s all okay because we’re learning. So anyway, I hope this podcast accomplished that. I co-hosted it with a friend of mine, Henry Zhu, who’s both Christian and maintainer of the JavaScript compiler Babel.
Side note: A week after releasing it, the SQLite Code of Conduct bubbled up, which was written based on a very Christian set of principles. What I find amusing about the whole story is how people couldn’t tell whether the lead developer was joking or not (he wasn’t). Which is why we made this podcast! Faith is surprisingly intertwined with open source in ways that took me years to fully appreciate, but that can also tell us a lot about how it works.
Writing
Posts I’ve written this month.
“Governance without foundations”: Exploring alternatives to software foundations from a governance standpoint. Nobody seems to like software foundations (if you don’t believe me, take them out for a drink), yet so many projects do them because they think it’s what they “should” be doing.
“Moral infrastructure”: Quick reflections on the role of infrastructure providers in governing the internet
“Public faith”: Backstory of why we made a podcast about faith and open source
Notes
Notes from this past month have been updated. Apparently I got super into justice systems for the internet this month, which I'll mostly spare you from here. A few other highlights:
(from a conversation) “Longevity as anti-future”, bc you’re prioritizing yourself over your children (link)
Counterarguing with myself: I think my conflict over the moral responsibilities of service providers depends on how I evaluate their role. If I believe these companies are the new governments - which I kinda do - then why wouldn’t I support my government taking a stand against bad actors? I think my actual fear is “well where else would they go, we can’t just kick people off the internet”. Maybe the conflict here is that we only have one “mega-government” on the internet, and we just need to start making multiple governments? If people had other places to go, I don’t think it’d bother me so much. We’re in the Pangea stage of internet governance (link)
(from a conversation) Open source, and knowledge production online more generally, looks more like a “repulsion market”: inverse of a two-sided market. At some point, the higher the consumer demand, the lower the producer incentive to respond (link)
Developers have a lot of negotiating power now. If we start training lots of new devs, and the market is flooded with dev supply, will it tip the the negotiating hand back in favor of companies? Will the “developers have all the power” culture eventually become obsolete? (Maybe won't affect some individuals…but will that be bad for developers as a whole) (link)
Links
Useful articles I’ve read this past month.
“Blizzard Courts Controversy With New 'Overwatch' Anti-Toxicity Measures” (Erik Kain): Someone pointed me to Blizzard’s efforts to clean up the Overwatch community as a corollary for open source. This approach caught my eye: apparently, Blizzard looks for egregiously bad actors in out-of-game channels (ex. YouTube, Twitch) and preemptively bans them before they’ve offended in-game.
“Mutiny on the Bounty: The Epic Tale of How Data Defeated Dogma” (Katie Moussouris): I enjoyed this video about how Katie designed Microsoft’s bug bounty program. Lots of good learnings in here wrt bug bounties, game theory, *and* just figuring out how to get a big idea pushed through at a big company. If you don’t feel like watching a video, her Senate testimony has some good nuggets, too.
“Private BitTorrent trackers are markets” (John Backus): How pricing, altruism, and sharing dynamics play out when torrent sites are managed in a “private market”, which seems relevant to open source economies.
“Choosing to stay out of the community” (Rachel Kroll): In which Rachel imagines “an entire ‘shadow ecosystem’ of invite-only source repos” as an alternative to working in the open. I'm really interested in seeing projects try these "peer source" models, so this is more of that. Dovetails nicely with John’s post above: she even mentions private torrent sites as an analogy.
“Creating a New Source of Revenue for Open Source Software” (Guillaume Luccisano) We’ve seen a number of corporate OSS funding initiatives emerge, but this one is particularly interesting to me because they’re trying to decentralize their decision making, an approach I wrote about a few months ago. Users get $100/month to allocate, up to $20K/month from Triplebyte. Who knows what will happen, but I like seeing more experiments!
Books
Relevant books that I’ve read this month.
Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice (Elinor Ostrom, Charlotte Hess): Did a close re-reading of this book as I’m collating my research notes into a more coherent thesis. It’s funny: I think Ostrom’s most famous book, Governing the Commons, is sort of timeless, but this one, which examines knowledge as a specific type of commons, feels very rooted in the early 2000s.
Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization (Alexander Galloway). If you ever wondered what Focault and Marx would say about TCP/IP, well, have I got a book for you. This book is like an off-Broadway play about the experience of gazing into the soul of DNS. I had to skim over some parts, but I’m not-not into it.
Bonus: there were some really spectacular Marxist (not the author’s) descriptions of money in the Protocol book that I’d be remiss not to share for your personal descriptive purposes:
The gold standard as a "gold chrysalis"
The money-owner [is] a "capitalist in larval form" who will eventually emerge "as a butterfly" in the sphere of circulation...
"Alchemy" by which simple commodity objects are transmitted into "the money crystal"