Authority

In “Liberty”, I explained how libertarianism is bad (especially on the consumption side), but there’s also another extreme: Totalitarianism. Because – surprise – totalitarianism is bad!

Totalitarianism

can be explained with the following satirical piece:

1984 was a guide.

Because yes. It’s not the government I’m talking about, it’s the corporations. Corporations (like Redhat!) act in their own self-interest and restrict both consumption and governing. They act with stone cold precision and govern as such.

Big corporation™ governing system

Dictatorship. It’s dictatorship. It’s feudalism. With the lords being the HRs and the boss™, exploiting the peasantry™ being, well the lower ranking workers.

The boss™

The boss™ is a dictator. It’s simple as that. In FOSS, especially. He (because sadly, basically the only people in power in these governments are men) sits on his high chair, looking over the peasantry with his wife™ saying “Let them eat cake!”™.

Consumption policies™

The consumption policies of big corporation™ tends to be overly authoritarian and “short term”, think:

“Your free trial for ‘project_x™’ has run out, buy project_x™’s subscription for only €99,99!”

And:

“You are not allowed to use project_x™ as you broke one of the restrictions written in the license, you are being sued for €999,999,99.”

So, let me define a new term: Conauthoritarianism™ (or, it’s not really new, but basically new).

Conauthoritarianism is a consumption ideology that places many restrictions on consumption. Often confused with conrestrictionism, with some restrictions on software.

“This is bad!”™, and that shouldn’t come as a shock to you, if you’re not a fascist (AKA big R Republican). The sad thing is that this is basically the consumption policy of 100%™ of all IT-based corporations.

The project_x™s of the world

I have been talking about this caricature; project_x™ for the whole chapter, but why? Well, there are way to many project_x™s of the world, so it’s hard to pick one to criticize. That’s why project_x™ is the name is chose. I was planning to list project_x™s now, but there are just too many. Way too many. For further reading, see “Corporate Dominance in Open Source Ecosystems: A Case Study of OpenStack”. In the study, they examine FOSS and corporate dominance, and come to this conclusion:

As corporate participation in OSS ecosystems is growing, their in- fluence on the future evolution of these ecosystems also becomes stronger, which in turn can have significant consequences for the sustainability of these ecosystems. In this paper, we present a de- tailed study of one popular OSS ecosystem, OpenStack, to (a) es- tablish corporate dominance as a prevalent issue, (b) identify five patterns of corporate dominance, and (c) apply survival analysis on a large set of repositories, and find that corporate dominance of repositories negatively associates with their survival chance. This paper is among the first to provide a detailed investigation of corporate dominance in OSS ecosystems, which we hope will draw more attention to this phenomenon which may have a significant impact on the future of OSS ecosystems. The findings of this study may help OSS communities to increase their awareness of this issue and the associated risks, and adjust their governance mechanisms so as to ensure their future sustainability.
- “Corporate Dominance in Open Source Ecosystems: A Case Study of OpenStack” (2022)

“Corporate Dominance in Open Source Ecosystems: A Case Study of OpenStack” credits:

*Corresponding authors

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