As a data point: I can honestly say I’ve never heard of Gamergate before this comment, and I am a 31-year-old white male. I did read a book on Watergate when I was in my teens, though.
I recommend visiting the Ecomuseo in Palermo [1] if you ever have the chance. They examine, among other things, the lasting impact of the subpar building of now mostly crumbling structures by the Mafia that still litter the cities of Sicily.
Yes, the mafia built housing, but it’s not the kind of social housing we might hope for—it’s mostly slum-like. Of course, the city of Palermo is also EXTREMELY densely populated—I read something like the fourth-most densely populated city in Europe in a magazine once, but can’t source that now, so take it with a grain of salt.
Nota bene: I’m not Italian myself; my wife’s family has their roots in Sicily.
It might be a little glib, but that’s the main incentive I see here, especially since they’re exclusively using their own system, Github Sponsors, to direct the money. It makes sense, but if it was truly only about the maintainers, wouldn’t it be better to get the money to them through whatever means they choose to implement?
But you’re right: in the end trying to find out what their actual motives are is purely speculation, and I shouldn’t have phrased it as if it were a fact.
It seems like you are pretty angry at me trying to get the notion across that this is good, but they could do better. That’s okay, I can deal with that.
But I want to make one thing clear: I’m not doing this for HN karma. I haven’t commented on here in years, and this article prompted a reaction. Trying to somehow shoehorn that into "you’re only doing this for points” is invalidating that in a way that I find troubling, because, really, how can I prove you wrong? I might just have an opinion on something and wanted to engage with a community about it, or I might not. Only I can tell (and you, apparently).
EDIT: Correction. I submitted two comments 2 months ago that I forgot about, the comments before that are from 2019.
> Is there even one $10M ARR business that has donated $500K even one time?
I don’t have exact figures for most of these companies, of course, but I have seen many small consulting or teaching businesses contribute a lot of money to OSS (here’s one such example, I don’t know the company, just a quick look on Open Collective: https://opencollective.com/frontendmasters). That’s because they rely on the success of those software systems to continue making money, of course, but I don’t think that’s any less true for the big payers.
> What about all of the banks, oil, retail etc. with enormous ARR?
I in no way meant to single out GitHub or insinuate that what they were doing was bad, that’s why I tried to end on a high note (to emphasize yet again: _it’s a great start_). What I’m trying to say is that I hope it doesn’t stop there, for GitHub or anyone else. The incentive to do it is higher when there’s good PR coming out of it, and that is mostly true the first time around. I’m hoping that there are more incentives at play than just PR (genuinely, not in a “but I don’t think so” way).
I think companies or individuals contributing money to projects they rely on is great, and I personally do it and incentivize OSS development in my own consulting practice (through lower fees and philanthropy).
Now, should it be the main source of income for an OSS project, especially when it’s “critical infrastructure” (let’s just pretend that term is well defined and means whatever it means to each of us)? Probably not, and there should probably be a better way.
Whether science funding in particular is a good model I would debate, since it can be such a beauty pageant at times.
- On the one hand, for GitHub, 500k is nothing, just a PR move. For maintainers, $500 might make the difference between struggling to pay rent and having enough money to leave it in the bank, or having a nice dinner at the end of the month.
- On the other hand, for GitHub, 500k is nothing, just a PR move! If they really wanted to show appreciation for the maintainers that power a billion dollar business, more than a drop in the bucket would be great.
So, I guess it boils down to: that’s a great start, don’t stop there!
I wasn’t particularly interested in entering the discussion (mainly providing the link and an explanation), but I used the word "feudal" because Yarvin himself used it, in the name as well as in the description of the system.
I presume the author is referring to this blogpost[1]. The proposed name of the system is actually "Feudle", which might have made it harder to find for you.
The word "woke" did indeed not make an appearence, but this choice quote: "Eventually, all desirable content will move out of the anarchic slums and into this new, happy gated community. And junkies will be shooting up in the old Google building." His idea seems to have been that hierarchic—or "feudal"—arrangements would be preferrable to the "anarchic" ways of information indexing Google uses.
Thanks for suggesting him! I was unaware of his talks, and instantly fell in love! The first talk just made the list, and I’m planning on looking through more of his talks in the coming days.
At one point I just stopped adding people to the list, but I guess that doesn’t make much sense. Gary Bernhardt and more than just a few other people from your scrape deserve to be on that list!