The Open Source model vs the Open Exploitation model

It's interesting to stand still by the big changes in the software we are running on our computers today versus back in the 1990s and early 2000s. When I bought my boxed copy of SuSE Linux 6.3 in 1999, that year was hailed by the computer rags which I read at the time as the 'year of the Linux desktop'. The evil closed-source Mac and Windows operating systems would be banished and replaced by an operating system produced by the honest hands of the working classes.

None of that really happened, of course, but today it's hard to imagine a world that is not built upon the plentiful availability of freely available software. Whereas in the 90s you'd be paying for the operating system and any software for it - aside from freeware & shareware applications - today you could theoretically spend money only on the hardware and nothing on the operating system and even professional tools.


An example of these tools is for example compilers. In the 90s you'd generally have to pay to get a copy of Borland, Visual Studio or any of the other major players in that space. The open source GCC compiler only became a good option for general development by the late 90s, and today GCC along with LLVM are solid options for software development that have essentially obsoleted pay-to-play compilers like Visual Studio (MSVC) and Intel's ICC.

Similarly, for office suits LibreOffice and Google Docs have made the proposition of paying for Microsoft Office or similar a quaint idea unless one needs some of the rare features offered by the latter. For 3D modelling there is Blender 3D. Basic audio editing? Audacity and others. Need to design a PCB for a new electronics device? KiCad or some of the new-and-upcoming open source options have your back.

Of course, the one question that is always true with 'free' is who ends up holding the bill in the end.


First, one preconception about closed source is that it is necessarily something commercial, NDA-ed and for-profit, with open source always community-driven and following an open collaboration strategy. This ignores the many free tools that are released by hobbyists but who do not feel comfortable sharing the source code to these. It also glosses over the realisation that open source projects can be equally as abusive as the worst commercial office setting.

There have been a few high-profile situations in the world of open source so far where essentially all of the primary (volunteer) developers packed up and left to resume the project on their own terms. XFree86 is one such example, where the fallout from an inflexible project owner resulted in the Xorg fork. Similarly with OpenOffice's developers disagreeing with Oracle's harsh management of the project and resuming the project on their terms in the form of LibreOffice.

This shows clearly how open source projects are not immune to the worst traits of human nature. From oversized egos, to poor or lacking communication and so on, open source projects are nothing magical. In the end they are still software projects, with the same management challenges as a commercial or closed source project. Just generally with the dirty laundry being put out more clearly in sight of the world to see.


Then there's the more concerning aspect of free/open software: the exploitation of 'free' labour. It has happened a number of times now that a small hobby project got absorbed into the global ecosystem that has sprouted on this fertile soil, only for the maintainer of said hobby project to get inundated with support requests. A few years ago this led to the demise of the WiringPi project [1] that had become essential to countless Raspberry Pi (Python) projects. More recently the Babel transpiler project on which countless large web frameworks and companies depend announced that it'll likely be shutting down soon unless it can obtain more funding [2].

This shows the immense pressures that project owners are put under when their project suddenly takes off in ways they had likely not imagined. Balancing what likely was 'just a hobby project' with their day to day obligations and job becomes increasingly more complicated. As the author behind WiringPi makes clear, some people who contacted him for support got rather violent and aggressive when they didn't get the help they felt they deserved.


Clearly the open source movement that began in the 90s has spawned a massive ecosystem, but one has to wonder just how sustainable it truly is. There are disconcerting signs that at least a section of it is built on what is essentially exploitative (unpaid) labour. This is not just something that concerns small project owners who get overwhelmed by sudden attention, but also within larger projects. As mentioned, it's easy for a large open source project to feature the same abusive behaviour seen elsewhere.

Ideally a project uses an open collaboration model [3], where there is no strong hierarchy and yet there's a clear progress towards to a common goal. Yet, much like the economical/social model of Communism which has similar goals, there is a significant risk that at some point a hierarchy is established, with a dictator establishing absolute rule along with a number of lackeys.

If one is lucky, said dictator is of the more benevolent type (though possibly potty-mouthed, like Linus Torvalds) and helps with herding the developer-shaped cats. If not, then as one saw with the XFree86 and OpenOffice projects it can spell the end of the project. When those who seek to contribute to a project do not feel valued or appreciated, they will likely abandon that project forever. The more often this happens, the worse off a project becomes.


In this light one also has to consider what drives someone to contribute to an open source project when they can expect no monetary compensation for this. For many it is because they use the software in question, and wish to improve it. Either by suggesting improvements or by directly contributing code, bug reports or patches. There's a significant time investment involved in these activities, which is for the individual contributor the investment they are willing or capable of contributing.

This leads to the expectation of some level of return. Much like with any other type of investment, a lack of return negatively affects the desire to invest again in that particular project. With my own open source projects this is something which I had to work on with e.g. the communication when someone files a ticket. It's easy to assume that the person who filed the ticket is doing this as a hostile act, but it's much more likely that they genuinely like the project and are doing their little bit of investing into the project to see whether it will make the project better. If so, then the project owner and the person filing the ticket will win out.


In this regard it saddens me to see project like e.g. KiCad steering in a direction that's clearly not optimal. Most recently in the run-up to the 6.0 release a new icon set for the user interface was 'decided upon', which seems to have been one of those 'upper management has decrees' level of decisions. As the new icons are hideous violations of UX rules and based on the KiCad forum communication on the topic, it's clear that this was not a decision made in consensus, but rather on a whim. This is just one example there of many small details of a similar nature.

A similar lack of consideration is present with the Audacy project, whose management recently had to backpedal heavily after previously announcing telemetry that would be enabled by default [4]. At best this showed incredibly poor judgement on the side of the project owners, at worst it shows that every major open source project can just as easily become the next BonziBuddy [5] if one isn't careful.


With all of that said, I too happen to be the author of a range of smaller and larger open source projects (BSD 3-clause licence). Some of these get more attention than others, but when looking at other projects, it does make me reflect on what my response would be if any of them suddenly got really popular. After I had attention for my NymphCast [6] project explode with over 51,000 views on the original blog post [7] last year, I felt the rush and pressure to 'do something' with that project.

Since then the attention has died down a lot, and I have since regained the appreciation for NymphCast and my other projects as 'just hobby projects'. Since I'm not making money off them, the only compensation that I seek from them is to get the satisfaction of having accomplished something for myself. That's after all the point of a hobby project.

That also then shows the counter point to open source as a hobby: open source as part of a business model, or paid projects involving open source software. In my view open source project is nothing special and adheres to the same basic rules as any other project: either it's a hobby or it's work. If one doesn't receive monetary compensation for work, it's exploitation.


Or to cue the (in)famous line that artists hear too often when asked to create something: "You'll be paid in exposure!".


Maya


[1] https://hackaday.com/2019/09/18/wiringpi-library-to-be-deprecated/
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/12/babel_money_woes/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_collaboration
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/14/audacity_telemetry/
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BonziBuddy
[6] https://github.com/MayaPosch/NymphCast/
[7] https://mayaposch.blogspot.com/2020/03/nymphcast-casual-attempt-at-open.html

Do you love yourself?

Want ik hou van jou
is niet de sleutel tot de ander
maar ik hou van mij
al klinkt het bot en slecht
want wie van zichzelf houdt
die geeft pas echt iets kostbaars
als hij ik hou van jou
tegen een ander zegt

(Because 'I love you'
is not the key to the other
but 'I love myself'
even though it sounds bad and wrong
because those who love themselves
give something truly precious
if they say 'I love you'
to someone else)

- Harry Jekkers 'Ik hou van mij' [1]


There are a lot of things which we are told to love. A family, that special person, a nation, a pet or a job. But what about loving yourself? What is so bad about considering loving oneself to be the ultimate goal in life? What does loving something or someone else truly mean if you cannot feel the love for yourself and your existence? Can you truly be yourself and find happiness if you do not love yourself?

Self-love is often regarded as something 'bad', in the sense that it makes someone 'selfish' and possibly narcissistic. Someone who cares about themselves first and foremost cannot be a good person, after all. That's why self-sacrifice and altruism are the proper values to follow in one's brief existence in this world. [2]


When raising a child, it is generally recognised that what a child needs the most to develop properly are stability and safety. It is thereby the task of the parents and the environment to ensure that this environment exists, in which the child can learn, grow and discover themselves. To become a person who understands and loves themselves, so that through this love of themselves and their existence, they can learn to love the existence of others, and this world in which we all live.

It should therefore come as a surprise to absolutely nobody that during experiments with a so-called Universal Base Income (UBI) participants found themselves much happier, much more relaxed and much more productive. The clue here is the shift in expectations between 'being a child' and 'being an adult'. Instead of the low-stress, nourishing environment of an ideal childhood, the adult is faced with a high-stress, uncertain and unstable environment. An environment in which one's self-worth depends solely on one's performance and ultimately the most crucial resource needed to survive in society: money.


A human adult roams around, doing what has to be done to survive, which generally means exploiting themselves in the service of others to obtain monetary compensation. But money alone doesn't nourish the soul. Nor does having shelter and food. Starved of love, they will seek this love externally. To feel the rush of appreciation as they do something praise-worthy online, or in the conquest of others. But what does any of it mean if you cannot love yourself?

Society has always been about paying attention to the exceptional. Not necessarily the ones who have something to say, but rather those who can manage to draw attention. The more attention one draws, the more external love one receives. This is the rush that drives many to crave the road to fame and fortune. As an infantile longing back to that safe environment of one's childhood, whether real or imagined, where there are no worries and one is loved.

Yet without the ability to love oneself, none of that matters, and as the rush and excitement dies down, this stark realisation will hit home for too many. They're not loved for who they are, but for this role they play. This is why plagiarising other people's works is so tempting, and yet so dangerous. You may have gained those fifteen minutes of fame, but in the end you will have lost yourself.


Much has been written about the ideal ways in which to construct a society, and the framework for a fair and equal society and economy. Here it seems quite simple and straightforward: the ideal society is formed around the concept of self-love and through it the drive that everyone can live in an environment where this is possible.

This means no punishing (negative attention) to those who are having troubles surviving in society. This is very much the concept behind UBI, and also the tragic thing about what it tells us about society today: when people are given money with no strings attached, they will still ask 'what does this cost me?'. Because they have learned that outside of childhood, nothing is free and no one can be trusted.


The ideal society is one in which someone who can truly love themselves can say with conviction 'I love you' to others, to society and to every living and inanimate object in the world, thus enriching it with a true love for life itself.


Maya



[1] https://www.songteksten.nl/songteksten/40786/harrie-jekkers/ik-hou-van-mij.htm
[2] https://mayaposch.blogspot.com/2020/07/altruism-is-anathema-to-humanism.html

The trauma of proving a negative: the transgender delusion

 I think it is fair to say that one's identity is a crucial part of one's overall well-being. To know what your body is, to know your own mind, and to understand one's place in the larger whole. When any of these elements are incomplete or missing, one's mental health suffers.

When I think of myself in the period between me finishing HS and my parents divorcing followed by the repeated moving to new homes, it'd seem reasonable to see this as the time when I first began to firmly lose touch with these aspects of my identity. With new, unfamiliar surroundings, no sense of direction when it came to education or a career, I eventually began to also lose any sense of what my body was about.

This was the time when I began to question a lot of things which I had held as self-evident about my body. Which included my sex. Partially using online research and partially using intuition, I ultimately figured that I had to be intersex. This was based on my assigned sex of male, along with the requisite male genitals yet a lack of secondary male characteristics, and what I identified as female secondary characteristics. The latter including the shape of the pelvis and some breast growth during early puberty.


Looking back on this period now, I can see how this discovery gave me a lifeline in a period when it felt that my whole existence had been cut loose and was just drifting around aimlessly. I would figure out what was going on with my body, and build up my life starting from there. With the knowledge of what I was, it should be straightforward to figure out my position in society and my identity.

Many times I have written about this already on my blog. The dismissive attitude by the Amsterdam gender team whom I contacted about this. The hostile attitude from Dutch GPs, along with a massive lack of knowledge by these experts about what intersex is and how to diagnose it. The Groningen gender team whose radiologist tried to convince me that what could be seen on the MRI scans wasn't a blind vagina, but just some air either outside or inside the large intestines. The refusal by the same radiologist to contact his German colleagues who had diagnosed my intersex condition a few years earlier.


I have lost count of how many times a doctor, psychologist or psychiatrist has tried to convince me that I could only be transgender, because obviously my body was that of a male. The first & second MRI-based diagnosis at private German clinics which showed and confirmed the presence of female genitalia along with a normal feminine skeleton were dismissed and disregarded by every subsequent visit to Dutch and German hospitals. Except one.

There was the orchiectomy procedure which I required to have my legal gender changed from male to female in the Netherlands was only possible in a country like Germany, where it can be an elective surgery if there are reasonable grounds. Since I suffered significantly from having the physical appearance of a woman, but the official identity of a man, this provided the grounds, and I was able to find a German surgeon willing to prepare the procedure.

In addition to the orchiectomy, this surgeon also performed an exploratory surgery in the perineum, confirming in the process the presence of the vagina. This provided the necessary documentation to have my official gender changed in the Netherlands using a never-before used law for intersex births. Finally, I also got the biopsy report for the testicles that were removed, showing them to be underdeveloped and non-functional.


In hindsight, I'm not sure how much good much of this did me. Yes, it is undeniably a good thing that I had those non-functional testicles removed, as they were not providing any useful service and were a potential cancer risk due to their aborted development. I'm also grateful that I got my official gender changed to 'female', just so that I do not have to keep explaining to people why my appearance and listed gender do not match up.

Yet despite all of the evidence I have gathered over the years like this, it does not feel like it really matters. Even though my body has since that surgery continued a female puberty and it's undeniably 100%-female-except-for-the-genitals - i.e. that of a hermaphroditic intersex person - there is still so much that I do not know or understand about my body.


Meanwhile, the weight of being told over and over by people who are supposed to be intelligent, educated specialists doesn't seem to be lessening. While I got over the worst of the uncertainty, such as that experienced when I stood in front of a mirror and tried to pin down whether I could 'pass' as a woman, the whole issue feels unfinished and the mental injuries I suffered raw and bleeding.

For so many years I was essentially trying to prove to these doctors that I was not transgender and could not be transgender. That me taking female hormones until a few years ago was only to fix a hormonal imbalance I felt existed in my body. The low levels of both testosterone and estradiol should have supported that notion, but instead I was told by the first gender team that their tests showed my testosterone levels to be at normal male levels. Something which was physically impossible due to the underdeveloped testicles.


How does one process this? How can one give this a place, and put it into the past? To this day, my body is the very representation of the struggle over those many years. And even though I know my body to be a hermaphroditic intersex person, it feels that this knowledge has further divorced me from society, instead of bringing me closer as I had hoped.

Maybe it's just the bitterness and disappointment that inevitably came with those traumatic and other negative experiences. To have lost most if not all faith in doctors, psychologists and kin. To feel that society does not care about or acknowledge intersex individuals. To feel like a square block in a society of round pegs and spheres. Being different and a minority (true hermaphrodite) within a minority (intersex) does not give one that feeling that it helps with settling on that identity.


Perhaps a major part of the problem is not with me, but with society. Instead of seeking to define oneself using properties which are genuinely individualistic, the average person's identity seems patched together using existing concepts within that society. Yet within that society it more or less works. Pick a template, tweak it a bit and off you go as a newly minted member of that society.

At this point I think I am coming closer to understanding how this all works, and how I can figure out both my own identity, as well as a way to make it work with society without compromising on my own identity, but it's definitely not the 'as seen on TV' simplicity. Like the documentaries which I have seen about e.g. transgender people where all their worries are taken away by having their genitals and secondary characteristics of their sex removed, or BIID patients who get their legs or an arm removed. Just tweak the body and it's all fine.

I'm pretty sure at this point that none of that is how it works at all in reality.


Maya

Have some self-respect

 What's the value of a human life? When it concerns your own life, it literally means everything to you. Yet in the scope of a society or even smaller groups, the value of a singular human life diminishes quickly. As put succinctly many years ago, a single human death is a tragedy, a million human deaths is a statistic.

Does this mean that a human life only has value when regarded by itself? And what are the societal processes which seek to erase the individual?

One could argue that this process begins before the individual has even been born into this world. The first and most universal erasure event is that of gender. The presence or absence of specific reproductive organs (i.e. being male or female) precludes the newborn from being assigned specific designations ('name'), from wearing certain styles of clothing, as well as the colours thereof and the types of toys deemed appropriate.

This simple biological fact results in a specific gender role that seeks to erase the individual, leaving a 'boy' or a 'girl', instead of a 'child'. A child is a young individual who is still becoming their own person. A 'boy' or a 'girl' is a child whose identity as a child has been violated, since this designation results in harsh social responses and possibly punishment if they violate this involuntarily assigned gender role, i.e. the social role which is deemed appropriate for their biological sex.


The human brain is monomorphic, that is to say that there are no specific gradations or divisions that would allow them be divided into specific groups. As a consequence, one individual isn't necessarily better at specific mental tasks, nor are they likely to have stronger preferences in any direction. This precludes the possibility of statements such as 'girls are better at socialising', 'boys do not like pink colours' and 'girls are better at mathematics' to be true. The only way for these statements to be true, is if they are made to be true, i.e. through social conditioning of the individuals in question.

This social conditioning is a repeating pattern, which seeks to put all responsibilities at the feet of the individual, while only grudgingly admitting to the rights of an individual in society. An example of this is demonstrated in e.g. the system of Neo-Liberalism. Much like in the overarching systems of free-market capitalism and oligarchies, the purpose of the individual is not to be recognised and acknowledged as an individual, but rather to perform their duty to society.


Not unlike in the totalitarian regimes of Stalinism and Fascism, the highest good in Neo-Liberalism is the State. In societies based upon these systems, you are a good person if you are working a job that's for the betterment of the State. You are a bad person if you do not have a job, or seek to circumvent the Glory of the State. What the goals of the state are isn't relevant here. The State exists for its own sake, as a purpose onto itself. Something to be maintained and cherished, not unlike a theocracy.

Theocracies and religions in general are based around the very concept of the erasure of the individual. From providing very strict gender roles to prescribing all aspects of daily life, it is hard to consider a system in which the individual is more fully erased. in Neo-Liberalism, the same is true to a lesser extent. Even so, the erasure of the individual is essentially nearly as complete.


An interesting aspect to consider at this point is whether this erasure is the result of a wilful act. Here the answer is likely that it is an evolutionary artefact, from the days when humans lived in tribes. Inside a tribe, you either fit in or you are cast out. To be cast out of a tribe in those hunter-gatherer days meant almost certain death. Such a demand for absolute obedience is likely to have left its evolutionary traces, much as it has transformed the prideful, fiercely wild wolf into a creature for whom their master's wishes are all that matters.

How 'wild' are humans? Is individualism merely a faint dream that some of us hold in our hearts? Is the very concept of maintaining individualism in a society a foolish dream? Can the individual exist within a society?


Within the writings of e.g. Karl Marx (Socialism, Communism) and Ayn Rand (Objectivism) we can see a similar desire towards individualism, even if Ms Rand at no point would have admitted to hold Socialist ideas in her heart. Both of them grew up in an era and surroundings where the harsh exploitation of hapless humans was commonplace, whether it was under the shackles of the Industrial Revolution and the struggles leading up to it, or under the Red banner of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

They both held the belief that in a society the individual is of the utmost worth, as from individualism spring creativity and freedom. This is what led Ms Rand to her conviction that free-market capitalism was the ideal model, based on her experiences in the totalitarian Stalinism regime in the USSR. Despite this, she too admitted that there has to be oversight to ensure that these individual freedoms remain preserved.


In light of this, it is not hard to see today's Neo-Liberalist societies and kin as abject failures in this regard. While not as cruel as the unregulated days of the Industrial Revolution where a worker's life was worth something only for so long as they stayed in good health and could perform their job, these societies nevertheless focus on the exploitation of the individual.

From the strict adherence to gender roles and a refusal to acknowledge the individual, to the pressure for the individual to exploit themselves in what is called the 'job market' by making money the prerequisite for their continued existence. With all land inside a nation's border claimed by the State except where owned by more affluent individuals, an individual must adhere to the rules, if they wish to remain a part of a State. To be  rejected by the State would mean almost certain death.


What is the value of a human life? Does the individual merely exist to ensure the survival of the State? Does it matter what their dreams and desires are?


Truth to be told, I do not reckon that a violent overthrow of the 'ruling classes' is the answer here, nor do I see a clear, ideological path forward. To rid ourselves of tribalism first and foremost would be a step forward. That means ridding ourselves of superstitions and other burdens of the past. One thing which is absolutely an individualist trait is an adherence to science and reason, which is likely where we'll find the answers we seek.

The most pertinent question there is probably whether the average individual in society can be made to rely solely on their own faculties for reason, or whether the social conditioning that has led us to accept the erasure of the individual has to be first resolved.


Maya