What’s wrong with this claim? There is absolutely a political faction, characterized in part by association with university soft sciences and humanities subjects, that seeks to stigmatize lots of categories of speech and behavior as socially unacceptable because they think they constitute a type of hatred. I think it’s fair to classify opposition to gun ownership and promotion of the idea that ordinary social institutions should avoid doing business with institutions that sell guns is a policy that this faction generally supports.
come on man, that’s not a degree, that’s just blatantly siding with abusers. ESR is a known abuse-apologist who consistently sides with people that actively do harm to others.
Calling someone a harmful abuser can easily itself be a form of abuse, and the political faction ESR alludes to is fond of claiming that political dissent against them constitutes an extra-political form of abuse which can legitimately be countered with extra-political violence. I don’t believe the people who imply that the political positions ESR has defended constitute actual abuse.
Life is never black & white and everything has a context. Without a context, we can do math or we can talk bs.
There are many reasons why one chooses SaaS. Not all of them are bad.
There are 2 major problems with it: deprecation and censorship which is why I do agree on this sentiment in general.
I almost never depend on cloud in my professional life (maybe some trivial stuff such as status page) . Majority of projects I was involved with last for decade so you need things to work even if upstream guys don’t.
In my personal life, I use cloud ONLY and ONLY if it is either trivial (hence not very important and easily replacable) or it has complete data export (so if the cloud provider decides against me, I can take the data and eventually recreate something or massage it enough for another service).
typical I must be free to kill anybody if I want. Let me do so. (I don’t believe that he is against the commercial restriction against so called “terrorist” states or just china)
That’s not what he’s saying. He’s saying that giving control to or depending on a third party whose interests don’t align with yours can be dangerous. Even more so when a small subset of people can get suppliers to change their policies to impact a wider group. He mentioned one that affects his group. In other submissions, people in opposite groups are talking about how tech companies discriminate against their groups or minority groups in various ways. Ceding too much control or allowing too much dependence is bad for them, too. For at least software parts, he advocates blanket use of open source to eliminate or reduce the risk of malicious or inconsiderate dependencies.
Clearly, it’s just a reduction given some open software is really complicated. There’s going to be a small to large group of people one depends on in those cases. In general, it does reduce the risk. I disagree that it needs to be open given shared source with the right terms in a perpetual, paid license might be fine. Open is safer, though. More field-proven.
Sure, but is software special in this regard? Doesn’t this apply to every external service a business relies on that has a switching cost? My packaging supplier could decide to cut off my supply because I’m shipping assault rifles in their boxes, so should I use generic boxes, or have in-house box production? It’s hard to avoid any dependency on society.
The crux here is that you can easily switch to another box producer, but you cannot easily switch to another software provider when it holds all your data and business processes hostage.
I think most manufacturing businesses have a variety of crucial non-software vendor dependencies that would not be easily unwound if the vendor fired them suddenly. (For example, if these boxes went through months of prototyping to get right, and the vendor won’t release the dies.)
Any SaaS vendor can hold your data hostage. Is the argument that everybody should run their own servers and not use SaaS at all, even open-source SaaS?
The argument is that everybody should be in control of their own data and that they should be able to spin up an alternative on other servers, that they may or may not own themselves, on a very short notice. And that they should only use software that would allow them to do so.
There’s dependencies. Then there’s the kind of dependencies that might cancel production or hose your personal data based on your political views after a tiny number of people interact with them or get inside the company in decision-making positions. That seems mainly to be some big, tech companies in specific areas with specific type of politics. Most companies, including your packaging example, don’t do that stuff. Then there’s all the older ways dependencies screw with you. Open-source dependencies can help with both.
Hmm…so the argument is that SaaS companies are (for whatever reason) much more likely than other vendors to fire you as a customer due to disagreeing with your behavior, and open-source software is a specialized mitigation that luckily happens to work on that particular risk?
They’ve been doing it more than most companies for sure. There’s also more people on that part of the political spectrum in the areas they’re concentrated in. They might just inherit it. There’s more activists targeting tech companies and software communities for policy change getting results here and there. Whatever the ingredients, it seems to happen with them more than (random company or industry here).
Open source is part of a mitigation strategy for it. It’s not lucky at all: the licensing was partly designed to protect the users from malicious suppliers. Proprietary vendors already made arbitrary changes to availability to maintain or increase profit (greed). These vendors are doing it for political reasons or to maintain/increase profit with image management. The same protections address them by self-hosted or at least portable FOSS mitigating a lot of the risk.
Of course thar is not what he is saying: esr is a libertarian who defend the freedom of ownship of guns. He will never say that he want that person are killed by guns. But he will protest from any measure préventing it for whatever reason he will find and will never protest against same or similae measure if it is not related to guns.
That’s definitely his goal. The post is about a method companies use to prevent him from achieving it that generalizes to other situations. Then, a solution to that. So, that’s what I focused on.
How does being a libertarian relate to only wanting freedom of firearm ownership? While self defense is an important right, it’s not central to the argument here: the same would apply to companies that exacted consequences for clients that e.g. ran television ads, or had .onion pages.
Even if he could giving exactly same rant about similar threat for other events before, esr just didn’t for him it start to be a problem when you try to prevent people death
Please don’t dramatize ownership of firearms, it doesn’t make your point.
This happens to be the most public and most clear cut example of SaaS enforcing its values on its clients
They are 70k injury and 30k death by year close to entirely avoidable by removing the second amendment. So the situation is dramatic in the us. It is clearly not the only clearcut example of saas enforcing its values on the client. See for example https://www.mangopay.com/prohibited-businesses/
This is off topic for Lobsters, but if you want to discuss it, I think you will find your approach to be intellectually lazy and to not have correct results.
The mangopay example can be explained away as trying to avoid liability and a certain kind of market, thus perception management. The Salesforce example is just them taking a stand against a highly politicized tool.
I don’t know what ESR’s position on the US government’s legal restrictions on doing businesses with countries the government deems enemies is. But the incident last year where slack stopped working for many people was a direct result of Slack, a US company providing a closed source software product, attempting to comply with US law about doing business with Iran and screwing up the way they detected who was Iranian. Although the details are different from this incident, the cure is exactly the same: don’t used closed source software as a service that you can’t switch away from easily if they suddenly decide to stop servicing you.
It didn’t get with the times, upgrading its features and UX. Offerings like Slack that did took the market the IRC replacement could’ve had. Now, there’s some open offerings competing with Slack trying to take slices of the market it already dominates. IRC still has whatever niche fanbase it had before.
Additionally, people started using XMPP which was a mess of standards and availability and clients and servers. IRC is simple by comparison, but the energy was leeched by the efforts going to XMPP.
His intent doesn’t matter here: only the arguments about the risk and mitigation. If you disagree with his intent, you should be writing politicians in his area to push for gun control rather than dragging more of his BS over here. Political campaigns are how you get laws changed.
So manipulating the technical arguments for a political agenda is perfectly ok? I don’t see how american politician cares about the advice of a fench man. (Looks they care a lot more of nra money)
I like how the bottom of the post has a link to ESR’s (now defunct) Google Plus profile.
What irony, lol
good grief.
What’s wrong with this claim? There is absolutely a political faction, characterized in part by association with university soft sciences and humanities subjects, that seeks to stigmatize lots of categories of speech and behavior as socially unacceptable because they think they constitute a type of hatred. I think it’s fair to classify opposition to gun ownership and promotion of the idea that ordinary social institutions should avoid doing business with institutions that sell guns is a policy that this faction generally supports.
come on man, that’s not a degree, that’s just blatantly siding with abusers. ESR is a known abuse-apologist who consistently sides with people that actively do harm to others.
Calling someone a harmful abuser can easily itself be a form of abuse, and the political faction ESR alludes to is fond of claiming that political dissent against them constitutes an extra-political form of abuse which can legitimately be countered with extra-political violence. I don’t believe the people who imply that the political positions ESR has defended constitute actual abuse.
Life is never black & white and everything has a context. Without a context, we can do math or we can talk bs.
There are many reasons why one chooses SaaS. Not all of them are bad. There are 2 major problems with it: deprecation and censorship which is why I do agree on this sentiment in general.
I almost never depend on cloud in my professional life (maybe some trivial stuff such as status page) . Majority of projects I was involved with last for decade so you need things to work even if upstream guys don’t.
In my personal life, I use cloud ONLY and ONLY if it is either trivial (hence not very important and easily replacable) or it has complete data export (so if the cloud provider decides against me, I can take the data and eventually recreate something or massage it enough for another service).
typical I must be free to kill anybody if I want. Let me do so. (I don’t believe that he is against the commercial restriction against so called “terrorist” states or just china)
That’s not what he’s saying. He’s saying that giving control to or depending on a third party whose interests don’t align with yours can be dangerous. Even more so when a small subset of people can get suppliers to change their policies to impact a wider group. He mentioned one that affects his group. In other submissions, people in opposite groups are talking about how tech companies discriminate against their groups or minority groups in various ways. Ceding too much control or allowing too much dependence is bad for them, too. For at least software parts, he advocates blanket use of open source to eliminate or reduce the risk of malicious or inconsiderate dependencies.
Clearly, it’s just a reduction given some open software is really complicated. There’s going to be a small to large group of people one depends on in those cases. In general, it does reduce the risk. I disagree that it needs to be open given shared source with the right terms in a perpetual, paid license might be fine. Open is safer, though. More field-proven.
Sure, but is software special in this regard? Doesn’t this apply to every external service a business relies on that has a switching cost? My packaging supplier could decide to cut off my supply because I’m shipping assault rifles in their boxes, so should I use generic boxes, or have in-house box production? It’s hard to avoid any dependency on society.
The crux here is that you can easily switch to another box producer, but you cannot easily switch to another software provider when it holds all your data and business processes hostage.
I think most manufacturing businesses have a variety of crucial non-software vendor dependencies that would not be easily unwound if the vendor fired them suddenly. (For example, if these boxes went through months of prototyping to get right, and the vendor won’t release the dies.)
Any SaaS vendor can hold your data hostage. Is the argument that everybody should run their own servers and not use SaaS at all, even open-source SaaS?
The argument is that everybody should be in control of their own data and that they should be able to spin up an alternative on other servers, that they may or may not own themselves, on a very short notice. And that they should only use software that would allow them to do so.
There’s dependencies. Then there’s the kind of dependencies that might cancel production or hose your personal data based on your political views after a tiny number of people interact with them or get inside the company in decision-making positions. That seems mainly to be some big, tech companies in specific areas with specific type of politics. Most companies, including your packaging example, don’t do that stuff. Then there’s all the older ways dependencies screw with you. Open-source dependencies can help with both.
Hmm…so the argument is that SaaS companies are (for whatever reason) much more likely than other vendors to fire you as a customer due to disagreeing with your behavior, and open-source software is a specialized mitigation that luckily happens to work on that particular risk?
They’ve been doing it more than most companies for sure. There’s also more people on that part of the political spectrum in the areas they’re concentrated in. They might just inherit it. There’s more activists targeting tech companies and software communities for policy change getting results here and there. Whatever the ingredients, it seems to happen with them more than (random company or industry here).
Open source is part of a mitigation strategy for it. It’s not lucky at all: the licensing was partly designed to protect the users from malicious suppliers. Proprietary vendors already made arbitrary changes to availability to maintain or increase profit (greed). These vendors are doing it for political reasons or to maintain/increase profit with image management. The same protections address them by self-hosted or at least portable FOSS mitigating a lot of the risk.
Of course thar is not what he is saying: esr is a libertarian who defend the freedom of ownship of guns. He will never say that he want that person are killed by guns. But he will protest from any measure préventing it for whatever reason he will find and will never protest against same or similae measure if it is not related to guns.
That’s definitely his goal. The post is about a method companies use to prevent him from achieving it that generalizes to other situations. Then, a solution to that. So, that’s what I focused on.
How does being a libertarian relate to only wanting freedom of firearm ownership? While self defense is an important right, it’s not central to the argument here: the same would apply to companies that exacted consequences for clients that e.g. ran television ads, or had .onion pages.
Even if he could giving exactly same rant about similar threat for other events before, esr just didn’t for him it start to be a problem when you try to prevent people death
Please don’t dramatize ownership of firearms, it doesn’t make your point. This happens to be the most public and most clear cut example of SaaS enforcing its values on its clients
They are 70k injury and 30k death by year close to entirely avoidable by removing the second amendment. So the situation is dramatic in the us. It is clearly not the only clearcut example of saas enforcing its values on the client. See for example https://www.mangopay.com/prohibited-businesses/
For source of numbers:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_States
This is off topic for Lobsters, but if you want to discuss it, I think you will find your approach to be intellectually lazy and to not have correct results.
The mangopay example can be explained away as trying to avoid liability and a certain kind of market, thus perception management. The Salesforce example is just them taking a stand against a highly politicized tool.
I don’t know what ESR’s position on the US government’s legal restrictions on doing businesses with countries the government deems enemies is. But the incident last year where slack stopped working for many people was a direct result of Slack, a US company providing a closed source software product, attempting to comply with US law about doing business with Iran and screwing up the way they detected who was Iranian. Although the details are different from this incident, the cure is exactly the same: don’t used closed source software as a service that you can’t switch away from easily if they suddenly decide to stop servicing you.
Not going to work until free alternative is par or superior, which won’t happen until free software can fix the monetisation problem.
For every day you use a SaaS, you become more dependent on it. A month of retraining and reduced productivity would be unthinkable for many companies.
Whatever happened to good old irc
It didn’t get with the times, upgrading its features and UX. Offerings like Slack that did took the market the IRC replacement could’ve had. Now, there’s some open offerings competing with Slack trying to take slices of the market it already dominates. IRC still has whatever niche fanbase it had before.
Additionally, people started using XMPP which was a mess of standards and availability and clients and servers. IRC is simple by comparison, but the energy was leeched by the efforts going to XMPP.
IRC’s still going strong, plenty of users on freenode and other servers.
My point is that he did not protest at this time but only when it is guns related. So my point stand.
His intent doesn’t matter here: only the arguments about the risk and mitigation. If you disagree with his intent, you should be writing politicians in his area to push for gun control rather than dragging more of his BS over here. Political campaigns are how you get laws changed.
So manipulating the technical arguments for a political agenda is perfectly ok? I don’t see how american politician cares about the advice of a fench man. (Looks they care a lot more of nra money)