Agree completely. I understand the deeper issues and concepts being discussed - because I'm the kind of person that happily takes time out of my weekend to re-read Stallman essays from 2007. However, as a SaaS startup trying to communicate with non-geek end users about our AGPL-licensed FLOSS product, we have found the misunderstandings caused by the term "free" insurmountable.
Our choices are to use "open source", which more or less gets it across to lay people completely unaware of the subtleties, use "free software" and then launch into some long-form explanation of why we also charge money (of course anyone can grab the code for free and run their own instance but most of our customers don't care about any of that), or say FLOSS or Libre and it's totally unintelligible to most people and they stop paying attention before we've gotten anywhere.
Unfortunately I don't think this problem will be constructively progressed until it evolves past the realm of geeks arguing about it amongst themselves, and actually is approached as a marketing issue. Perhaps the reason the debate is still festering is there hasn't been much alignment of incentives between the marketers and the geeks to work together on it, because most software companies don't try to mutually hold the values of Free Software and commercial profit. But we won't see Free Software and its underpinning values go mainstream until that happens, and I think it would be good for everyone if it did.
Did you even read the article? The author self-identifies as a feminist. Your implication that this is about feminism vs not-feminism is simplistic and missing the point.
Well, broadly speaking feminists tend to agree with these Title IX "inquisitions". Her declaring to be a feminist doesn't really mean that feminists tend to agree with her.
Hello. I am one survey point for you. I believe women should have equal political and social rights, which makes me a feminist.
I massively disagree with the general thrust of these "inquisitions" as discussed in the article, although the original Title IX, if I understand it, was meant to be about equalising opportunity[1] and not about whatever this is all about.
So by the dictionary definition, you are a feminist (and, of course, based on your advocacy of social and political rights for women, I and anybody else using a dictionary would describe you as a feminist, no matter how much you insist that you're not).
What definition are you using that means that you're not, and what's the source of that definition? It's not really fair for you to be using a different definition without saying so in advance.
I reject the feminist narrative of history, the feminist view of gender and the feminist idea of patriarchy. Basically the majority of the social critique that is the backbone of feminism. I'm also deeply suspicious of the notion that feminism as a movement is interested in equality and not power.
Being called feminist because I believe in social and political equality is like being called a Christian because I think heaven sounds like a wonderful place. But IMHO if you don't believe in Jesus you're not a Christian and if you don't believe in the feminist social critique you're not a feminist.
I have never heard of an -ism that people don't personally choose to identify with, and instead other people dictate that they are part of against their will.
> To be competitive, we need to build diverse organizations where people have different strengths.
Exactly. And if your hiring process locks out someone who does not have a certain strength (such as negotiation), which is not directly relevant to their job (such as programming), you will miss out on people who could have great skills in the area that is relevant to what you're hiring for. This is unfair to potentially strong candidates, and bad for your company.
People are very willing to admit that most interviewing processes simply select for people who are good at interviewing, and tests select for people who are good at test taking - these methods sometimes overlap with what you're actually trying to measure, but are obviously flawed in many ways. The same goes for negotiating, which may have a tangential correlation with being an effective programmer in some contexts, but certainly not very directly.
Ellen Pao is trying to send a signal to people who are good at what they do, but put off or intimidated by playing hardball over salaries. If you like negotiating, you're not the intended audience.
There's plenty of discussion on Hacker News about people management, culture-building, social issues, work-life balance, personal development, etc. Usually as it relates to tech and startups, but that's to be expected.
Something is going on in Spain. You can track the Indignados movement through Occupy and now Podemos. We're seeing a parallel movement in technology there to what's going on in politics with the Podemos movement [0] - decentralised, grassroots, bottom-up. It's deeply exciting to track these digital and cultural trends together and imagine a new paradigm emerging in society.
We make an open source tool for distributed collaboration, and our userbase is now overwhelmingly in Spain. This emerged organically. It seems to be very fertile ground right now for distributed communication and democracy. I would advise anyone making software in this space to get a Spanish version out there and join the wave. I wonder about how it will spread to the rest of the Spanish-speaking world and join up with related tools and movements coming out of South America, like DemocracyOS.
The push for open source in Spain is often labelled as being about freedom.
Personally, I think it tends to be about money, especially in SMEs.
My friend uses an open source collaboration tool in his office of 20+ people, because even though everyone uses evernote personally, the plan with collaboration features is "too expensive". Might just be an anecdote, but I keep hearing lots of those.
Spain might be great for free software, but I would stay away from it in terms of starting an actual business.
Podemos' offer might be great for some people, but I don't think they will do much to change some of the deeper issues of the Spanish economy. I don't think I will be voting for them.
>That's most probably a part of it, but it wouldn't explain why people migrate to GNU Social
Do they? I don't think the article is accurate to what's happening in any large degree. As another commenter puts it below:
>I call shenanigans. Spaniard here, the story is completely wrong. Most of the 6k registered users on Quitter Spain are inactive and it has nothing to do with Podemos and the indignados movement (they use Twitter actively along with Facebook). Even the user that started this "false migration" (@barbijaputa) is using Twitter and is inactive on Quitter
Cost is also associated with freedom, I don't see how you can think of it in any other way. The cost of software for startups is so significant that it can lead to bankruptcy.
This is my main gripe when people compare Gimp vs Photoshop, or Microsoft Office vs LibreOffice, or desktop Linux vs Windows - as that cost is not associated and placed in balance to what people actually need.
I also don't buy that "everyone uses evernote personally". If they do, then those people haven't evaluated their options.
Without the premium account, you have some pretty harsh limits, like a maximum of 60MB/month, or search that sucks, or no mobile app. And the premium version is what? Last time I checked it was $5 / month. Do you know what I also pay $5 per month? Google Apps, but that's only for the privilege of using GMail with my own domain, because otherwise Google Docs and 15 GB of Google Drive are free. And Office 365 is also in that range.
> The cost of software for startups is so significant that it can lead to bankruptcy.
What? Here's the software you listed:
Photoshop, Microsoft Office, Windows, Google Apps, Evernote. All of these added together comes to less than $3000 a year per employee (and I've generously padded pricing and then rounded up).
That's $250 a month per employee. I'd argue that if your startup cannot afford $250 a month per employee in software costs, then the startup is hiring too fast and cannot sustain the number of employees it has.
Maybe in the US, but in poorer countries things are a bit different. And let's not forget that money are scarce in startups unless you have some investors.
I don't think it's an anecdote. If you are funded $ 30M then you can buy "pro" plans to virtually everything. If not, you buy a VPS for $ 15/month and setup everything you need there.
This is much more a european-centric movement akin to Siriza in Greece than it is a spanish speaking thing. Southern Europe got hit hard by the recession and southern states were semi-forced into adopting austerity policies by the european union. The success or failure of the new greek governement will probably have a large influence in the fate of Podemos in the next election. In the end, it's about reconfiguring the coalition that governs europe more than it is about anything else. Europe is a quasi federal state where the Senate (i.e. the European Council, representing state governements) has the bulk of the power.
The «Podemos» movement is losing steam. Other political parties are still worried about them, but the breach they created in the bipartisan politics in Spain has been occupied quickly by other new (yet, more standard) political parties. In the last regional ("autonomic") elections «Podemos» got a good number of votes, but far less than expected, while other more traditional new political parties took a good bite in each election.
Things are changing, but not as dramatically as people expected. Let's see what happens in the general elections.
I happened to work on some of the decentralised computing and networking projects in Barcelona. Guifi.net is the largest community network at the moment that among others lets users share and publish their content including internet access [1]. Last year I worked in Clommunity [2], an effort to build the first large scale community cloud. Guifi.net users can just install the Clommunity distro [3] on top of and use its service discovery and decentralised cloud management tools to contribute and benefit from marginal resources. I think it's a cool idea that we will keep revisiting in the long future...
This American Life did a fantastic piece on acetaminophen, how easy it is to overdose on it, and the story behind why it's still thought of as so safe. Interesting listening on this topic!
> Maybe worst for me personally was most all straight forwardly representational work was labeled "illustrative" and discounted as "commercial."
While I find the "deskilling" of arts to be troubling, and experienced frustration at the lack of technical education as a fine arts student, this line made me realise that what might be deep underneath this is a rejection by those in search of "authentic" art in the face of rampant commodification by advertisers.
In a world where the true human value of art is judged by the proxy of commercial value, and many of the greatest talents are using their abilities not to further human culture but to sell products, it's not irrational for people to seek art that cannot be commodified. It's a collective search for authenticity that's unfortunately flailing and grasping at straws instead, of unpacking the deeper causes caught up with larger social and economic currents.
Our choices are to use "open source", which more or less gets it across to lay people completely unaware of the subtleties, use "free software" and then launch into some long-form explanation of why we also charge money (of course anyone can grab the code for free and run their own instance but most of our customers don't care about any of that), or say FLOSS or Libre and it's totally unintelligible to most people and they stop paying attention before we've gotten anywhere.
Unfortunately I don't think this problem will be constructively progressed until it evolves past the realm of geeks arguing about it amongst themselves, and actually is approached as a marketing issue. Perhaps the reason the debate is still festering is there hasn't been much alignment of incentives between the marketers and the geeks to work together on it, because most software companies don't try to mutually hold the values of Free Software and commercial profit. But we won't see Free Software and its underpinning values go mainstream until that happens, and I think it would be good for everyone if it did.