How the development world changes (a wider world)

This is part 3 of a series with undetermined number of rants from my side. Last time I finished my rant with a very wide statement that people might dislike, which is that „Open source comes from privilege”. And I don’t want to focus too much on the social aspects of how the software world changes, but I think there’s a few things worth discussing about nonetheless. This rant is a collection of multiple mini-rants, so I’ll get to explain that statement as well.

You don’t know your heroes

If there’s something I have been thinking about a lot lately is how all programming heroes are more or less the same. I looked a lot over the history of computing and a lot of it comes pretty much similar to the history of pop: a lot of heroes from the US, some british hero here and there, an occasional European one (hello Mr. Dijkstra and Mr. Tannenbaum), but everyone is charting in the US and that’s the only place where people matter, where the history of computing has been written. There’s very little info on what the rest of the world does or did, aside a spectacular story ripped out of an 80s spy thriller like the awesome article from Andrada Fiscutean about the very local (for me) CoBra Z80 computers-line. But the discussions are, in general, about the US and the enemy (at most), and the enemy has no heroes only dark faces under hoods. There’s no heroics in being poor and unable to create things like computers.

Now, I’m not saying that the world should be any different. Indeed, most investment in this sort of technology was done by the american state in Silicon Valley, and the technological revolution was funded through the capitalistic exploitation of the wealthy-world population of the 80s-00s (the US, UK, western Europe) through toys for children and tools for productivity for grown-ups. But this is why the heroes are deeply privileged people that maybe don’t really understand how a lifetime of work can make them privileged.

I’ve been reading in the past years quite a lot about software history, and everytime a book or an article goes on to talk about the heroics and the inventions of individuals, it looks to me like „people got an assignment and performed to expectations”. And the few times where you see someone who is not born or immigrated into the US, it’s almost always about ideas. And we need to remember: the cold war closed more than half the world in huge jails shut people down from the bigger conversations, so you won’t hear voices from Eastern Europe, Russia, or China in the conversation about development of technology up to the ’00s, even if a lot of them ended up doing the work in Silicon Valley. The sad part is that the current trend in politics is to create these jails again, hooray for nationalism, I guess.

But coming back to the topic, again, a lot of the heroics presented in the history books, a lot of firsts (americans are obsessed with whoever does X first) were „I got an assignment and did the job”. Sure, some of them were fast, some of them were amazing, some became important figures, some created amazingly influential things like programming languages or tools. But still most of these achievements were „I got an assignment…” and that’s the thing that people forget out of the conversation. And yes, people are creative when accessing expensive tools, and so they create many firsts. That’s humans humaning, that’s monkeys being handed tools.

And you don’t know who created the software you’re using

I recently had a discussion with a friend related to Netflix. I can’t remember exactly what sparked the conversation, possibly it might’ve sparked from a clip of Primeagen, or maybe he said that Netflix was the first one to have the idea of streaming. And I laughed at it, in a sense reminding myself about the genius idea I had before Apple, of putting a hard-drive to a small device that can automatically play MP3s (everyone had this idea before Apple, but that’s another story). In another sense, reminding myself that I worked on a streaming service client before Netflix started doing the business they are known for now. Yes, I worked on a client for the 1&1 streaming service, but my name will never appear on the credits for „creating the first streaming network” because, well, I was outsourced work force. The people that commissioned the product probably never knew that I was the one writing the code.

And it’s not the single „firsts” in my life. I ported some Windows synchronization objects in Linux (including the famous WaitForMultipleObjects) before even pthreads was available (2001). I also was part of the team that created one of the Media Center competitors to Microsoft’s Digital Media Center - only we did it better: you could’ve record things from satellite, as well as write your own clips on DVDs, while playing Sokoban on your Tv (2003-2004ish?). The system I worked on was one of the first to ever play HD video at IFA (Ice Age. It was Ice Age). I also worked on one of the most important smarthome systems in Germany. I wrote the warehouse system for a big transporter in Romania. I will not get a medal for any of these achievements. Like the heroes that make the history books, I was there competently doing the assignment. So what’s different?

Well, the marketing, and the money.

The point is that behind the software you’re using there are tens of thousands of heroes you don’t know about, from places you can’t even imagine. Sometimes I feel there are a lot of people who look down on poorer countries and imagine nothing of value can come from there - a lot of them actually do, but you will never know this. There’s no marketing advantage to show how a guy whose parents didn’t afford shoes for most of their childhood could ever be a creative part of products to rival Microsoft’s, or be more forward thinking than Netflix’s „innovative idea of streaming”.

So circling back to open source

There are two things to point out. The first one is that the idea of open source is not some crazy invention, and it feels very natural to most people who are not caught into a faux-scarcity meritocratic system. But for someone whose time is money, where everything measures in money and value being exchanged, the idea of open source is naturally a cancer. What I’m saying is that open source is not a big invention, but a return to the natural state of things, the commercial aspect being added only later.

Because there is no scarcity in the world of creation, and software development is a creative field as much as it is about technical production. Not creativity is scarce, but scarcity was created behind closed doors and paywalls. There is reason for this. Money made possible investments into technology at a pace inimaginable otherwise, however, we must also understand the limitation of what money can do, as we see this around us (next article, I promise, we’ll talk about enshittification). But to get back to what I was saying, the idea of open source was created in the US and western Europe because half of the world didn’t care too much about the capitalistic idea of exploiting software for own personal gain. Not to say that they didn’t care at all about personal enrichment, but the initial instinct was to not care for most.

The second is also about economy and it’s about who gets to write open source software. Open source cannot exist in an environment where there is no closed source, but in an environment where money are the measure of man, open source can be produced and maintained long term by people who can afford the privilege of not measuring each moment of their life in money. That’s not necessarily the wealthy (when did you last see some code written by Idiot-in-Chief Elon Musk), but you can’t really create if all your time is hogged by the necessities of everyday life. So creating and maintaining an open source project can be a privilege, and people involved in open source, some dedicating their full time to them, live in a privileged space.

This is one thing that doesn’t change. The only problem is that in current day, with pseudo-AI cutting in software developers privileges, this means that less quality open source can exist outside of the spaces that corporations create for „open source”. This means that even if open, most of open source development is now hostage to people who are paid by corporations precisely for hogging the access to the most widely used projects, that in the end benefit the corporations directly. Exceptions are rare.

What does this mean? Complex solutions solving complex problems that nobody has, but corporations do. This is why software is so complicated nowadays - because it no longer serves the individuals, but businesses. This is why I find myself agreeing with the sentiment expressed in the previous article: Open source projects need a rewrite, to welcome a new generation to creating the infrastructure parts of their future. However, we discussed how Rust is a corporate takeover of open source, not a real open movement. A rewrite is necessary, but not if it’s made to serve corporations. Because what’s suitable for corporations is probably not very useful for individuals, as we see more and more every single day.

And since we got here, let’s talk tomorrow about the intentional enshittification of the software world.