Bonjour An, et bonne année 2014! Voici les notes ci-dessous, c'est un peu le bazar par contre... Si tu as besoin des slides, ils sont ici: http://git.bleu255.com/?p=slides;a=tree;f=fork_workers À bientôt! a. It is a common understanding that the meaning of the word "open" can vary greatly. Is it open for feedback? participation? business? open 24/7? Etc. Nevertheless, the positive idea, its unclosedness, associated with the word open, overshadows entirely the plurality of meanings we are facing with all these new open things. After all, regardless of one's intentions, who does not want to be perceived as being open, therefore potentially friendly and trustworthy? Thus we should not be surprised that today openness has become highly fashionable. This does not concern just software, pretty much any object can be granted this magical adjective: hardware, design, services, relationships, companies, data, workflows, governments, industries and even the Web. Indeed, if it’s open it must be good. Perceiving openness as being a positive thing did not happen over night though, and it is not just due to the popularity of open source methodologies, licenses and the cultural diffusion of free software. In fact, the core positive ideas behind openness, as they are perceived here, stem from the World War II era, and most notably from Karl Popper's work on the liberal concept of open society.\footcite{Popper:open1,Popper:open2} With the open society, Popper, motivated by the wish to liberate critical thinking from the claws of authoritarian structures, justifies the need for a society to nurture and cultivate egalitarian standards, as well as recognise the importance of the individual, for instance in the context of moral decisions. It is also in this post war context that Norbert Wiener expresses the uncomfortable moral position of the cybernetician,\footcite[][28]{Wiener:cybernetics} when it comes to the evil potential of technological developments, possibly looking for a way to move such questions of ethics to the society at large, trying to avoid pressure and the sole blame on technology and technologists. The society envisioned here is one based on a uncompromising trust that all our problems can be solved, by letting solutions emerging from individual interactions within a free market, and feedback loops. In this situation¸ the utopic vision, the wisdom of a few planners, is made obsolete and perceived dangerous, possibly evil, because such plans can only exist if they rely on a pre-existing and universal ethical code. In particular, liberal economist Friedrich Hayek sees such an approach impossible, as it would imply reversing the generalisation and reduction of our common moral code: \begin{quotation} The essential point for us is that no such complete ethical code exists. The attempt to direct all economic activity according to a single plan would raise innumerable questions to which the answer could be provided only by a moral rule, but to which existing morals have no answer and where there exists no agreed view on what ought to be done. People will have either no definite views or conflicting views on such questions, because in the free society in which we have lived there has been no occasion to think about them and still less to form common opinions about them. \end{quotation} Here, liberal and cybernetic ideas end up being complementary in defining the required openness necessary for the economy, society, and technology to operate rationally and freely, and evolve following the dynamics of an ongoing communication feedback loop, from which moral questions will get solved by themselves The idea behind this process is to improve society by socially engineering it through an iterative process, instead of loosely modelling it against an utopic vision, more precisely, "measures should be planned to fight concrete evils rather than to establish some ideal state."\footcite[][141]{Popper:open2} These measures are even seen themselves as evil, yet a necessary evil that should be used as little as possible, only to protect the freedom of the market. Such reflections have paved the way for the popularisation of democratic processes, competition, logistics, open systems, free market, liberalism, etc, as well as with a desire for increased transparency in the construction of technolegal infrastructures. Worse, due to the overwhelming outcomes possible from the chaotic properties of such open systems, and the semantic drift and abuses of the word open, it has became difficult to make the distinction between the rational and programmatic social engineering found in the free software definition and its relation to a cooperative, possibly collectivist free society it aims to create. This is maybe the reason why at the turn of the millennia, and at a time where the mathematical sublime of the Linux kernel development was at its highest, the free software movement is seen as a concrete utopia and enables a public space for cooperation.\footcite{Blondeau:utopie} However, looking how open source software also represents a cheap and disposable material for the information economy, we must admit that openness is in fact, whether this is intentional or not, a very effective smoke screen, in which both its supporters and critiques try to decipher a singular truth in the fractal-like twists of its mist. Regardless, if everything is meant to be eventually open in the techno legal positivist loop, we must find a way to look beyond our intuitive understanding of this property, in order to reveal, or better, map the concurrent purposes and functions of such open objects. We must look beyond the hype of participatory and remix culture, networked collaboration, novel forms of distributions, and all the peer-to-peer, whatnot-to-whatever systems, that have been rehashing the cybernetico-popperian credo against the totalitarian evilness of closed structures. By doing so we might have the chance to challenge the binary ethics of openness. This is necessary because the good versus evil discourse gives no room for other interpretations, possibilities and nuances. In this logic, things are either open or close, true or false, and generally stuck in an Aristotelian impasse. Bernard Stiegler sees in free software a process of individuation, that substitutes the duality of consumer/producer with an infrastructure made of active contributors. According to him this individuation permits the transformation and the questioning of the self, as well as it enables the sharing and responsibility of what is made. Stiegler is warning us though: technology, more particularly digital media is a double edged sword. He uses Derrida’s ‘pharmakon’ to describe what can be both a poison and remedy and finally ends up with a binary choice: depending how we will use this drug, we have to choose between a police state, or a contributive economy. With this conclusion, we are in fact going back to a situation that shares some similarities with Wiener's techno-ethical contend. In an unpublished manuscript from 1949 he gives a rather bleak account on this peculiar collective choice: \begin{quotation} In the discussion of the relation between man and powerful agencies controlled by man, the gnomic wisdom of the folk tales has a value far beyond the books of our sociologists. There is a general agreement among the sages of the peoples of the past ages, that if we are granted power commensurate with our will¸ we are more likely to use it wrongly than to use it rightly. [\dots] We can be humble and live a good life with the aid of the machines, or we can be arrogant and die. \end{quotation} An important element can be found in Wiener's prophetic warning. But first a word of caution: we should not get distracted from the historical context of this text. Doing so would probably let us drift in a black and white cold war era fantasy, which threats could be represented with nuclear bombs, rogue artificial intelligences and evil communists from outer space, all which can of course be easily mapped to topical and popular contemporary fears such as terrorists threats, drones, and other DARPA delicacies. I believe this would be a misreading of Norbert Wiener's thoughts. There is something else to be found: in fact, the vision of a good life aided by technologists and their machines has to be put in the real context of this text, which is manufacturing, logistics, telecommunication systems, and the autonomous intelligence of their apparatus. Like the technologist working with Popper's piecemeal social engineer, Norbert Wiener informs us here that machines and computation can change the way things are produced and organised, for the good of mankind. This statement relates closely to the post-scarcity society envisioned by Richard Stallman in the GNU Manifesto, where free software is needed "for technical gains in productivity to translate into less work," ultimately letting people "free to devote themselves to activities that are fun." With the post-scarcity ideal, the machine assisted productions, and the reduction of work hours we are simply back to Keynes's confidence in stating that, looking into the future, the real permanent problem of mankind is not of economic nature. The latter could get solved, he is confident to claim, as early as within the 21st century. The real problem of mankind will be how to occupy his freedom, in the form of "the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well." Even better, he gives us a confession on the necessary evilness of capitalism, yet a temporary one as we are all marching towards a better future: \begin{quotation} All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard. \end{quotation} Said differently: fear not misery, everything will go according to the plan. And here we have an interesting tension within the liberal camp, on the very nature of ethical principles, where through Keynes millennialist thinking, moderate planning guided by rightful minds goes in conflict with Hayek's general hatred for planners, and their socialist roots. Finally, we start to have a better picture of the slightly dysfunctional roots of our free and open family: an open society in which machine computation will free us from economic struggle; a rightful form of social engineering will give us the market freedom necessary to prevent evil closed totalitarianism; and recurrent narrative on the laissez-faire spectrum and its ethical model, that sees intervention and planning from unbearable for Hayek, to a necessary evil with Popper, and in Keyne's view, an elements of an unspoken wishful utopia in the future good life he predicts. No wonder that at the end of the line, free and source culture manages to please ideologies of all sorts, and at the same time is used to oppose them as well. There are countless examples where it has became impossible to take a clear position, in favour of, or against the principle of co-creation and the opposing ideologies that drive it, as found in free and open source projects. For instance, the software industry has hired many people from the free and open source software communities, following the Red Hat/Intel/IBM model of the late 90s. But in the recent years, the trend has changed slightly, as corporations are moving from a patch model of embedding their agenda inside the code of existing community projects, to a model where they develop their own open source products, in complete control of its legal context and direction, hoping to bootstrap a community of customers, attracted by the blue neon light of the positive open ethos, This is illustrated by a common startup company strategy to maintain two images, therefore two discourses and aesthetics, by the means of both registering a .com and a .org domains for their products, and maintaining such images independently and according to their audience, commercial corporate partners, or the cattle of unsupported testers, reviewers, feedback givers, the eyeballs, to refer to Eric S. Raymond's comment on the advantage of opening up source code. But even so, it is very naive to think of free culture and its not-so-freely-defined neighborhood as a territory, where the good cooperative communities and the evil corporations are clearly identified and isolated one from another. In fact, the two are completely interleaved and interdependant in a strange assemblage. As I said, countless examples of such assemblages can be given: Apple empires is built on a free software project, Darwin, derived from the free operating system FreeBSD, yet some of the components of the former are shared back with the community; Google's Android OS benefits tremandously from the Linux kernel project and does not always play by the open source game, yet it fuels a vivid community of mobile phone hackers and create new commercial opportunities for the later, including providing a an effective strategy against the planned obsolesence, and the hyper consumerist approach of the mobile phone industry; The Linux kernel is used for military projects, yet it powers the infrastructure of groups such as Riseup; The source code of the WebKit engine that renders the pages in the Chrome, Chromium, Safari and many other Web browsers, is a merciless commercially sponsored battle ground for groups such as Apple and Google, yet it gives free tools to experiment with for the designers of OSP, who share their experiments back in an ever growing community of cooperative designers. Truth is there is not such things as a one-size-fit-them-all free and open source approach, and it feels almost as if the liberal roots of such freedom and openness has enabled the existence of different nested pockets, that can provide as many different models, arguments, and counter-arguments, for normative ethical position to co-exist: consequentialism, deontologism, and even virtue ethics. In fact free culture, and its immediate surrounding, do indeed provide a materialisation of different trends that can be found in business ethics, and philosophical issues surrounding intellectual property. However they do not wait for such ideas to guide the writing of the law, or such or such political process to happen. Instead, following the original copyleft hack, these different systems of beliefs anchor themselves on top existing copyright and contract laws. The resulting object, despite the sharpness of its licenses, definitions, motives, ideology, and technology, cannot escape the artificial neutrality resulting from averaging its black and white properties: enter grayness. In Evil Media, Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey thus proposes to shift our attention from the dichotomic investigations, and explore instead the colourful corpuscles that constitute grayness. \begin{quotation} [I]n a period in which it is difficult to trace patterns of conflict and the emergence of antagonism back to a single binary opposition with any degree of plausibility, the gray zones of gray media call for new forms of investigation and a nuanced approach to the kinds of tensions and patterns of interference that arise. \end{quotation} There is something very refreshing in this approach, in the way it short-cuts right away the black or white obsession and suggest to find new places, where we can transpose this impasse in a less frustrating referential, and try to focus on the cultural context that brought us millennia of emotional anguish trying to answer this simple question: should I use this stone to make a wall for my home, or alternatively, use it to crush the skull of the person standing in front of me? There is however, maybe a limit in this approach, namely that the idea of greyness, might also reveal itself as yet another iteration in this Achilles and the tortoise paradox, that has been cursing the investigation of culture, by always getting closer to an infinitely out of reach object. More precisely here, the greyness of the systemic ambiguity found in free culture so far, is always encoded as discreet binaries, and it is the dithering of these that give us the illusion of different shades of grey. It only appears to become grey once we take some distance from it, and get a look at the bigger cultural picture these moiré patterns are creating. To challenge this doubt we must acknowledge two elements: All these black and white dots operate as surrogate for homes, whether they manifest themselves as a license, a software community, a tool, or file system; Second these homes are not perfect, there is always a moment of tension, conflict, a form of ugliness in their idealistic interfaces. It is during these moments of conflicts that some of its inhabitants are given a small window of opportunity, during which they can see through its flawlessness. So when the walls of such sandboxes crack, we are projected right into a classical Heideggerian situation, namely that these places are very much ready-to-hand, like a tool, device, object, or thing that is needed to achieve a particular action. But when conflicts emerge from what appeared to be a trivial thing, such as the examples cited earlier, but also a software installation, the appropriation of source code, etc, then these sandboxes suddenly become visible, present-at-hand. Yet, at this point, something interesting happens and that deviates slightly from the usual process of revelation. Any new knowledge acquired by the conflict will unlikely resolves in a revolution, even a mere evolution. Denial will be for many the only way out, in fact a way in, further down the sandbox. Why? Because there is simply too much at stake, too much has been invested in and built around these things already. In the sandbox, denial and commitment are not proof of ideological fanaticism: it is a survival mechanism that bypass the unreadiness-to-hand. Despite witnessing such spectacles of ugliness, and to borrow from Max Weber's vocabulary, we can understand this fear of letting it go through the process of rationalisation, that such sandboxes illustrate perfectly well. More particularly in the way codes, source code and legislative code, work together to provide a rational-legal authority that sustain a sense of belonging within the sandbox. Of course that does not apply to everyone. Seeing the ugliness leaking from the cracks in the sandbox walls, an opportunity is given for some of its inhabitants to migrate to other territories. Granted they are actually able to do so, in which case this will practically turn them into the new rulers, gurus, benevolent dictators, facilitators of a new sandbox, that will in turn be populated by those who followed such new leaders down the rabbit hole, or simply given to those who have yet to bite into one of these poisoned gifts. So in a way, if openness facilitates the creation of iron cages, it also gives the possibility to virtually anyone to create their own, as part of an agenda, an escape strategy, or simply because a personal itch, to refer to a common explanation for the creation of software. That said, in the particular case of abandoning existing sandboxes and creating new ones using elements from the previous one, we are then confronted with an interesting process: the fork. Relying on principles both found in the free software definition and the Open Source Definition, the fork is the process during which the source code of a free or open source software can be taken by anyone, so as to make, for instance, a new software integrating modifications, minor or major, that would not have been accepted by the author(s) and community from which the fork stemmed from. Sometimes, the conflict can be near-inexistant, such as in the case the forking developer(s) would not bother to make the effort to engage with the community, which is organised around the source of the interest, as exemplified with the tense relationship between the Linux kernel project and the Android operating system. On the nature of forking, the libertarian computer programmer Eric S. Raymond notes: \begin{quotation} Nothing prevents half a dozen different people from taking any given open-source product (such as, say the Free Software Foundations's gcc C compiler), duplicating the sources, running off with them in different evolutionary directions, but all claiming to be the product. This kind of divergence is called a fork. The most important characteristic of a fork is that it spawns competing projects that cannot later exchange code, splitting the potential developer community. \end{quotation} He also insists on the potential negative impact of forking, considering it as a bad thing, "not merely because it implies a lot of wasted effort in the future, but because forks tend to be accompanied by a great deal of strife and acrimony between the successor groups over issues of legitimacy, succession, and design direction." What is striking here, next to the irony that suddenly sees the link between open source practices and the freewheeling remix culture highly questionable, is how this idea of fork seems to relate strangely to the capitalist notion of creative destruction. In 1945, building upon Marxist theory, Joseph Schumpeter defines the process of creative destruction as such: \begin{quotation} The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as US Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation —- if I may use that biological term —- that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure em{from within}, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in. \end{quotation} Looking at the fork from the perspective of creative destruction, we can see the spectre of greyness coming back to us. Specifically, free and open source mechanisms, their definition, make forking em{implicit} to software production, and highlight its capitalist potential that has been largely integrated by the software industry. At the same time, and surprisingly even in the liberal context of open source software production, the fork is seen as a form of failure in reaching consensus around a common rational-legal authority, that should in theory satisfy all the inhabitants of the sandbox. In the early days of free and open source software, the fear of forking has worked very well as glue to assemble large sandboxes, but not just because people cared so much. Forking being a taboo, yet embedded in the very nature of free and open source software, it is possible to imagine that it made it also quite attractive. As a matter of fact, private forks, that are unpublished modifications of a software source code, therefore escaping the sharing back contractual bound of the early copyleft licenses, contributed greatly in illustrating the power of customisation and adaptability of free and open source software, to find its place in any sort of existing workflows. On the other side, public forking was relatively rare and isolated simply because, no matter what the contract allowed, the exhibitionist framework necessary to publicly fork, was simply not mature yet, making the creation of a new project a rather disturbing and painful act. Indeed, an important change in the network topology of software production was needed to facilitate such forking. This change is the switch from centralised revision control system to distributed revision control system, also know as decentralised version control system. In software development, tools such as revision control systems allow developers to keep track of changes in source code, which facilitate the maintenance of experimental branches in parallel with a stable production branch. It also helps greatly in tracking the introduction of new bugs, reverting to previous versions of the software, and merging contributions from different developers. As part of a centralised version control framework, the code repository is commonly served from a single machine, the server, that keeps track of all the changes in the source code. Developers use then a client software to pull new changes and push their modifications, granted they are allowed by the server to do so. It is not difficult to see that there is a lack of balance in this control structure. Developers can be denied access to the central repository, and getting access to whole database, the history, contained in the latter is not trivial. This centralised approach can seem contradictory with the post-war idea of openness, expressed at the beginning of this chapter, and that evolved through several economical and technological developments, which eventually found echoes in free and open source software. Nonetheless, it was just a matter of time, before the egalitarian and free-market libertarian thinking invite itself in software development, thus expanding its presence from the distribution of free software to the making for free software. After some experiments in this particular field, distributed revision control started to get highly popular in the mid zeroes, thanks to the so-called Web 2.0, and the rise of social networks, which steered the creation of novel web applications, in which social and machine activities were mixed into one carefree orgy of gamified openness. Such activities can be witnessed, in the open, for example on Canonical's launchpad platform, that is the development infrastructure used for the Operating System Ubuntu, and in which diligent and regular contributors are rewarded with karma points, based on their ability to track, fix bugs, and commit source code. These novel forms of algorithmic meritocracy, are possible because of the change in the topology of software production, which encourages individualism and initiative for the sake of innovation, disruption, and thanks to Web 2.0, also attention. With distributed revision control, there are no distinct clients and servers. Every code repository is a standalone database containing the whole history of the project, at the moment of the fork. So when a developer desires to start working on another developer's project, the first step is to acquire one of the copies from such distributed standalone code repositories, which becomes immediately a potential fork. Sending changes back to other code repository is optional, it depends on the willingness to interact with other developers, and the willingness of these to accept changes. Indeed if forking has became so cheap, literally producing new projects and potentially communties on demand, merging and collaborating become very tedious, reducing once and for all, the whole delicate notions of consent and consensus in free culture, to the calculative mechanics of game theory. Forget about approval, forget about engaging with a project, forget about basically all the collective and cooperative mechanisms that grew as part of the free culture universe, despite its ties with free market ideology: just fork them all. And it works. In a literal and pragmatic sense, the fork approach to software development has launched into fame a web platform such as GitHub, in leading the self-coined trend of social coding, that sits at the cross-road of social networks, project managements tools, and revision control. On GitHub, anyone is able to have several public git repositories, a popular revision control system, and is given the ability to fork any other repository by clicking on a button, simply called \emph{Fork}. The button is enhanced with a counter that reveals how many forks have been made of the given repository, making explicit, within this platform, how forking ends up as a popularity contest. Users of the platform are also able to contribute back changes they make to their fork, to the parent repository, and use a specific property of git, that allows them to cherry-pick changes made in other forks. While GitHub provides very effective, and easy to use, tools to facilitate the self-organisation of communities around one single repository, all the main operations are software assisted and do not require any engagement or confrontation, as The repository is therefore forked within the GitHub platform itself, thus revealing the irony of centralising a complete distributed system into one giant \ldots{} sandbox. Of course, because of the nature the git revision control system, you are free to maintain and sync different clones of the same repositories on your own servers or on other services. Still, GitHub has became the de facto reference for the free and open source software development, because of all the extra features built within its platform, on top of git functionalities, which would be lost or irrelevant once you step out of its sandbox. Then, why not fork GitHub itself? Well, in a sense, it has already happened, indirectly, with projects such as Gitorious that is a free software platform and hosting for git repositories. That said, Gitorious lacks many features of GitHub, even though it distinguishes itself with a less individualistic approach to using git, by putting forward teams and projects before repositories, most of the novel development of GitHub is out of its reach. The reason why, is that even though GitHub has released a large amount of its software, some of which have been effectively useful for Gitorious and the like, it has not released some crucial elements that allows to maintain its commercial leadership. When it comes to the openness of source code and its economic realities, the founders of GitHub have been following an hybrid strategy, made famous by Apple and Google: \begin{quotation} [Open source is] \textbf{the right thing to do}. It's almost impossible to do anything these days without directly or indirectly executing huge amounts of open source code. If you use the internet, you're using open source. That code represents millions of man-hours of time that has been spent and then given away so that everyone may benefit. We all enjoy the benefits of open source software, and I believe we are all morally obligated to give back to that community. If software is an ocean, then open source is the rising tide that raises all ships. \textbf{Ok, then what shouldn't I open source?} That's easy. Don't open source anything that represents core business value. \end{quotation} GitHub ends up creating a unique situation, in which the forking mechanism of free and open source software becomes predominant. Thinking back of the process of creative destruction, and more particularly how Schumpeter thought it would lead to the demise of capitalism, we can see an analogy with this example, and how the process eventually supersedes the rules and contracts it stems from, as illustrated by the overwhelming decrease of properly licensed source code found on the platform. Even so, GitHub resists itself to this creative destruction, by making sure it remains in control of the fabric of its sandbox, through the selective licensing of its non vital components, that effectively transform destruction into a more articulated manipulation. Ultimately, GitHub becomes the pimp for a whole generation of source code exhibitionists, who have been introduced and exposed to forking as an acceptable form of social transaction. On the websites of the many repository projects hosted by the platform, a common graphic is repeated over and over: a ribbon laid over the soft colour of the corner of an HTML page, like the exposed garter of the hooker standing at the door of the brothel; and on the overlaid image a few words can be read, as an universal invitation for a taboo-less libertarian libertinage, "fork me on GitHub." \begin{figure}[htb] \centering \includegraphics[width=.9\linewidth]{./img/forkmeongithub.png} \caption{GitHub ribbons.} \end{figure} And everyday, more of such calls are made, and new fork workers are joining the fork industry. What could possibly go wrong here? While networked decentralisation has been perceived as an empowering instrument in the context of worker-owned enterprises, as best examplified with Dmytri Kleiner's P2P Communism vs Client-Server Capitalism, the other side of the coin, that is represented by the different legal and techological mechanisms that permit such decentralisation, has been greatly overlooked. In the case of GitHub, we can see how such mechanisms can be quickly put together to emulate decentralisation and enforce control. More importantly the fork even once it becomes an accepted form of social transaction does not loose of its violence, if anything the contractual consentment of free software license make it even more fierce. However this ferocity is regularly overshadowed by other issues, which are in fact more likely to be cultural byproducts of such transactions, rather than entirely independent matters. Such a matter is for instance the problem of women participation in free and open source software development, and more particularly how the latter often drift into male only conversations about the issue, promoting in turn another form of objectification, a kind of feminism without women, to borrow Tania Modleski's book title on this very topic. And it is with this type of male feminism that the story of the software libupskirt, a library to parse the MarkDown syntax, got much publicity. It started with a blog post from Steve Holden in 2011, where the ex-chairman of the Python Software Foundation, expresses his anger and concerns on how the naming of a Python project, pantyshot, an implementation of libupskirt, is a way to "make the open source ecosphere hostile to women." As with every sensionalist witch hunting articles, the blog post quickly turn, for the whole following month, into a comment battlefield where all sorts of white knights take upon themselves to defending distressed damsels, against all evil free speech terrorists and trolls. The upskirt incident is not a novelty in the ongoing attempt to reach gender and political correctness in tech subcultures, there are, every now and then, similar events ranging from the unfortunate to the distasteful and provocative. (Ruby porn case, or the SmellyWerewolf's) What is slightly different here, is that the authors of libupskirt is a woman, and that somehow this whole incident led her to stop writing and contributing to free software projects all together. As a matter of fact, what the mainstream tech media will sum-up from this story is how a naive non-native English speaking woman got manipulated by a friend to name her project into something so offending, that the shame and harrassment that followed the exposure of this trichery, made her decide to resign from writing and publishing free software ever again. %%%%%%%%%%% %Here I read: %http://www.zdnet.com/blog/violetblue/when-software-offends-the-pantyshot-package-controversy/509 % %"She, not being a native English-speaker, had accepted on trust a %foreign-language name for her library. According to Holden, the %revelation - and the attention to her unknowing complicity - brought %about with the name was so uncomfortable for her that she quit working %in open source altogether." %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% This is, in fact, incorrect. What led Natacha Porté to call it a day with free software is not the unfortunate naming of her project, for which she is taking full responsability. The real story is the one of a fork. "The whole github-triggered curse has been extremely painful for me. It's by far the worst coding-related experience I ever went through. That made me retire from Open Source". (http://fossil.instinctive.eu/libupskirt/wiki?name=3Dabout-the-name) %The name. I doubt she was tricked. She does not say she was tricked in %her explanations and the name was the result of a chat on a French %FreeBSD IRC chan. So cultural misunderstanding can also be applied for %the benefice of the doubt. Interestingly enough, the skirt itself is a %symbol for the right to femininity that is defended by the French %feminist organization 'Ni putes, ni soumises' (rough trans: neither %whores, nor submissives). This all boils down to the right to choose a %particular piece of cloth without being labeled. And while I am not %implying that Natacha was consciously aware of this context, it is clear %that there is an issue with the right to choose how to name a project %and the fact a group (I can without too much risks assume western white) %is disabling this right based on their system of belief and obsession of %the politically correct. It is also quite revealing to see that this %group justifies their demand based on Google's software sorted culture %(talking about upskirt, "when I ask Google what that means" %http://holdenweb.blogspot.com/2011/07/childish-behavior.html). In my %opinion the whole libupskirt clash is a feminist issue, but not in the %same understanding as the mail %on the Debian dev list some years ago. Indeed, the reason for the sudden spotlight on a project that existed already for some years, lies it the appropriation of the later by GitHub itself. The story of this appropriation has been clearly documented by Natacha Porté herself over three posts on her blog. - http://instinctive.eu/weblog/049-code-gloire-beaute 28/03/11 She explains why she decides to write free software "in the hope that it will contribute to the progress of humanity, by sharing the source code with those whose could manage to do something with it." She goes on saying that in practice most software project are lost in the sea of information and rarely triggers anything. This is true, even though many free culture analysis still suffer from the delusion of massive cooperation, as it was associated with the nineties mathematical sublime of the so many developers around the world working the Linux kernel development, the truth is that most free and open source software projects are isolated efforts led by one single or very few individuals with little to no communities to support them. There are exceptions though, and in the grand branch and fork lottery, Natacha might drawn a winning ticket with libupskirt. A developer from GitHub decides to use the project for the platform. According to this developer, he felt like bringing back the project to life as the project seemed stalled. In fact Google was giving a higher rank to a link to an old repos and not the most recent one. He started to make changes that were in fact already present in the current libupskirt. Natacha felt some mixed feeling, on one hand proud to see her code used by GitHub, and therefore will be exposed and get more code reviews, and the other hand she felt a bit saddened in the same way "a writer might feel [..] when watching a cinema or television adaptation of one of her fictions." The post finishes with a question on the use of popular programming languages such as C, that allows for quick code reuse without real collaboration, and if whether or not using Ada instead, would avoid such a situation, and wonders if her next projects should therefore be written in Ada. No conclusion yet as she feels the current situation has both a negative and positive side. The comments that follow cover mostly three points: the history and choice of the name (this is done briefly, naturally and unrelated to the whole offending issue that came up later via Holden's article), the choice of license (whether using things such as ND is relevant, and why she chose open source license in the first place) and the mail exchange with the github dev (ultimately leading Natacha to not know if he would eventually just work on top of the latest libupskirt or fully fork the project). = - http://instinctive.eu/weblog/04B-code-review-review 03/04/11 This post is short and is a request from Natacha to review her code review of Redcarpet, the fork of upskirt made by tanoku/github. At this point we can assume that what was not clear yet is now: github is going for the fork. Unfortunately, both on github's side and Natacha's, the original repos of the fork (https://github.com/tanoku/upskirt) and the code review of Redcarpet have been deleted (http://fossil.instinctive.eu/libupskirt/wiki?name=3Dredcarpet-reviews). = =D4 joy, =D4 revisionism... = Through a comment we can also assume that she was explaining points of disagreement with tanoku and list what she thought was worth backporting on her side. A few days later, github will make the fork official with this blog post (with the typical entrepreneurial hacker fav adjective "awesome" to describe Natacha's original library). https://github.com/blog/832-rolling-out-the-redcarpet = - http://instinctive.eu/weblog/04D-le-logiciel-libre-c-est-ca 17/05/11 The post opens with a link to a diff: https://github.com/mcansky/upskirt/commit/cfa4e0934de0d1318c179f4b226b48b49= b0dfb65 Please note that this diff comes from a cloned repos. The original forked repos by tanoku has been deleted very recently, that also means that the comments associated to this diff, if any, are now also gone (I'm pretty sure I checked it within last month while taking some notes, anyway..). The diff shows that the way the original lib and Natacha's name have been changed dramatically: - The project stands on its own and is not introduced as a fork from an existing project anymore - Natacha Port=E9's status is demoted. From "amazing work," "invaluable," "kindly," and "lady of Markdown" to the mere rank of contributor. The link to the vanilla libupskirt is also removed. (Amazing to put distributed version control in parallel with the concepts of revisionism and iconoclasm, but I disgress...). Back to the post, Natacha explains that she tried to contact tanoku and according to her it was clear that it was targeted against her. His fork getting more and more attention, she writes: "it was necessary to get rid of the female so that he would be more visible under the spot lights." She refers to the trend of the "easy fork", while noting that the project is anyway not mentioned as a fork anymore, and ultimately gives up, saying that she does not have the same media importance as github and therefore will not be heard because the "history is written by the winners". Feeling humiliated, eventually she comes back to her original conclusion where she did not know if this whole thing was positive or negative and decides for the latter. To her original motivation to write in the hope it will be useful for others she wonders what is the point if in the process she gets "en-githuber" (word play on "entuber", rough trans: screwed). Towards the end of the post she writes "As a consequence I officially retire from free software contribution. I will still use it, because it has never the less technical advantages, yet I will not publish any lines of code anymore." The comments that follow, advice her to not leave the free software world, and instead respond by forking the "non-fork", put it on github and develop it further for her own interests and needs while ignoring what people would do with it. To this she replies that her weight is none as she does not have an "@github.com", as for working on her own code for her own interest she does not see anymore why she would put so much effort to make it available to others (administration of the server where the repos are, the commenting/doc of the code, her bug tracker, code responsibility and maintenance etc). To develop her argument she explains that she was pulled into free software as she was told several times that it is not just about licenses, it is also about the community spirit around it. For her her "experience of free software, it's the solitude of the project that does not interest anyone, and the human relationship of being screwed." The name clash is only mentioned once by her, quickly, to say that she received negative comments about it, but that's about it, nothing that can make anyone think this is related to her decision to stop writing free software. from libupskirt, to upskirt, to its ruby binding redcarpet, then to the renaming of upskirt into sundown, and eventually the renaming of Natacha Porté's libupskirt into libsoldout and her decision to not use her real name anymore and instead sign all new works from now on, as well as replacing her original name in past projects in favor of her Internet pseudonym Natacha Kerensikova. And of course all the other projects surrounding these forks, the DownBlouse .NET binding of upskirt or the pantyshot Python implementation of upskirt, that was pressured to be renamed. Which is what the Pantyshot author did, as the project is now called misaka, even though some are suspecting that this new name is in fact linked to Misaka Mikoto, a character from Japanese animes Toaru Majutsu no Index and Toaru Kagaku no Railgun, who has the particularity of being complexed by the small size of her breasts and wears boxer shorts under her skirt, precisely to avoid the pantyshot situation. Next to that, and more recently, others have succesfully forked the sundown project into Hoedown, that obviously barely attempt to disguise yet another gratuitous comment on the dubious imaginary to which both male feminists and Internet trolls are providing enough fuel to overshadow . If anything, bullying Natacha over the name she chose seems disproportionate when you take a look more closely at how GitHub hhas introduced the project in their blog post. What is very interesting in this post is the illustration used, you can see octocat, the github's mascot, posing as Marylin Monroe. Yes everything is there, the skirt, the upskirt phantasm, the redcarpet and the use of a pop culture icon that both represent the national american sex symbol pride and the exploitation of the blonde bombshell archetype in Hollywood productions. On top of that a few comments questions the use of "red carpet" in relationship with "upskirt", referring to the urban dictionary definition of the former (which also relates to the relationship between libupskirt and its python wrapper pantyshot See http://61924.nl/2011/07/03/renamed-pantyshot-to-misaka/). Yet, this time nobody seemed concerned. It must be cultural, well it certainly is unfortunately. That said, in my opinion what is the most important in this story is the problem of pushing forward a technolegal framework that enables with great fluidity the production and transformation of information, and to do so at the great cost of forgetting all the social dynamics, that are at the source of the production and transformation of this information. Of course all these names are used literally as paratextual elements, metadata, and develop a narrative of their own, possibly being used to express the unspoken, the frustration, the direct agression, the dirt that the cleanliness of a server less decentralised and distributed network operation cannot communicate. Maybe with the exception of bitbucket, a concurrent of GitHub that uses mercurial and not git as DVCS tool, that for a while started a campaign to promote a softer form of collaboration between programmers, by coining the term spooning, instead of forking, and using the former as a method to develop software. There is here a clear attempt to educate that consensual development methodologies should be sought after, even if free and open source license are irrevocable ways to indicate one's consent that anyone can dispose for any purpose of whatever has been distributed with such statement. The question "Are you being served?," that denotes both a strict expected hierarchy and script to be played by the actors of the Server-client drama, is replaced by the freestyle and open improvisation of the grand theatrical stage that decentralised and distributed practices, which void is filled by the latent solitude and the creeping doubt of its attention seeking free agents, who wander wondering "Am I being forked?" Asking questions is bad The architects of such systems, meanwhile, comfort their workers that there cannot be too much freedom. That constraints are the root of all evil, particularly in the form of a central authority, or a too restrictive license feature such as the copyleft mechanism. In the case of GitHub they do so despite being such a central authority themselves, with its own restrictive terms of service and privacy policies, and they muse on egualitarian practices while sitting on top of the biggest pile of source code ever written, with a record of all the social interaction that led to its production. A good old gold mine, being capitalised by a few, and from which the same few can be manipulate the crowd to revolt against the state that want to take all their freedoms. Except that here, the crowd are also the workers. Yes, it's good to be the pimp, specially when the fork workers are so enthusiastic to give so much. Of course one might say that GitHub is not truly distributed and decentralised, as I mentioned earlier. It is an emulation. But this emulation is none the less the reference in terms of decentralised and distributed practices, and it shows that no matter what the topology of a network is, there will always be opportunity to create control structures. There is something captivating in becoming a node in a network without central authority, to be freed from the assembly line and the hierarchy, free from capitalist madness and the competition that drives it. However, this charm is also blinding, as capitalism never left the building, but has simply strengthen its classic support toward laissez-faire and freedom. Same for the idea of cooperation that has never superseded competition, as in a system where everything is open and free, competition is accelerated by the rush to make use of cooperations, direct or indirect, of its products and materials, the fastest and the most efficiently to stand above the other nodes. And in the spirit of Ayn Rand and her objectivism, this is all fair, as only the most talented should be rewarded. With free and open source software production, the walls of the factory, are gone, and its liberated workers turned entrepreneurs can go fork and multiply. But isn't forking and such web platforms enable to facilitate and simplify working with free software? It has indeed never been so easy to start using someone else's code and convenient to use things such as github On the question of easyness and convenience. These last two words are problably the most irresponsible and hypocritical words of the beginning of the 21st century. Isnt' it easy to share photos with your family these days, convenient to know at any time where you're located, practical to be surrounded by all sorts of devices that try to be intelligent for you and simplify your life? You must be in complete denial or live in different universe to not have the confirmation that easy and convenience are gateway to servitude. Same goes with the idea of fun and positive nature of openness and insert here rant about positive thinking and gamification. As for the question as whether or not such structures allow as well other types of projects to emerge and empower local people. Yes there are certainly countless examples where such platforms have been useful, but this is completely irrelevant, as it is not what is possible now that matters, neither isolated tear jerking community project, what matters is where we're coming from and where we're heading towards. In the early days of free and open source software practices, the technological infrastructure was both under developed to make visible the capitalist and liberal nature of such sofwtare, and was still much informed and infused in the US counter culture activism that grew in parallel of the first user communities gathering around the sharing of UNIX source code. Naturally the first generation of noticeable projects based around free software adopted the collectist interpretation of cooperation, which to make it perceived as a tool for anti-capitalist and possibly leftist instrument of autonomy and resistance. This can be seen in Debian early days that were clearly marked with a strong hatred for commercial activities and its focus on a social contract, despited the effort of the free software to articulate that free software was absolutely not meant to be anti-commercial. However what we're witnessing today, through the growth of liberal thinking and the advancement of technology is very much focussed on the individual, the generation gap is too big to relate with early days of hacking communities, that have been hijacked in the much more fashionnable maker movement, and the advancement of software infrastructure that reduce to near zero both the context and the need to organise. Divide and Conquer. There cannot be another Debian project today. The only entities who have the means and context, even if artificial, to bootstrap communities around free cultural expressions, are corporations.