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BBC:
A Facebook engineer has quit the firm, saying they "can no longer stomach" being part of an organisation "profiting off hate".
Ashok Chandwaney is the latest employee to go public with concerns about how the company deals with hate speech.
The engineer added it was "choosing to be on the wrong side of history".
Facebook responded by saying it had removed millions of hate-related posts. Another of its ex-engineers has also come to its defence.
The thrust of the post by Ashok Chandwaney - who uses "they" and "them" as personal pronouns - is that Facebook moves quickly to solve certain problems, but when it comes to dealing with hate speech, it is more interested in PR than implementing real change.
Can [or should] Facebook successfully purge its platform of speech it considers harmful?
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Saturday September 12 2020, @05:15PM (12 children)
ESR is a whack job gun nut. Most people learned early on to ignore him. It was immediately obvious his Cathedral and Bazaar was unrelated to reality, more akin to mental masturbation and a false dichotomy as it's foundational argument.
It set up the battle as being between large closed source behemoths and the "rebel forces " of small open source developers. Completely ignored the small developers who made money selling closed source code to businesses.
To claim that closed source is unethical is another foundational lie - this one from RMS. Everyone is entitled to the fruits of their work, and to do so in the manner of their choosing. Someone writing code that someone else pays a license for is not unethical - however, branding such actions as unethical is itself unethical and slander. Is it more ethical to earn a living and put a roof over your head by selling licenses to your software that there is a need for, or for that software never to have been created because open source can't find it? Screen readers are an example - the open source ones don't work. Even the free NVDA (Windows only) is an exercise in frustration compared to Apple.
Was Apple behaving unethically in creating their own screen reader and bundling it as part of iOS? It wasn't anticompetitive behaviour, like bundling a free browser, because all the alternatives, including the paid ones as well as the free ones, are shit by comparison.
And that will make me take a serious look at Apple in the future. Because nobody else offers something that meets my needs, and especially not Linux.
Same as any code I write in the future will be like when I started out all those decades ago - closed - you want a license, you pay. Better 10 paying customers than 1,000 non paying customers. Don't want to be like RMS, who spent his working years either crashing in the lab (even after he was no longer a student) or begging online for a room for a few months at a time.
My point remains - to call someone unethical because they want to be paid for their work via a license fee instead of donations is itself unethical. And let's not forget all the hypocrites who decry closed source but use closed source video games on closed source operating systems. Why aren't they producing superior open-source games? Because open source can't produce the money needed to do so and people gotta eat.
What happens when all the old time enthusiasts die? Even more projects abandoned, and eventually this will hit a critical point.
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(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Saturday September 12 2020, @07:03PM (11 children)
I don't think OSS and "small developers who made money selling closed source code to businesses" are mutually exclusive. If you want to be such, go do such and may you enjoy a long and fruitful career.
As far as your screen reader goes, I'd say that if the open source ones don't work and you don't want to code them to work, then perhaps you should go with Apple or some other business that has something that will work for you. It's a big world, and one size does not fit all. Your frustration is understandable, but the world rarely hands us exactly what we want, when we want, and how we want. And usually when it does do all that, we wind up paying dearly some hidden cost. TANSTAAFL, right?
Meanwhile, I have not touched closed source personally or professionally in 20+ years and have been perfectly happy and extremely productive. Having to do anything with closed source means wasting perfectly good man hours dealing with lawyers, sales people, worthless support people in places like India, and more PHBs than you can shake a stick at. Open source means cracking open the case, slightly adjusting a feature or adding a feature, and continuing merrily on my way. If I need new software, I "apt-get install" and 20 seconds later I'm on my merry way. To me, that's bliss. Let the software be there to serve me as a tool, rather than let me serve as a perpetual serf and profit center for some faceless group of asshole MBAs.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 12 2020, @08:30PM (8 children)
She's only on this shtick because of the personal abuse she has brought down upon herself over the last 30+ years. She really is the apk doppelganger. Ironically, she is a serious conformist. And I don't believe the meds are helping her to keep on an even keel at all. The mood swings are quite the spectacle.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Saturday September 12 2020, @09:50PM (7 children)
Mood swings? Nope - I saw how shitty OSS became and said "fuck it."
The Cathedral and the Bazaar was a lie. There is no bazaar. Innovation? What passes for the OSS Bazaar is increasingly just shitty clones of other software.
Exhibit one: web browsers. Where's the bazaar. It's all google, all the time. Even Firefox copies Google's shitty features, and is dependent on google for life support . There used to be a lot more browsers. And a myriad of features. Not one browser to rule them all.
Exhibit two: Linux distros. There's too many , which at first glance would seem to contradict my claim that there's no bazaar . But if you look at the actual programs they come with , it's all the same. Nobody is going to spend serious money developing another office suite that does things better if everyone else can just copy it. Nobody is going to develop an innovative web browser for the same reason. You'll go broke. And nobody is going to invest the significant sums necessary for a really good OSS game because everyone else will just copy it and stick ads in it and create their own DLC marketplace and you are out your investment.
Exhibit three: The PinePhone. Gee, how are those sales going?
Also, APK was not even on my radar until his hosts file spamming pissed me off 15 years ago. You're nuts iand should stop making shit up. And you're angry that I was once one of those pushing open source but have woken up and seen that ESR and RMS were full of shit. You say I'm a conformist, but I'm the one refusing to conform to the group think. Show me the bazaar, show me the innovation instead of poor clones, show me distros that don't contain an increasingly tired collection of poorly maintained packages. Not just "twiddling the knobs on the UI" as "innovation." That's the Microsoft Way circa Vista.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 13 2020, @03:28AM (6 children)
Man! You are so full of yourself! You're only mad at free software because you feel personally slighted and take offense at the smallest challenge. It's all in your head. Free software is perfectly fine. You really should just shut your mouth about it. You're just spewing whiny bullshit.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Sunday September 13 2020, @03:42AM (5 children)
Wake me up when there's some AAA free open source games. The biggest consumer software market, bigger than movies, and NOTHING!
Loser. Fortunately , with the collapse of the idea that OSS can meet people's needs, we can hope for a bazaar of closed source software.
Oh wait -it's already happened in app stores selling literally millions of different softwares, both paid and ad-supported, without giving away the source.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 13 2020, @05:11PM (4 children)
I noticed you cannot refute any of my points.
There's nothing to refute! It's all pure nonsensical bullshit. You're not making any "point", you're just ranting and jabbering.
You sound like a freetard. Probably because you are.
You sound like a pretentious moron. Most definitely because you are! What a dumbass prick! This is why people have been reacting so negatively to you over the last 30 years, and you still don't get it. You're just like your apk. That DSM-5 must be full of info about you
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Sunday September 13 2020, @05:32PM (3 children)
The smartphone is the primary computing device for the majority of the population, and it's where the most prolific application development takes place. These are developers making money off closed source software. It's the bazaar, but not open source.
So why aren't we seeing open source applications competing on phones? Simple - developers want to get paid for their work. And people are willing to either pay for it directly or through ads.
That is one fact that you cannot explain - that most people seek out closed source applications on their main computing devices. The battle has been decided for almost a decade, which is remarkable considering that's only a bit longer than the current iteration of the smartphone.
And there's no way that OSS can change that. It has neither the technical chops nor the financial resources to.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 14 2020, @12:12AM (2 children)
:-) Yes! do tell! You made no point to address. They are simple rants, it's you howling at the moon and engaging in name calling. You don't like free software for some personal reason that's totally irrelevant to the world at large. Who the fuck cares?!
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Monday September 14 2020, @03:28AM (1 child)
I'm not happy about it, but I was willing to face up to the facts. There is a pitiful open source bazaar with comparatively few software choices. And a closed source bazaar with more than 10 million choices between all the platforms, and a financial model that works for both the producers and consumers, in part because only a fool knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Free software doesn't work for consumers or we would have had a "year of Linux on the desktop." I don't hear anyone saying that today.
Then again, there will never again be any sort of "year of the desktop" - any desktop - ever again. We passed the "year of the smartphone " a while ago, and it's now most people's default device.
And tablets which had their day , will probably have a comeback with improved operating systems to replace laptops.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 14 2020, @05:20PM
I don't like free software because it's getting worse, not better.
Rubbish! You are simply carrying a personal grudge. Everything you say about open source is nothing but garbage. Looks like you have an inferiority complex!
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Saturday September 12 2020, @09:07PM
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(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Saturday September 12 2020, @09:27PM
It's me going back to what worked in the previous century. The promise of open source didn't pan out. There is no bazaar.
And people who don't want to pay for software are not a viable market. Same reason shareware died. People would rather keep trying the next free thing than actually pay for something.
So innovation died. Except among those who didn't give it up for free. The nice thing was that those who paid for it also expected to pay for improvements and new features. The second sell is always easier. Same as when you go to the store and you really like your adidas or sketchers, you're going to buy another pair.
So what happens when there's nobody willing and able to work for free on OS software who actually knows how the current systems work ? We couldn't clone Larry Wall, so there's not much to expect from Perl7 after the Perl6 fiasco. Same with most utilities - they're feature complete, have been for a decade or two, and when they finally can no longer run on the most recent OS version there won't be anyone familiar enough with them to fix them.
The OSSocalypse is going to be ugly 20 years from now. Because the bazaar, with the promise of innovation, never happened. And there's nothing to do about it because of the GPL.
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