[linux-elitists] Hacker ethic, brogrammer ethic

[Don Marti]

First of all, I have to point out that the people
who originally came up with the "brogramming"
concept considered it just a goof and deleted it.

But perhaps brogramming really is a thing, and it's
becoming distinct from "hacking" in a way that other
subcultures did not. It's probably hard to recognize
from the outside (hackers and brogrammers are all
incomprehensible elitists) or from far enough inside
(where most or all of the tech people you interact
with are bros.) How is the "brogrammer ethic"
splitting off from the "hacker ethic"?

One of the early criticisms [citation needed] of
the book _The Circle_ by Dave Eggers was that in
the fictional Big Internet Company, an employee is
pressured to violate her own privacy, and in the real
world that doesn't happen. There's an us and a them.
Kate Losse put it in terms of the "Man" and the
"servant"...
http://zgp.org/~dmarti/qotd/kate-losse-2013-10-03/
...or you could just say "bros before hos". There's
an in-group and an out-group. (Yes, I realize I'm
posting this on a list called "linux-elitists". But
someone who is a member of the Elite here might have
low reputation elsewhere, and vice versa. And the
kinds of privilege that give you the opportunity to
get on the branching ladder to various kinds of hacker
status tend to overlap a lot with the advantages that
open up the possibility of becoming a brogrammer.)

class BrogrammerEthic extends HackerEthic -- apply the
Bro Code if possible, fall back to hacker principles
where the Bro Code is silent (like US law referring
to English common law).

So how does "extend and subvert technology" turn into
"go fast and break people"?

Hacking: copyleft or neutral licensing (promote generic
ubiquitous code as a complement to valuable people)

Brogramming: aggressive ToS/CLAs (contributors are a
generic out-group; value is in control of the hub of
the network)

Hacking: subvert the dominant paradigm by building
common space outside it.

Brogramming: subvert the dominant paradigm by
monetizing existing common space.
http://gigaom.com/2014/07/04/its-getting-harder-to-tell-whats-a-real-silicon-valley-startup-and-whats-a-parody/

Bonus link: danah boyd
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2014/07/01/facebook-experiment.html

[Andy Bennett]

Hi,

Post by Don Marti
class BrogrammerEthic extends HackerEthic -- apply the
Bro Code if possible, fall back to hacker principles
where the Bro Code is silent (like US law referring
to English common law).

I didn't really ever attribute "ethics" or "principles" to brogrammers.
I'm not saying that they don't have any, I'm just saying that I never
really thought they were defined by them.

I always assumed that brogammers were what PHK was referring to when he
said 'programmers from the “lost generation” who have never heard about
Peter G. Neumann or Robert Morris.'
-- http://phk.freebsd.dk/sagas/md5crypt.html


It's easy for "post Facebook" or even "post millennium" programmers who
might once have become hackers to become brogrammers because of the
"Eternal September" effect and the relative ease with which it is now
possible to meet other people at a similar larval stage of
hacker-development.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/L/larval-stage.html

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/W/wannabee.html


This combination of a large influx of new blood that couldn't be well
mentored by the existing incumbents as well as large, noisy forums and
communities which distracted from the core act of programming (and
learning on ones own) combined to create a much more mainstream culture
that rewards the "vocal minority" and people who conform to certain
social mores.


The user-centric web also had its influence: people came to programming
and hacking much more from "design" and "photoshop" backgrounds and with
(maybe more) tangible "products" that they wanted to build or "end
games" that they wanted to achieve.

Whilst we can debate separately whether that is a "good" or "bad" thing,
what is definitely true is that people from those kinds of backgrounds
have a very different set of values and goals compared to traditional
"academic" hackers.

This leads to a very different "personal development pathway" for the
individual and I guess what frustrates a lot of the old-timers is that,
despite that difference in personal development, they still end up
making the same old mistakes along the way. What makes it especially
frustrating is that it is very difficult to encourage someone who has a
very specific end goal in mind and doesn't see the immediate value in
it, to do the kind of deep, broad, slow learning that is so advantageous.








Regards,
@ndy

[Teh Entar-Nick]

Post by Andy Bennett
I didn't really ever attribute "ethics" or "principles" to brogrammers.
I'm not saying that they don't have any, I'm just saying that I never
really thought they were defined by them.

That's a bit like saying "What are you talking about? I don't *have* an
accent!" Being amoral does not preclude any system of ethics, and
behaviours may be governed by principles of selfish avarice. There are
several popular schools of thought trumpeted by these people:

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2009/11/how_ayn_rand_became_an_american_icon.html

[Teh Entar-Nick]

So how does "extend and subvert technology" turn into "go fast and
break people"?
Hacking: copyleft or neutral licensing (promote generic
ubiquitous code as a complement to valuable people)
Brogramming: aggressive ToS/CLAs (contributors are a
generic out-group; value is in control of the hub of the
network)

And yet, you're seeing plenty of tech bros using Open Source to wring as
much unpaid labour out of people as they can. It's probably one of the
more irritating and impossible-to-deflect criticisms of the free
software movement: what does this do to the power dynamic between
capital and labour? How does this not flood the markets with
more easily exploitable programmers, and harm everyone?

Hacking: subvert the dominant paradigm by building common space
outside it.

The GNU solution to this is copyleft: it explicitly protects the gift
economy so that it can be self-sustaining enough to survive attempts at
exploitation. But even then we worried about "The ASP loophole" (this
was before cloud computing confused people enough to use "in the cloud"
to mean "on a third-party Web service"). Nothing short of the AGPL is
enough to protect the hacker way now.

Brogramming: subvert the dominant paradigm by monetizing existing
common space.

I would propose this razor:

Anyone who is vocal against copyleft licences (such as Brett Glass)
is more likely a brogrammer than a hacker.

[Don Marti]

Post by Teh Entar-Nick

So how does "extend and subvert technology" turn into "go fast and
break people"?
Hacking: copyleft or neutral licensing (promote generic
ubiquitous code as a complement to valuable people)
Brogramming: aggressive ToS/CLAs (contributors are a
generic out-group; value is in control of the hub of the
network)

And yet, you're seeing plenty of tech bros using Open Source to wring as
much unpaid labour out of people as they can. It's probably one of the
more irritating and impossible-to-deflect criticisms of the free
software movement: what does this do to the power dynamic between
capital and labour? How does this not flood the markets with
more easily exploitable programmers, and harm everyone?

And other workers too, as more and more places pick
up on the "like Open Source, but for..." line, but
use ToS/CLA arrangements in place of conventional
licenses.

For a good example of that, see the Geoff
Shullenberger series on Coursera...

Coursera’s GTC, conversely, involves an attempt to
decouple a form of skilled labor from the expectation
of payment on the part of the laborer by redefining
it as something similar to social networks (the
benefit of doing it is that you will join a
“community of committed individuals [and] be given
access to a private translator’s portal.”

http://www.geoffshullenberger.com/archives/118
http://www.geoffshullenberger.com/archives/158

Post by Teh Entar-Nick

Brogramming: subvert the dominant paradigm by monetizing existing
common space.

Anyone who is vocal against copyleft licences (such as Brett Glass)
is more likely a brogrammer than a hacker.

Unless the project maintainers take some other steps
to ensure the valuable people/generic codebase model.
The PostgreSQL project seems to do code commons well
without copyleft (possibly informed by some failures
of proprietary derived works in the past.)

[Teh Entar-Nick]

Post by Teh Entar-Nick

Brogramming: subvert the dominant paradigm by monetizing existing
common space.

Anyone who is vocal against copyleft licences (such as Brett
Glass) is more likely a brogrammer than a hacker.

Unless the project maintainers take some other steps to ensure the
valuable people/generic codebase model. The PostgreSQL project seems
to do code commons well without copyleft (possibly informed by some
failures of proprietary derived works in the past.)

I specifically am not talking about people who choose permissive
licensing for other reasons. There are plenty of concerns that could
lead one to choose a permissive licence, many involving compatibility
with a given body of work or community of practice. And yes,
organisational structure can really help mitigate some of the failure
conditions these licences leave you open to.

My point is that people who try to argue that copyleft works *against*
freedom are the ones who are probably brogramming instead of hacking.

[Don Marti]

Post by Teh Entar-Nick
I specifically am not talking about people who choose permissive
licensing for other reasons. There are plenty of concerns that could
lead one to choose a permissive licence, many involving compatibility
with a given body of work or community of practice. And yes,
organisational structure can really help mitigate some of the failure
conditions these licences leave you open to.
My point is that people who try to argue that copyleft works *against*
freedom are the ones who are probably brogramming instead of hacking.

Old-school anti-copyleft flaming isn't as much of a
problem around here as the "forget all that legal
jibber-jabber, I just want to bro down and crush
code" message.

Luis Villa: "...the values encapsulated in
our licenses are taken for granted by younger
developers who have always had a plentiful, healthy
free-as-in-beer code commons."

http://lu.is/blog/2013/01/27/taking-post-open-source-seriously-as-a-statement-about-copyright-law/

A decent Unix-like system with tools is just
background radiation--you can always download a
slick Linux distribution, or software comes free of
charge with your choice of aluminum ingot from the
Apple Store (just click here to agree to the EULA,
nobody reads that stuff).

While there's some "these kids today don't appreciate
what earlier generations built" the problem might
be that we don't have _enough_ license flamewars.
At least they got people to think about the norms
that affect software sharing.

Maybe it's just a question of how much does an
individual see startup equity as an essential ticket
out of _précarité_. Everyone has a different
balance of change the system / get my piece of
the existing system. Try to change the system
in the 1980s and fail, oh, well, you have to get
a middle-class job babysitting Novell NetWare or
something. Fail in the 2010s and if you're not on
the "tech bus" you're, um, a self-employed achiever
in the cloud-based crowdsourcing economy.

[Ruben Safir]

Post by Don Marti
While there's some "these kids today don't appreciate
what earlier generations built" the problem might
be that we don't have _enough_ license flamewars.
At least they got people to think about the norms
that affect software sharing.

The problem is deeper than this and largely a failure of our own making.
The common public just doesn't get a shit any longer. As long as they
have a steady supply of the dope of choice, then they could care less
about eulas, crowdsourcing, licenses, source code, tracking, stalking,
survalance, social control, etc etc etc.

I feel sorry for these kids. I feel like I let them down and they are
entering a very dark chapter in human history.

God help us all..


The experience they are perhaps missing most, and which we failed to
transmit, is the experience of looking at a black screen with nothing
more than a keyboard. Similarly, they never face a white sheet of paper,
with just a penicil in their hands, or a lump of clay, or a blank
canvass, or a box of blocks even. Who needs a licensing flamewar in a
generation that can't read and doesn't have access to rich debate, and
which has no understanding of participation, creativity and constuctive
engagement that isn't prepackaged, regurgitated and pre-digested.

I wanted to use technology in order do tasks, and empower me. I needed
it to do what I wanted to, and I needed to bend it to my needs.

So when the Phone was invented wealthy aristacrats at a dinner table
said, "So that is your new "telephone". It rings and you come running!"

We are now a long way from that. Maybe the first thing we need, at this
point, is to put down the damn mini-tablet/cellphone, turn off the GPS,
pull out a fishing pole, and head out on a boat for an afternoon of
fishing.

The whole model of technology and human society needs to be reassessed
at this point and we need to take control of our future, which is not
our future any longer, but the future of our children.

Ruben

[Don Marti]

Post by Ruben Safir
The problem is deeper than this and largely a failure of our own making.
The common public just doesn't get a shit any longer. As long as they
have a steady supply of the dope of choice, then they could care less
about eulas, crowdsourcing, licenses, source code, tracking, stalking,
survalance, social control, etc etc etc.

It's never been about the common public, though.
Hacker culture is elitist and obnoxious for regular
people, too.

The differences might just have to do with how you
approach...

* Network effects

* Skilled human labor

* Government-granted information monopolies

...and hackers have never been unanimous about how
to value them. Brogrammers seem to skew more towards
seeking network effects, devaluation of non-bro labor,
and use of information monopolies in the service of
network effects, though.

[Don Marti]

Just following up on my own post, after seeing Rachel
Chalmers in San Francisco a little while ago.

http://blog.heavybit.com/blog/2014/9/15/rachel-chalmers

(Yes, _the_ Rachel Chalmers...
http://www.cbronline.com/news/unisys_patent_crackdown_sparks_burn_all_gifs_protest
)

Post by Don Marti
Brogrammers seem to skew more towards
seeking network effects, devaluation of non-bro labor,
and use of information monopolies in the service of
network effects, though.

All of the techiques that Rachel covers
are equally applicable to hacking and
to brogramming. But it ties back to Joel
Spolsky's point on "commoditizing the complement" (
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html
) -- in hacking, the complementary good to free
information can be a lot of things. In brogramming,
the complement is some kind of network effect,
where the "bros" have some position of advantage on
the network.

Maybe brogramming is a subset of hacking. Hacking for
brodom?

Bonus link:

"My free software will respect users or it will be bullshit"
Matthew Garrett
http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/32686.html

[Don Marti]

Post by Don Marti
Maybe brogramming is a subset of hacking. Hacking for
brodom?

Another relevant article...

The Politics of the Sharing Economy
Trebor Scholz The New School
http://ourworld.unu.edu/en/the-politics-of-the-sharing-economy

Covers differences between "commons-based peer
production" and "sharing economony" (terrible name,
should just be brogramming.)

Brogrammers are to network effects as rent-seekers are
to information monopolies?

[Ruben Safir]

Post by Teh Entar-Nick

So how does "extend and subvert technology" turn into "go fast and
break people"?
Hacking: copyleft or neutral licensing (promote generic
ubiquitous code as a complement to valuable people)
Brogramming: aggressive ToS/CLAs (contributors are a
generic out-group; value is in control of the hub of the
network)

And yet, you're seeing plenty of tech bros using Open Source to wring as
much unpaid labour out of people as they can. It's probably one of the
more irritating and impossible-to-deflect criticisms of the free
software movement: what does this do to the power dynamic between
capital and labour? How does this not flood the markets with
more easily exploitable programmers, and harm everyone?

Who needs to deflect criticism and why do we care. How blindly stupid
would such a statement be? Let me get this straight, every time someone
uses a previously discovered technology it is a distortion of the
market? Who cares. Markets are not the venue or means for human growth
and transmition of culture. They are a by product of our economic
activity. Anyone who views every engineering and artisitic feat as a
"market" needs to take a day off and go to the park. Smell some grass.
Play some softball. Enjoy a day OFF.

[Teh Entar-Nick]

Post by Ruben Safir

Post by Teh Entar-Nick
And yet, you're seeing plenty of tech bros using Open Source to
wring as much unpaid labour out of people as they can. It's
probably one of the more irritating and impossible-to-deflect
criticisms of the free software movement: what does this do to the
power dynamic between capital and labour?

Who needs to deflect criticism and why do we care. How blindly stupid
would such a statement be? Let me get this straight, every time
someone uses a previously discovered technology it is a distortion of
the market? Who cares. Markets are not the venue or means for human
growth and transmition of culture. They are a by product of our
economic activity. Anyone who views every engineering and artisitic
feat as a "market" needs to take a day off and go to the park. Smell
some grass. Play some softball. Enjoy a day OFF.

Cool story, bro.

[Shlomi Fish]

On Sun, 6 Jul 2014 19:53:11 +0000

Post by Teh Entar-Nick

So how does "extend and subvert technology" turn into "go fast and
break people"?
Hacking: copyleft or neutral licensing (promote generic
ubiquitous code as a complement to valuable people)
Brogramming: aggressive ToS/CLAs (contributors are a
generic out-group; value is in control of the hub of the
network)

And yet, you're seeing plenty of tech bros using Open Source to wring as
much unpaid labour out of people as they can. It's probably one of the
more irritating and impossible-to-deflect criticisms of the free
software movement: what does this do to the power dynamic between
capital and labour? How does this not flood the markets with
more easily exploitable programmers, and harm everyone?

Hacking: subvert the dominant paradigm by building common space
outside it.

The GNU solution to this is copyleft: it explicitly protects the gift
economy so that it can be self-sustaining enough to survive attempts at
exploitation. But even then we worried about "The ASP loophole" (this
was before cloud computing confused people enough to use "in the cloud"
to mean "on a third-party Web service"). Nothing short of the AGPL is
enough to protect the hacker way now.

One reason I prefer the permissive licences is
that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saladin is my role model when it comes to
ethics and long-term strategy and based on
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Heaven_%28film%29 , I think that if
Saladin were alive today and he wrote open source code for fun (yes, I know -
sounds farfetched) he would have used BSD-style licences too.

Someone who lives in paraonia of people abusing his licence, is miserable and
unhappy, and as a result, it will bring his downfall. Also see:

(Yoda from Star Wars episode I).

Regards,

Shlomi Fish
--
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/
First stop for Perl beginners - http://perl-begin.org/

How many “one-liners” do I actually write? I don’t know; maybe a couple dozen
a day. But I guess I must be unusual, because as we all know, AWK was a
complete failure and vanished into obscurity since it didn’t address anyone’s
real needs. (That was sarcasm.) — “Twelve Views of Mark Jason Dominus”

Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply .

[Ruben Safir]

Post by Shlomi Fish
One reason I prefer the permissive licences is
that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saladin is my role model when it comes to
ethics and long-term strategy and based on
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Heaven_%28film%29 , I think that if
Saladin were alive today and he wrote open source code for fun (yes, I know -
sounds farfetched) he would have used BSD-style licences too.

shlomifish.org > /dev/null

After a decade of reading this prattle, it is time...

[Don Marti]

Post by Shlomi Fish
Someone who lives in paraonia of people abusing his licence, is miserable and

The problem is that most people redistributing
licensed code are doing so in an organizational
context. Corporations aren't hive minds where "those
who participate within it subordinate their goals to
that of the collective."
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/12/invaders-from-mars.html

(If you don't have actual corporate experience you can
go explore http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/ for
a while. Or better yet, try helping an experienced
enterprise sales person sell something to a large
company--as a vendor you rapidly become a piece in
a complex internal power game.)

So think of it from the point of view of a downstream
user trying to do the right thing.

A well-intentioned hacker at an organization
planning to release a derivative work can say,
matter-of-factly, "we need to comply with the upstream
license" if copyleft is involved. Otherwise, he or
she is in for a license strategy struggle -- office
politics that the best office politician will win.

(The extreme case is university licensing offices.
Some poor graduate student gets excluded from his or
her own project on leaving the university, unless he
or she had the foresight to build it as a derivative
work of something under copyleft.)

Copyleft is a CLERK CANNOT OPEN SAFE sign for
users. The clerk wants the sign to advertise his
or her own powerlessness. Copyleft isn't a magic
commons-building tool, it isn't right for every
situation, and sometimes an extreme adversary will
invest in "blowing the safe", but used correctly it
can increase the well-being of downstream hackers
and their users.

[Andy Bennett]

Hi,

Post by Don Marti
go explore http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/ for

In

http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/07/05/never-relocate-unpaid/

...he starts to talk about cost minimisation and how much to pay for
things (specifically software engineers when you have VC money to spend).

He argues that it's better to pay $2X for 15 good developers than $X for
100 mediocre ones to get a particular job done.

Clearly he's talking about this because it's something that doesn't
happen (and he explains why he things so).


The question that comes to mind is "how does 'worse is better' apply here?"


Does worse-is-better apply to venture style startups?

If we're "doing it wrong" why isn't the market working itself out
according to market principles that would allow it to be "done right"?



Maybe the Californian employment laws don't encourage a perfect market?
Afterall, there are a lot of jobs and a lot of talent.


Thoughts?




Regards,
@ndy

[Teh Entar-Nick]

Post by Andy Bennett
Thoughts?

Mental concepts!

[Don Marti]

Post by Andy Bennett
http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/07/05/never-relocate-unpaid/
He argues that it's better to pay $2X for 15 good developers than $X for
100 mediocre ones to get a particular job done.

Market for lemons. Very hard for employers to
identify who will be good developers in their
particular situation.

Post by Andy Bennett
If we're "doing it wrong" why isn't the market working itself out
according to market principles that would allow it to be "done right"?

There's enough extra value being created in
software that the industry can afford to do a lot
of things wrong. In a primeval forest you can own
a badly-managed lumber camp and still make a profit.

[Shlomi Fish]

Hi Don,

On Sun, 6 Jul 2014 07:31:39 -0700

Post by Don Marti
First of all, I have to point out that the people
who originally came up with the "brogramming"
concept considered it just a goof and deleted it.
But perhaps brogramming really is a thing, and it's
becoming distinct from "hacking" in a way that other
subcultures did not. It's probably hard to recognize
from the outside (hackers and brogrammers are all
incomprehensible elitists) or from far enough inside
(where most or all of the tech people you interact
with are bros.) How is the "brogrammer ethic"
splitting off from the "hacker ethic"?

What exactly do you mean by "hacking"?

Do you mean "Breaking computer or computer network security"? Probably not.

Do you mean computer software or computer hardware enthusiasts?

Or do you mean hacking in the most general term of finding clever solutions to
big problems by bending the rules and getting your environment and tools to
comply with your whims whether it wants it or not. See:

* http://www.paulgraham.com/gba.html - Paul Graham’s “The Word ‘Hacker’”.

* http://paulgraham.com/opensource.html - What he said about “amateurs”

*
http://www.shlomifish.org/philosophy/philosophy/putting-all-cards-on-the-table-2013/#david_and_goliath
- what I wrote about why the famous tale about David vs. Goliath is a tale
about hacking or being an action hero.

If that's the definition, then, in this day and age, almost everyone of
significance is a hacker, including Penny from The show The Big Bang Theory
( http://bigbangtheory.wikia.com/wiki/Penny ) and as evidence, see:

* http://www.reddit.com/r/buffy/comments/1d6x12/so_did_you_love_it_a_clip_from_the_big_bang/ ;

**
http://www.shlomifish.org/humour/fortunes/show.cgi?id=big-bang-theory-penny-after-watching-buffy
(transcript) ;

===========

So what do you mean?

Best Regards,

Shlomi Fish