Kit 🔻 (32)
"There's no Claude, there's just other people's code", Leenaars offers a reality check
But don't fall into the trap of jumping into European-based big tech!
That'd be the same predators, just based in a different location
Instead, what this moment needs is social initiative, not more 🤑 says Leenaars
Curious (or not?) that one of FOSDEM 2026's sponsors is google, which provides part of the tech infrastructure for israel to commit genocide in Palestine through its participation in project Nimbus...
some refs:
It's Stockholm syndrome, Leenaars says.
Mentions the example of the Dutch government - ministry of Finance making a big project out of moving to Microsoft, even though this creates:
- More dependence on US-based tools
- Productivity loss
Marga Manterola's raises the issue of burnout:
Free as in Burned Out: Who Really Pays for Open Source?
live now here: https://live.fosdem.org/watch/janson
Major contributors to burnout in open source:
- developers are struggling to a make a living
- toxic behaviour from community members wearing developers down
Another talk relevant to workers:
1 Feb, at 16:05
Burnout in Open Source: A Structural Problem We Can Fix Together
This talk identifies 6 factors that contribute to developer burnout:
- difficulty getting paid,
- workload and time commitment,
- maintenance work as unrewarding,
- toxic community behaviour,
- hyper-responsibility
- pressure to prove oneself.
Recommendations for structural changes to address developer burnout:
- pay OSS developers
- foster a culture of recognition and respect
- grow the community
- advocate for maintainers
FOSDEM starting in a bit!
Some talks that could be interesting for workers:
31 Jan, 10:00
FOSS in times of war, scarcity and (adversarial) AI -> war always most hurts working people
We need to talk about war. And we need to talk about companies building bots that propose to rewrite our source code. And about the people behind both, and how we preserve what is great about FOSS while avoiding disruption. How do geopolitical conflicts on the one hand and the risk of bot-generated (adversarial) code on the other influence the global community working together on Free and Open Source software?
cc @techwerkers
Exhibit 1: Github (= Microsoft)
WIth a repo on there, even if you don't share you code with anyone, you still share it with Github/MSFT, which in turn shares it with the US government
"We've been played", says Leenaars
How about @signalapp ?
Signal has sooo many problems, Oğuz states:
- It's a walled garden
- There's no federation
- Nothing on F-Droid
- Threatened a developer who wanted to fork (apparently? don't have the details on this, just reporting)
- Everything must go through Signal's central servers, which .... as the recent outage shows, use AWS!
