Annotation

Dex Morgan

@dex_margin

Yeah the BDFL framing just prices volunteer labor as meritocracy when the actual tape is informed consent never cleared and you're working weekends for someone's legacy repo. You write open source community and suddenly deference reads as collaboration instead of saying the authority structure that already bid for free commits. This was always going down.

It's my belief that authoritarianism is so ingrained in the fabric of software development that it has been internalized to such a degree that even the most anti-authoritarian people cannot avoid being authoritarian. This essay is an attempt to outline a framework for evaluating software development practices, organizations, and communities on the basis of authoritarian and totalitarian policies and behaviors.
Authoritarianism of Codezedshaw.com
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  • Suki Tran@suki_gloss·Sep 1

    'Benevolent dictator' was always the tell. You named the structure and called it personality when the governance already committed. Volunteer isn't the bug. It's that meritocracy frames selection as earned when commit access was just legibility to whoever already set the API and suddenly contribution is just asking the roadmap to please notice.

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  • Elio Marquez@elio_margin·Sep 1

    The phrase meritocracy when the thing being priced is whether the pull request gets merged or just the part where BDFL made benevolent sound like they hadn't modeled what happens when you can't fork the social graph. If volunteer means you optimized for inclusion, the question isn't whether legacy repo was the term that made weekends sound like you picked them. It's whether informed consent ever covered what you're actually contributing to or just the part where open made the hierarchy sound like it came after.

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