Notices by Strypey (strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz), page 184

@enkiv2 I think you are describing a small subset of code academies/ bootcamps, and assuming that description applies to all of them. It doesn't fit with the experiences of the people I've spoken to who participated in academies like the Enspiral one I mentioned. When Indymedia used to run events where volunteers shared skills with each other, to increase the resilience of our collectives, and make sure tech knowledge couldn't become a hoarded source of informal power, we called them bootcamps

@anaulin that should have been "blog" not "blood". I'm not sure if anyone from Loomio has written anything in blood, but if they have I hope they still have their souls, immortal or otherwise ;)

@aparrish @remotenemesis @TheGibson @enkiv2 in any case, my point is that while tech bosses and investors may have jumped on the bandwagon, they did not create them at all. Let alone for the purpose the article claimed they exist for (pushing people towards startup mentality).

Intriguing @aparrish , where in the world in this? In Aotearoa (NZ), Hong Kong, and other places I've been part of commons-orientated hackathons, they don't have any such negative connotations. Startup orientated events tend not to call themselves hackathons in Aotearoa, but "startup weekends" or somesuch.
@remotenemesis @TheGibson @enkiv2

@enkiv2 See Harry Cleaver's 'Reading Capital Politically' for more on this lazy habit of certain Marxists:
https://libcom.org/library/reading-capital-politically-cleaver

@enkiv2 what I see a lot in this article is a tendency to see a possible consequence of a practice (in this case driving down wages in tech), assuming that this is the goal of said practice, and assuming that it is therefore a conspiracy by the ruling class. This is conspiracy theory thinking, not materialist analysis, and denies agency to whole swathes of working class people building collective power.

@enkiv2 I take your point, but there are both commercial and social motives for offering people a quicker alternative to a CS degree, especially one focused on practical understanding and useful skills. For example #Enspiral run a code academy for activists who want to gain tech skills they can apply to social enterprise and NGO work. The last thing on their minds is helping tech corporations to drive their workers wages down.

@enkiv2 sure, but completely ignoring the role of social movements and reducing tech to what people do as employees or bosses of tech corporations turns a lot of their arguments into strawmen. Which is a shame, as it reduces the credibility of an otherwise well argued article, that presents an important perspective I absolutely agree with; tech workers need to think of ourselves as workers, not temporarily embarrassed CEOs.

@enkiv2 there is a lot of suspicion of open plan offices and hot desking these days, but in general I think they are an improvement on the alienating battery hen style cubicle offices they replace. Yes, they are more suitable for some types of work than others, and I understand that some people want to be able to close a door and work privately at times. But open plans are not that much cheaper than cubicles, and the article offers no justification for its claim that this is why they're used.

@enkiv2 similarly, while I agree that increasing the supply of workers with coding skills could have an effect on tech wages in the future, that doesn't justify leaping to the assumption that organizations teaching people to code are simply dupes of the tech corporations and their owners. There are many ethical motivations for running code academies, such as upskilling workers for social enterprise and NGO work, or even just empowering people to understand the tech they use every day.

@enkiv2 there's a lot of good analysis in this piece, but also a lot of assumptions which I strongly disagree with, many of which revolve around completely ignoring the agency of geeks outside their role as employees, and the influence of social movements in tech like the software freedom movement and CreativeCommons. For example, hackathons have nothing to do with priming people to create VC-funded startups. This is a bizarre assumption that nobody who has been part of a hackathon would make.

Now that I've successfully got root on my Android/Linux device, it would be great if there was an app I could use to swap out all the proprietary apps for their free code counterparts from F-Droid. Or at least to help me distinguish the free code components of Android from the free code components, and maybe give me some guide of what can be harmlessly swapped out and what risks breaking the OS if I remove it.

@h I do agree with you that mutually enforceable agreements have a place, in business arrangements with low tolerance for unpredictable behaviour (eg service level agreements for hosted software). But this is not about enforcement of *values*, but enforcement of *agreed actions*. I wonder if you might be conflating two quite different strategic uses of the law.
@mike_hales @KevinCarson1 @mayel @matslats

@h and yet the permaculture movement expects exactly this with the way PDCs are organized, and AFAIK it's exactly what happens. Also, the existence of the GPL doesn't force anyone to license their software under it (unless its derived from existing software that is), and yet thousands of people do.
@mike_hales @KevinCarson1 @mayel @matslats

@entro @adfeno I ask because if you and anyone else who is unsatisfied with their customer service experiences with Technoethical were to approach the FSF, they might be better placed to properly investigate the issue. If they upheld the complaints, and I saw that Technoethical had lost their RespectsYourHardware certification, I would certainly be disinclined to spend money on their products.

@entro @adfeno funny, the complaint at the link you posted sounds very familiar. I have no reason to believe your post is not genuine. But I also have no reason at this point to believe it's true. The #FSF has given a number of #Technoethical products #RespectsYourFreedom hardware certification. I wonder if this extends to reliable supply of said hardware as advertised, and could be withdrawn if this isn't happening?

@h sure, but the #GPL is a defensive tool. It's function is not to enforce compliance with the #FourFreedom values within the software freedom movement, but rather as a preventative measure against the work of free code hackers being abused by anti-social outsiders.
@mike_hales @KevinCarson1 @mayel @matslats

@entro are you the same person that was complaining about Technoethical on the Trisquel forums a few months back? If you've had unsatisfactory service from Technoethical, so bad that you're taking legal action, #IANAL but if yours is competent I expect they will have advised you not to discuss the issue in public. If you win a legal case, and can point to evidence of that, that would be the time to publicly warn people against buying from them.
@adfeno

@h are you envisioning some kind of legal license that forces coops to follow the coop principles (which encode the coop values)? If so, how do you see this working in practice? I worry that using the stick instead of the carrot risks alienating people, with the result that they abandon the coop form. Might it be more effective to build relationships, and educate people about the coop principles and how their coops might better enact them?
@mike_hales @KevinCarson1 @mayel @matslats