this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2024
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Privacy
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i think it's crazy high salaries; it insulates them from the problems that the rest of us have have to deal with in our lives.
i first noticed it around the tail end of the earlier "IT half" of my career when my payrate started to push up against six figures; now at over 20 years as a software engineering that's solidly past that boundary (like most well connected software engineers are); the opinions/outlooks/expectations of my colleagues have become so toxic to me that i've decided to go back to IT permanently.
also: the work seemed to get more and more evil as i progressed in the software engineering half of my career. i'm convinced my current gig is a net detriment to humanity and society like all my software engineering gigs were and i'll be taking a 56% pay cut to avoid the that profit-seeking-evil in a non-profit organization that teaches people who can't afford to dedicate their lives to a college degree like a 19 year old from the suburbs can do.
a big part of me is sad that i will never become rich like my current colleagues; but i think that my psychological well being matters more and it's a union job so there are other perks that help compensate for it.
I know this feeling. I was finishing my film Moria's Race which is libre and will never make a single cent. And then I went to see Spielberg's Auto-Biographical film "The Fablemans" and it literally broke me. The amount of evil I have to agree to do just to have a chance at something like this. Oh my god. It didn't help to go see Avatar 2 right after that.
The worst is that a lot of people delude themselves that they are good. I don't think Spielberg is a bad person. The messages in his films seem to point that he is firmly on the side of freedom. Though he never thought about copyright, for example, as being anything evil yet. And probably if somebody will point it out to him, his age is such that there is probably very little neuro-plasticity left there, and if he somehow justified copyright all this time, it will be hard to convince him otherwise now. Not even talking about how his whole career is basically holding on the fact that copyright exists.
To do something about this whole apocalypse, we need to change values. GDP has to go away! Something like a freedom score should replace it. That will already force governments to divert from stupid ideas like "chat control". And perhaps will make them start supporting Free / Libre projects. And then of course, there should be ways to make money in Free / Libre to convince those who care only about how big their pockets are. Donations do not cut it. They are good, but they feel pathetic in comparison to what a proprietary alternative makes. There should be a way to make money without restricting freedom. Devices is a good start. Librem5 and PinePhone are amazing. Software is totally free. Maybe something like a reverse-crowd-funding could be implemented for simple software. Basically the changes aren't even released to begin with, until people come and fill up a can full of money. Each can send a cent or a million dollars. But the idea is, the developer chooses how much will unlock the release. And since it is unlocked it is totally free. And to avoid proprietary versions, until it is unlocked nobody has access apart from the devs.
they make that money because our system restricts that freedom and it's intentional.
ever since i became a software developer, my work has been 100% based off of extending the capabilities of open source projects beyond their base capabilities that's available to the public. (ie turning it from a hobby project into enterprise worthy product). my task masters make billions of dollars off of the efforts of those volunteers who will never see a dime or even be aware of the details needed to get their fair share that they rightly deserve. the legal "protections" put in place to help open source projects like gnu or copy-left licenses is so easily curtailed that my management and senior engineers literally laugh at it sometimes when deciding which scraps are useless enough not to make money for the company and then report it back to comply with the copy-left. those things that they report back are MINUSCULE compared to what they actually have and they milk it to look like they're actually compliant.
the people who are aware of this fact are, like me, are trapped into legally binding non-disclosure agreements resulting in thousands of us who are aware that we're profiting off the blood, sweat, and tears of people like you and our system assures us that our livelihoods & freedom will be permanently altered in some of the worst ways possible if we made you aware of exactly how we profited. this is one of those evils that i felt i could no longer keep doing, which is one the core reason why i want to stop doing this.
like you, i don't think that they're bad people. it's simply that your environment determines your actions and these people are so placed that they're disconnected from the impacts of what their actions are having on humanity because of those ridiculously high salaries; this encourages their worst, material impulses and makes them believe that anyone doing what i'm doing is simply a malcontent or a shitty developer. it's a open secret in my industry that a lot of people do what i'm doing and the most privileged among us will sometimes derisively use groupthink "common sense" stereotypes to attack the person doing it; it's so bad that most who do it have learned to say that they want a "change" or to "give back" to help them keep the door open should they decide to ever return.
Copyleft was not designed to protect the developer from corporations. It was designed to protect users from developers.
it's one of the several other examples that i pulled out the thin air and probably not the most appropriate in helping me make my point.