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Tribalism Is the Enemy Within, Says Shuttleworth
climenole points out a post from Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth about internal strife in the free software community. He wrote,
"Tribalism is when one group of people start to think people from another group are 'wrong by default.' It's the great-granddaddy of racism and sexism. And the most dangerous kind of tribalism is completely invisible: it has nothing to do with someone's 'birth tribe' and everything to do with their affiliations: where they work, which sports team they support, which Linux distribution they love. ... Right now, for a number of reasons, there is a fever pitch of tribalism in plain sight in the free software world. It's sad. It's not constructive. It's ultimately going to be embarrassing for the people involved, because the Internet doesn't forget. It's certainly not helping us lift free software to the forefront of public expectations of what software can be."
"Tribalism is when one group of people start to think people from another group are 'wrong by default.'"
This is 90% of what makes the American government unworkable.
My other sig is clever.
If you can figure out how to convince people to reject tribalism and operate in a completely rational manner then promoting free and open software will end up being small potatoes, you've probably got a nobel prize waiting for you.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Just the sort of intellectual whining I'd expect from an Ubunt-dude.
It is a problem. Tribalism is different than debate, dissent, and competition. It's a state of being unable to engage in meaningful debate or to accept constructive criticism. There is (or should be) a middle ground between a "mono-culture" and the inability to accept new ideas from a member of an opposing group.
My other sig is clever.
Strange how he speaks of "lifting Free Software to the forefront", whilst all he's _really_ doing is trying to lift Ubuntu to the forefront.
Mr. Shuttleworth apparently knows that "the internet doesn't forget", yet he (I assume it was him who heralded the changes made) chose to tone down the role of Free (as in freedom) Software in the "Ubuntu Promise" over the years in a very silent yet continuous manner, and led Ubuntu to act against some of the principles of the early (think 2004 to 2006 or so) days of the project; principles that I happen to value. Getting into bed with vendors of proprietary software in a way that doesn't benefit others in the Free Software eco-system is something I despise, for example: Canonical is actually getting proprietary AMD/ATI graphics drivers before anyone else gets them, probably under NDA or whatnot. I also don't like their "partner"-repository that contains nothing but proprietary software, and is advertised and presented as a Really Great Thing(tm), not as a sometimes (probably) necessary evil. I don't like how Ubuntu's more and more about doing "their thing" without contributing back to the upstream projects they base their product on, and how they actually try to differentiate themselves from their competitors by making technically bad decisions in the wake of all this (think client-side window decorations, and putting window controls to the left because of that - just doesn't make any sense to me). There were many other occasions on which Mr. Shuttleworth and Ubuntu chose to somehow, somewhat upset parts of the Free Software community, either by what they stated or what they did. I just don't think Mr. Shuttleworth is entitled to put Ubuntu under the banner of Free Software, at least not as it stands today. If someone on identi.ca, or whereever else, is arguing against Ubuntu, it's just that: someone arguing against Ubuntu. It's certainly not an attack on Free Software.
:%s/Open Source/Free Software/g
YTARY!
Mark doesn't like it that we don't just all cooperate in making him even more wealthy. We're not his unpaid employees, even if that's the way he treats us.
Bruce Perens.
This type of action by Bush was the reason his approval numbers were so low - he lost his conservative base. Conservatives were quite outspoken about this. That being said, the fiscal bailout was quite different from the "stimulus" package. The fiscal bailout was almost completely a set of loans and the large majority of those loans have been repaid. The "stimulus" package, on the other hand was mostly a giant boatload of pork-barrel spending.
Mod this one down. I disagree with it's sentiment.
A friend and I have recently been discussing tribalism and an idea he called Monkeysphere - I'll quote him here more-or-less verbatim as he's already written it beautifully:
It's [Monkeysphere] a brilliant concept. It came about when researchers noticed a correlation between primate brain sizes (I forget whether it was the whole brain or a key part of it) and the size of their social groups. It was such a strong correlation that they could actually predict how big a group it would be when presented with a brain they hadn't seen before. This group limit has been termed the Monkeysphere.
One day they were given a rather large brain, and guessed a social group size of 150. You might already have guessed which species this brain came from.
Basically, we cannot cope with the idea of more than 150 people - at least, not AS people. We blur the others out. The supermarket
checkouts may as well be staffed by robots for all we care. There are human beings taking away our rubbish every morning, but we don't even think about them. All we think about is the rubbish going out, and then disappearing. Road rage? We simply don't see other drivers as people.
We *have* to work this way, or we'd go mad.
Stereotypes? Racism? That's the Monkeysphere at work. It's much easier to think of a million people far away if we think of them all as the
*same* person.
Now apply this logic to any community. Once the community gets big enough (such as in the Free Software world), it essentially divides into such tribes and you wind up with exactly what Shuttleworth's describing.
The sad thing is, if this Monkeysphere idea is accurate, I don't see how such tribalism in the F/OSS world is avoidable. Indeed, it'll only get worse as more organisations jump on the bandwagon.
What many people don't realize is that this is true for advanced users as well. I know the intricate details of Linux, but don't want to be bothered by them, so I choose to use Ubuntu.
It's the same thing with programming languages. I have programmed in C for over 25 years, but I use Python for many jobs. Having a simpler language to program makes my work more productive for day to day tasks, although I can resort to C whenever Python isn't powerful enough.