On Tue, 07 Jun 2016, Steve Litt wrote:

> I'm all for corporations making money. I get paid, why shouldn't they?

sure, this is sort out of the scope of the discussion. work should be
paid as much as possible and sustainability is a feature, not a bug :)

I'm even ready to understand some discounts on quality when
reasonable, for the sake of time and prompt delivery, especially when
things are called with their name (a beta is a beta, better cautious
as we are than bold and fast in calling it stable).

but said that, I do have a problem with marketing hype and smoke in
eyes. Which is pretty much how most corporations communicate outside:
they just advertise their products, they lack respect for boundaries
and other players. sadly, startup are inheriting this behaviour.

however, back to us. I still admire RedHat for having built a company
of considerable size, having provided paid work for many developers
and having shipped reliable solutions to the public in the past
decades. So here maybe me and Steve and others disagree a bit.

what i'm "silently ranting" about is the rethoric of innovation,
especially when merged to aggressively profit driven strategies and
marketing, the "fast food" way.

If you look in the big and new corporations today you'll find out that
technically aware people who feel a social responsibility for what
they are doing are less and less. The vast majority of employees are
(very young) sales, stuffed in chicken factory setups for marketing
all sorts of ads and nonsense. Time to market is shrunk as much as the
quality of products is. "Legacy" customers are disregarded in disgust
in most occasions and all sorts of dreams for "easy money" are driving
a sometimes blind adoption of products even before they are stable,
see Docker's wrapping of LXC for instance, which is as idiotic as
succesful in the world we live in
http://homolog.us/blogs/blog/2015/09/22/is-docker-for-suckers/

so well what I'm arguing is not that the corporate sub-culture should
be ostracized because "evil". I seriously think noone should ever
think or speak in reductionist terms of "good" and "evil".

I'm arguing that as of today, through a slide of 2 or 3 decades, we
are witnessing the necrotization of what it was originally indended as
"industry", with choices which are very poor and strategies that are
continuously tainted by marketing hype and lobbies. Even the academic
world which should be the last bastion for neutrality and objectivity
is falling into this landslide, even bribed to do so (see pharmaceutic
industry).

Can this be fixed by a campaign for industries which "do no evil"?
I doubt so....

How do I feel we can fix this? well the answer is maybe too long to
write now and contains still many doubts and incertainities. However
at Dyne.org we like to think of ourselves as the "slow food" of
software and Devuan, straight after dyne:bolic, is one of the best
cooked meals we've ever facilitated so far. Big up to Franco and
CenturionDan whom I consider to be chef and sous-chef of the menu we
are feasting on today in this fine and well mannered restaurant.


ciao