your auntifa liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦Feb 14, 2024

it's time to fork #Firefox and turn it into a cooperative-owned project.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/mozilla-lays-off-60-people-wants-to-build-ai-into-firefox/

cooperative membership is the element missing from FLOSS.

fuck the non-profit's faux neutrality when in truth it's just a broke doppelganger of the top-down structure of the corporatist kleptocracy.

make the project a cooperative where members --users and developers-- get to vote on the future of the project with their paid memberships and contributed labor.

Mozilla lays off 60 people, wants to build AI into Firefox

Memo details layoffs, “strategic corrections,” and a desire for “trustworthy” AI.

Ars Technica
Show threadFunesFeb 14, 2024
@blogdiva are there any examples of software owned/maintained by a cooperative? Would love to look into some as case studies.
Show threadtrystimuli

@funes @blogdiva there’s loomio - source code on github. most tech worker cooperatives seem to do consulting.

another model might be a multi-stakeholder cooperative, which would also include people who use the software as owners/members, but i don’t have any ready examples of that model.

Loomio - make decisions together

Loomio is a collaborative decision-making app that saves time in meetings and keeps a record of decisions

Feb 15, 2024 at 12:02amWeb
Show threadFunesFeb 15, 2024

@tryst @blogdiva interesting, a cooperative developing software to facilitate cooperatives!

Multi-stakeholder could be an interesting avenue. I'd also be interested in the idea of a consumer cooperative, where people who have a common need for a piece of software buy membership to the cooperative instead of buying the software, which in turn funds it, and members vote on its direction.

Show threadtrystimuliFeb 15, 2024

@funes @blogdiva in the food coop space i’ve seen consumer coops that don’t treat their workers terribly well. it can end up being a little like an enterprise software team - the customer(s) don’t really have a reason to consider worker’s beyond what it gets them :’(

this comes up a little in buying coops without paid workers too, when some people participate in the work and meetings and others just turn in their order sheets. but is exacerbated in a customer/customer-elected-board/board-hired-management/management-hired-workers cooperative.

that’s not to say that it couldn’t work! and there are great consumer coops out there! just something to be careful of.