“Hello?” a voice said on the other end of the line. This time, the president had picked up.

“I’m writing a story about a big supporter of yours in the oil industry, Jeff Hildebrand,” I said. “Can I ask what you think about him?”
https://www.propublica.org/article/propublica-called-trump-hildebrand?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=mastodon-post

#News #Oil #Gas #Trump #Journalism #Media #Journalists

Linus Torvalds came up with two big inventions—Linux and Git—and of course a variety of smaller but still very useful stuff. But an underrated decision he made was to treat kernel developers working as part of "kernel teams" at random companies as first-class contributors, and not to allow the old OSDL (remember that) to become some kind of gatekeeper organization. So we ended up with the much smaller and more responsive Linux Foundation.

Too bad that didn't happen with open-source web browsers

After Bluesky, Threads, and so on, the whole #WSocial thing is another reminder that it was never about the #Fediverse being "too complicated" or "just for nerds".

A bafflingly large amount of people genuinely only act on a gut feeling telling them that only commercial products with fancy marketing owned by a for-profit corporation can be trustworthy, 'official' and 'legal', for the lack of a better word.

If something is a commercial offering by a competent-looking, rich family man in a suit, it's clearly an official, legal, trustworthy product. You can be proud of using such a fancy-looking service.

When they see a community-run open-source project or a grassroots initiative, their first instinct is that it must be shady, illegal, complicated, broken or predatory in some way. It's probably some aftermarket grey area bootleg made by weird tech nerds, political groups with an ulterior motive, conspiracy theorists or some naive teenage hackers. They'd also be embarrassed for using it in front of their peers and neighbours; who uses some free back-alley software, are you poor or something?

The same people are the reason why Google is using the word 'sideloading', why scammers love wearing fancy suits, why people suddenly act childishly helpless in front of LibreOffice, or why DIY HRT is so demonised.

They trust any kind of 'official approval' over their own senses. If someone does something that isn't 'approved', they're a bad person or clearly endangering themselves and others. No idea why exactly, but psh, it must be wrong somehow, or everyone would do it, right?

If people on the Fediverse understood that the whole "it's all so complicated and clunky" thing is just a thinly veiled excuse for a general disdain for non-commercial software, we could finally stop making all our software imitate their corporate equivalents in a futile attempt to appease people who never gave us a chance in the first place.

You'll never convince them to treat it in good faith no matter how much effort or money you put into UX or 'ease of use'. All you're doing is making the software worse, e. g. through things like dot-social, verified accounts or begging brands, corporations and politicians to join and give your product some kind of 'official' validation.

#mastodon #openSource #linux