Tech: Professionalism

Introduction I don’t know how to introduce this post other than the question in the title: is it even worth working on Free and Open Source Software anymore? I have been asking myself this for the past week or two, and it’s uncomfortable for me; I believe in the power of Open Source to empower users and to give them control over their machines. Exploited FOSS But that belief of mine has been severely shaken by several things happened this week, things which also made me reconsider things that happened further in the past as well....

In July, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) put out a call for whitepapers about the “philosophical and legal questions” around GitHub’s Copilot. I wanted to write one, but decided not to until encouraged to do so by an employee of the FSF. By that time, I only had five days to write it, so the paper ended being subpar, but I got it in. As to be expected, my paper was not chosen for publication, and I don’t blame them....

I have mentioned the term “Yzena” a few times, so I should probably tell my readers what it is. As I said before, I have several ideas that I might turn into a business. When I first got those ideas, I came up with a name that I reserved so that I could use it. That name was Yzena. In other words, Yzena is the name of the business that I will use to commercialize my ideas....

I don’t like Codes of Conduct. They can be easily misused. So Yzena doesn’t have one and never will. But I do reserve the right to eject people from the community who, I believe, have behavior that is detrimental to the health of the project(s), community, and any other members of the community. In other words, I am BDFL, and I take direct responsibility for maintaining a healthy community.