
Interview with Steve Klabnik - hannahurr
http://www.maskmagazine.com/the-cyborgoisie-issue/work/steve-klabnik-interview
======
halon
“Nobody asked the jackhammer dude to work on an open jackhammer project on
Saturdays, that would be totally absurd.”

------
jwhitlark
I find it interesting that he contrasts free software with open source as
"ethical position vs. cost reduction", apparently without ever considering
cost reduction as an ethical position. (Enabling people to do things for less
cost seems (to me), to be at the heart of any non-zero-sum strategy for
improving the world. Otherwise you're just re-shuffling the same cards that
have already been dealt.)

I also thought it was curious that he's advocating for capturing 100% of the
value you create, apparently not considering the value he gets from other
people without paying them.

This didn't resonate with me. It made me a little curious, but left lots of
"How did you get to that conclusion?" questions. Any recommendations on what
his best writing is?

~~~
calibraxis
Ashe Dryden wrote the best explanation I've read:
[http://www.ashedryden.com/blog/the-ethics-of-unpaid-labor-
an...](http://www.ashedryden.com/blog/the-ethics-of-unpaid-labor-and-the-oss-
community)

(Helped me realize why writing opensource never appealed to me: the respect of
my peers is even worse motivator for me than money. I rarely enjoyed the
company of other programmers, due to the toxic culture we replicate. Caused
some minor problems when I "led" a team of them; needed to care for them
despite disgust at their cowardly, sociopathic acts. My interest kept
returning to their far more marginalized coworkers.)

------
calibraxis
Thank you, hannahurr! What a very worthwhile interview; the tech world greatly
lacks such things.

~~~
hannahurr
Thank you!

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georgemcbay
9 times out of 10 when I see some "controversial" (for HN) economic/political
post that I totally agree with, it was posted by user steveklabnik. That
aside, I have to admit I still prefer Go over Rust.

In any case, very interesting interview.

I'd love to see more like this even if the subject was someone on the opposite
end of the political/economic spectrum from me, I found it much more
interesting than the typical padded puff-pieces "What Hacker XYZ uses to hack
with" (spoiler: probably a MacBook, you bunch of Apple-sellouts!).

~~~
steveklabnik
Hehe, thanks. I do often think about how my posts here are perceived. It's
weird being an anti-capitaist, hanging out on message boards that are, in many
ways, at a center of capitalism.

------
ilaksh
> It’s not universally bad — it’s really cool that you can get all this
> software for free. But, value is being generated from your labor and it’s
> not being captured by you, and that’s unsustainable.

A useful alternative perspective on open source and I hope people will pay
attention.

Unionization is something I certainly hope can someday happen for programmers.

I think this touches on some very serious unresolved issues we have in
society.

Anti-capitalism is a reaction but not a solution. More egalitarian sharing-
based attempts at organization have generally also resulted in centralization
and lack of freedom and equality just as much as capitalism has.

I think that the problem is creating a system that is efficient and holistic
but also allows for diversity and evolution.

Whether you are coming at it from a fundamentally competitive angle or a
cooperative one, you easily end up with centralization and hierarchy. Creating
efficient holistic systems generally results in this hierarchy.

What we want is a system that is somehow holistic but also made up of diverse
components.

I think that the problem we need to solve, or if it is solved then we need to
starting promoting the solutions.

If anyone read this and has an answer to that question please let me know.

~~~
zenogais
Notice the contradictory language used in describing what you want:

"creating a system that is efficient and holistic but also allows for
diversity and evolution."

Effectively: I want things to be one thing that is the same, but also to be
many things that change constantly. The truth is that this kind of small-scale
logic breaks down when we talk about large systems. They can usefully be
viewed, to take a page from Marx, as mediators of internal contradictions like
this. Desires that pull in opposed directions.

It's in fact these contradictions that Marx, I believe, very effectively
demonstrates cause ever more rapid and widespread crises like the financial
meltdown of 2008 and the .com bubble 8 years before that as well as numerous
global crises in the interim. He leverages a lot of historical and empirical
data to demonstrate this and I would say reality has consistently validated
this prediction. Its this crisis tendency that leads to an anti-capitalist
position - clearly the system cannot effectively avoid disaster (it's now
struggling to even remain stable for a decade). Therefore, we should really
search for alternatives, what those are is not a ready-made answer and there's
a lot of push back in attempting to experiment in the way necessary to
discover them.

~~~
ilaksh
Its not small-scale logic. I have read Marx. He doesn't have all of the
answers.

All of these crisis are not caused by a contradiction in thinking, they are
caused by not comprehending and solving the true problem, which I have stated.

The reason this problem hasn't been solved is because it is extremely
difficult, to the degree that it is easy for people to simply dismiss it as
being contradictory goals.

Marxist thinking has led many times to a cooperative approach which has led to
holistic hierarchical systems that were not diverse and flexible enough to
cope with an evolving and distributed reality.

Capitalistic thinking also eventually leads to the same type of holistic
hierarchical systems with the same problems.

------
pnathan
I am not anti-capitalist, so I am sure Steve and I would disagree quite
profoundly on many things.

However, one thing we both do agree on is the distinction between free and
open source. I do not particularly care for open source, as it is a nice way
to provide unpaid work for other people to exploit and make lots of of money
off of without providing compensation of any form in return. That seems
_extremely_ unethical to me. _However_ , I provide the bulk of my public
software under GPL-derived licenses: if a company wants to use it, they need
to publish the source so other may benefit. That is my price. Alternatively,
if that is onerous, they can give me some cash.

I strongly believe that it's improper to take others work for gratis and not
provide consideration in return - its also unethical to encourage an entire
industry to contribute gratis work and build off of it for large piles of
cash.

~~~
zenogais
If you've read some of the alternative literature on capitalism you might
think that profit is by definition providing "unpaid work for other people to
exploit and make lots of of money off of". It's a rather clever inversion of
private property rights that exploits the medium of commodity exchange - to
pay someone a fixed wage for their commodity called labour time and exploit
their produce to turn a profit.

Open-source is only an ethical perversion if you believe the above is a just
system of compensation. To me the profit motive is a hinderance to progress
and innovation as it requires subjugating everything to the need to produce a
surplus - often eliminating whole extremely useful areas for human advancement
as they are impractical in this regard. Case and point: no one paid Einstein
to produce his innovation, he merely took a menial job that gave him time and
means to produce it. That being said capitalists have certainly made money off
of it - eg, GPS. We should be careful not to conflate the exploitation of
innovations with the cause of them.

~~~
pnathan
Remark: there are different theories of value. I don't buy into what, afaict,
is known as the labor theory of value - _" profit is by definition providing
"unpaid work for other people to exploit and make lots of of money off of""_.

Oh, other remark - the ethical perversion that MIT/Apache/et al allowed is
that _billions_ of dollars are made off those licenses, providing very
excellent lifestyles to selected people, and there is _no_ compensation ipso
facto to the actual authors outside of (maybe) recognition in license.txt
files hidden away on phones. Recognition does not (as a first order effect)
help bills get paid (or a better life for author (those might be second order
effects)), nor does it help the world in general (except for the product
itself).

Consider the effects of open source on the economy (positive), and the fact
that thousands of people do this for free, enabling companies to essentially
get _free labor_ (and then have the gall to want unpaid labor proof in
interviews).

Stallman approaches this topic grounded as a question of ethics and morals,
with an imperative to share information.

I approach the topic in three ways: "Am I taking this thought-stuff and making
fat cash and not giving _anything_ back to the person who made it?", and "Can
the end user repair (or find a repair person) the product I have provided
them?", and "If this is a good project, can it be maintained and recovered in
thirty years time". I don't think anything but the GPL (and friends) gives
that position.

You can also say to my position that it's terribly unethical to ask people in
each company that wants to do X to do the same project (but duplicated for
each company), rather than having an open source project that has liberal
licensing and having the engineers share work. Wasting other people's lives is
a harsh thing as well. :-)

------
mjburgess
I do find myself in many of the same communities as Steve, and in much the
same starting position whereas I tend to get bored and leave things he puts in
the effort to do something for the community.

I jointed Rust to write an ML project and contribute, I gave a talk on the
philosophy of programming, I think I was speaking one conference behind him at
one point too. And yesterday he opens metaphysics.io and I
programmingphilosophically.com ...

It's interesting to see what could be with a little effort. And yet I still
dilly dally and potter around.

~~~
steveklabnik
Don't stress it. You probably have the time to actually enjoy things in
life... workaholism isn't inherently positive.

------
sandyarmstrong
"The free-software ethos and the founders of the open-source movement are
mega-racist libertarian people, and so it’s always really weird to me that a
bunch of Leftists are so into open source; it explicitly manifests capitalist
social relations."

Mega-racist? What? Lost me a bit there.

It's weird to me that he speaks about the free software movement as if it were
dead...as if the only motivator to write open source software is to get a job
with an artificially low salary.

~~~
georgemcbay
> Mega-racist? What? Lost me a bit there.

I assume that was mostly a thinly-veiled jab at ESR; who is a racist and
generally a giant asshat, IMO; but it probably isn't worded in the best way
when taken out of context of the paragraph preceding it since it sounds like
the speaker is conflating ESR with the Free software people (who I also tend
to disagree with on a great many things but for different reasons). At the
very least, I wouldn't associate libertarianism with the high-level FSF types.

~~~
steveklabnik
Yes, I was referring to ESR, who is mega libertarian and mega racist, and a
large part of 'open source' rather than 'free software.'

~~~
mjgoins
I wish you had made a stronger distinction between freedom and zero-price.

~~~
steveklabnik
I don't see it as freedom vs. price, I see it as ethical position vs. cost
reduction. That said, you're right that I could have gone into it further, but
this was a spoken interview over lunch, so it's not as tight as it could be,
and this magazine is also not for programmers, so it's a little harder to dig
into the details.

------
halfdan
Steve appeared on Ghostalk (a podcast which I co-host):
[http://talk.ghost.io/17/](http://talk.ghost.io/17/)

------
zenogais
Just discovered Steve on Twitter yesterday so this is a coincidentally well
timed article. What initially drew me to his Twitter account were the obvious
references to Deleuze and Guatarri - specifically his reference to the concept
of the body without organs (BwO) in his twitter handle. Glad to see a like-
minded programmer coming to many of the same conclusions I've been reaching
recently.

~~~
steveklabnik
You caught me on a good day: I've been changing my twitter handle multiple
times a day some days. It's a reference to ATP, p150:

    
    
        > You never reach the Body without Organs, you can't reach it,
        > you are forever attaining it, it is a limit.
    

Glad to see some other Deleuzians around too. :)

~~~
zenogais
Me too! Really enjoyed your article applying the concept of the assemblage and
(de-/re-)territorialization to software development. Just finished a reading
of "Difference & Repetition" myself and have been working on applying some of
his concepts from that book and ATP to programming as well. I think software
is a particularly rich area for application. Excited to see where you go next
and refreshed to see someone thinking in a similar vein :)

------
samth
I wish Rust people (like Steve here) would stop saying that there's no new
research in Rust. It's just totally 100% not true. Large parts of the Rust
type system involve awesome new ideas. Additionally, as I said once to
dherman, language design is _always_ research -- putting things together in a
new way is basically all research is.

~~~
steveklabnik
As far as I know, the newest bit is regions, taken from Cyclone, in 2001. Am I
missing something else?

~~~
samth
Regions as a general concept go back at least to FX-87 (in 1987 :). But the
way the Rust type system works is quite different from Cyclone, for example.
Cyclone, for example, treats memory in the heap quite differently than Rust,
and doesn't have borrowing (at least not obviously).

But my more significant point is the second one, which is that novel language
design is research, period.

~~~
steveklabnik
Quite fair. :)

------
wasd
Steve is a really great guy. He's super friendly and incredibly accessible.
I've emailed or tweeted him a handful of times and he's always been very
helpful. I don't agree with everything he says but he has turned me onto a lot
of issues I didn't know anything about especially feminism.

~~~
steveklabnik
<3

