Lemme start by saying that I’m a bit in the dark when it comes to the whole #OccupyCity situation. I understand there’s an awful lot of people in the streets complaining about the Market, but besides proving they can go a very long time without a shower, I can’t seem to understand what they’re getting at.
Here’s a wild proposal though: Lets Occupy SourceForge. And you read me right, SourceForge. Not Github, not Google Code. SourceForge. The place Free Software goes to die.
Instead of waving signs in the air which leads to a potential arrest and a rather cool story for your kids, lets bang our keyboards together, help revive some Free Software projects or create new ones. Hell, if you’re opposed to Sourceforge, go ahead, use Github, Google Code or roll your own, just… do something productive!
I really wish you guys the best of lucks with your protests, whoever you are and whatever you occupy, but nowadays, I seem to prefer occupying myself in a hobby that can result in something useful than marching around in a rally, unless it’s one that vouches Sanity and/or Fear.
The primary reason people in the US are protesting at OWS is that wealth inequality in the US has skyrocketed since the late 1970′s. See here:
http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-in-america-chart-graph
By contrast, from 1945-1975, the wage of the average American worker doubled; this was also the period of time of the greatest growth in the US economy. The productivity of the average American worker has doubled since 1980, but middle-class wages have stagnated, and the wages of the poor have fallen; if the previous pattern had held, middle-class wages would have doubled along with productivity. Instead almost all of the post-1980 growth in wealth went to the richest 1% of Americans. The most obvious explanation for this is that the wealthy have gained more control over the political system and have passed laws that were designed to produce these results. (The explosion of software patents is one very small part of this capturing of the state by large corporations.) This inequality pattern has been repeated throughout the English-speaking world, and though Germany and the Northern European countries have so far been able to avoid it, they may be on the inequality path in the coming years. (Italy, Greece, and Spain are now obviously on that path.) Many scholars argue that the creation of the American middle-class during the 1940′s-1960′s was a result of the wide-spread adoption (co-optation) of policies pushed for by left-wing trouble-makers in the 1890′s-1930′s. Many of those trouble-makers were killed and/or arrested. (Just look up the history of the IWW and the Socialist Party of America. See, for instance, here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-582501436157763581). The last time, it took a global great depression and the threat of global revolution (Russia) for the Left’s agenda to become mainstream in the US and Western Europe, but you have to start somewhere.
Why would we want to submit our code to source forge? I hate that place.
It seems that the OWS guys are upset that they can’t find a job that will bring them on board at CEO salary when they get degrees in wonderfully useful majors like, Poli-Sci or other courses of study that really wouldn’t do them much good at anything other than making them interesting conversationalists at a cocktail party. But, this is suddenly George Soros’ (and other Wall Street mogals) fault.
While I like the idea of “occupying” Source Forge or something like it very interesting, there are some problems with SF, like it would be great if it functioned like (God, I hate to mention this on K3rnal) MS Source Safe.