[woodruffw]

> But these conversations often lose sight of the main way our projects produce social good: through good work on our mission.

At the risk of being maybe a little plaintive: what happens when that mission is bad? It's not clear to this (government-funded) researcher that good (meaning quality) work, even when it's always open-sourced, translates to a good (meaning ethical) mission.

[tyre]

It's also playing into the exhaustive narcissism that some Founder wrote down a Social Mission and the best way to help society is to just work towards it.

As if employees or the culture at the company or conversation about a changing world or taking in new information and adapting (etc. * 100) could have no positive impact.

[wmf]

Bad missions can't be fixed by internal activism, so allowing it just wears down everyone involved.

[woodruffw]

> Bad companies can't be fixed by internal activism

Maybe I'm misunderstanding that you're saying, but wouldn't this imply that unionisation from within ought to necessarily always fail? It's a pretty textbook example of activism, and is generally pointed to as one of the great strengths of the American midcentury.

[wmf]

I updated my comment to clarify. If a company has a neutral mission (like selling cars or something) but treats workers poorly then activism can fix internal issues. If a company's fundamental goal is harmful (tobacco, war, etc.) then I don't think unions can fix that.

[woodruffw]

I think I understand, but to bring the point home: it's not clear to me that selling cars is, in fact, neutral: they're environmentally destructive (both to manufacture and over the long tail), contribute to unsustainable housing patterns (suburbanization), and are the lynchpin in some of the US's most callous urban development decisions in the last century[1].

This doesn't make an engineer who works at a car startup a bad person. It's just an admonishment to maybe be a little more cognizant of the bigger picture that we're all a part of.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/apr/04/new-york-sou...

[rsa25519]

When the GP said "internal activism," I don't think they meant unionization in the sense of worker rights. I think they were referring to workers objecting to projects that hurt other people, rather than workers collectively bargaining wages etc.

[Ericson2314]

I would rather Google operate as inefficiently as possible due to internal political fights.

Not what's intended, but works well enough.

[jacobr1]

I think that idea is you start with a the basis of a mutually agreed upon mission, rather than produce rationalization to retroactively justify the work.

This can be hard if people came to the project for difference reasons and it is an interesting point, because missions can be narrowly or broadly defined. They can be framed in terms of a variety of ends.

But if you can agree on what the common ground looks like ... which might beed a BDFL or steering committee, then you can proceed from that point.

I don't think there is any way to get around the potential for misuse or misappropriation though. Either those concerns are in scope or out of scope of the project. The framing of a mission presumes they are ignored unless explicitly accounted for the in the mission itself.

Is the mission of the Linux Kernel to build a core of a "free" in the GNU/stallman sense OS? Or is to just build a world-class os for diverse environment that just happens to be copy-left licensed as a means to encourage broad participation? If maintainers of proprietary drivers needs more hoo

[aaron695]

I thought that strange too, it's something young people obsessive over perhaps? It just opens up the ambiguity again.

It should just be about code (or whatever the project is made of). We need to get back to a system that maximises the project, not bike shedding.

https://missionprotocol.org/codeofconduct/ "Our objective is to focus on the mission we set out to accomplish, which we believe will produce an important social good in the world"