Melvin Conway famously said that organizations design systems that mirror their own communication structure. But how about Conway’s Law applied to the entire industry rather than a single company?

The tech industry, and open source (OSS) in particular, are mostly shaped now around the dominating communication structure — GitHub. Nadia Eghbal’s book “Working in Public” does a great job at explaining how OSS’s centralization around a big platform mirrors what happened everywhere on the internet, with us going from personal websites to social networks.

Another huge shift in organizational and communication structure, especially in Open Source, has been the increasing coalescence of maintainership: we historically talk about “a loosely-knit group of contributors” but most OSS nowadays is written by employees of big companies.

The commit stats in big projects like the Linux kernel indicate this, as do GitHub stats and the like. There’s a long tail of small independent contributors, of course, but by quantity major projects are dominated by those hired full-time to work on it.

One thing I haven’t seen discussed a lot is how much this reality changes the way projects are run and developed. Sometimes we see it coming up in particular cases, such as the relationship between Amazon and Rust, but this is a general phenomenon.

When Canonical came into the scene back in 2004-2005, I remember distinctly noticing their impact on OSS; it wasn’t just “more getting done” (yay?) but also what and how—various projects shifted direction around that time (GNOME comes to mind); it didn’t feel like a coincidence.

I don’t mean to imply it’s all bad, just that we don’t discuss enough about how the influence of Big Co development styles affect, in a “Conway’s-law-way”, the development of OSS, and even tech in general, since both open and closed development are so linked nowadays.

OSS has a big impact on how tech in general works (though the reliance of every company on OSS dependencies), and Big Cos have an impact on how OSS works (through their huge presence on the OSS developer community), so in this way they affect everybody. People bring in the experiences they know and how they’re used to working, from coding styles to architecture and deployment patterns to decision processes.

One great example where this is more evident is the “monorepo” discussion, which happens to projects of many sizes nowadays, and where Google and FB experiences are often brought up.

“help our codebase is too big” no, your company is too big. try sharding into microservice entities operating as a cluster in the same management substrate rather than staying as a monolith

— @myrrlyn on Twitter

The tweet above is such a great insight: we often see conversations about how to deal with huge codebases (using the likes of Google and FB as examples) AND we often see conversations about Big Tech monopolies — and how they’ve grown way beyond the status at which other monopolies were broken up in the past — but those two topics are hardly ever linked.

If we agree that some aspects of Big Tech as organizations are negative, how much of those do they bring into tech as technology practices via Conway’s Law? OSS seems to act as a filter that makes this relationship less evident, because contributions come from individuals, even though they work for these companies, and often replicate their practices, even if unknowingly.

These individuals will often, even if unknowingly, replicate practices from these companies. This is after all, a process of cultures spreading and influencing each other. It just seems to me that we as an industry are not aware enough of this phenomenon, and we probably should be more attuned to this.

“Eu, Tituba: bruxa negra de Salem” é um livro de ficção baseado na história real de Tituba, uma escrava que foi acusada de bruxaria no julgamento das bruxas de Salem, na América colonial.

Leitura fluida e leve apesar do tema, o livro conta a história de uma Tituba ficcionalizada em primeira pessoa. No livro, ela é filha de uma escrava negra e um inglês; nos registros históricos o consenso é que ela foi uma nativa de uma tribo da América do Sul. A autora usa de realismo fantástico para construir uma narrativa envolvente, centrada nessa figura que tantas vezes foi excluída dos famosos relatos dos julgamentos das bruxas de Salem.

Written in the early 2000s, “The West Divided” is a collection of interviews, newspaper articles and an essay by Habermas about post-9/11 international politics and the different approaches taken by the US through the Bush administration and the EU, through a philosophical lens.

The structure of the book helps the reader, by starting with transcripts from interviews and articles, which use a more direct language and establish some concepts explained by Habermas to the interviewers, and then proceeding with a more formal academic work in the form of the essay of the last part, which is a more difficult read. Habermas discusses the idealist and realist schools of international relations, aligning the idealist school with Kant’s project and the evolution of the EU, and opposing it to the realist school proposed by authors such as Carl Schmitt, a leading scholar from Nazi Germany. Habermas proposes a future of the Kantian project which lies in the ultimate development of cosmopolitan (i.e. worldwide) juridical institutions, such that cosmopolitan law gives rights directly to (all) people, rather than as a layer of inter-national law between states.

It was especially timely to read this book in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and to have this theoretical background at hand when watching John Mearsheimer’s talk from 2015 on “Why Ukraine is the West’s Fault”. Mearsheimer, an American professor in the University of Chicago and himself a noted realist, gives an excellent talk and makes a very important point that in international conflict one needs to understand how the other side thinks — instead of “idealist” vs. “realist” (which are clearly loaded terms) he used himself the terms “19th century people” to refer to himself, Putin, and the Chinese leadership, as opposed to “21st century people” to refer to the leaders in the EU and in Washington.

It is interesting to see Mearsheimer put the European and American governments in the same bucket, when Habermas’s book very much deals with the opposition of their views, down to the book’s very title. Habermas wrote “The West Divided” during the Bush administration, and the Mearsheimer talk was given during the Obama years, but he stated he saw no difference between Democrats and Republicans in this regard. Indeed, in what concerns international law, what we’ve seen from Obama wasn’t that different from what we saw before or afterwards — perhaps different in rhetoric, but not so much in actions, as he broke his promise of shutting down Guantanamo and continued the policy of foreign interventions.

As much as Mearsheimer’s analysis is useful to understand Putin, Habermas’s debate that there are different ways to see a future beyond endless Schmittian regional conflicts is still a valid one. And we get a feeling that all is not lost whenever we see that there are still leaders looking to build a future of cosmopolitan cooperation more in line with Kant’s ideals. Martin Kimani, the Kenyan envoy to the UN said this regarding the Russian invasion of Ukraine:

This situation echoes our history. Kenya and almost every African country was birthed by the ending of empire. Our borders were not of our own drawing. They were drawn in the distant colonial metropoles of London, Paris, and Lisbon, with no regard for the ancient nations that they cleaved apart.

Today, across the border of every single African country, live our countrymen with whom we share deep historical, cultural, and linguistic bonds. At independence, had we chosen to pursue states on the basis of ethnic, racial, or religious homogeneity, we would still be waging bloody wars these many decades later.

Instead, we agreed that we would settle for the borders that we inherited, but we would still pursue continental political, economic, and legal integration. Rather than form nations that looked ever backwards into history with a dangerous nostalgia, we chose to look forward to a greatness none of our many nations and peoples had ever known. We chose to follow the rules of the Organisation of African Unity and the United Nations charter, not because our borders satisfied us, but because we wanted something greater, forged in peace.

We believe that all states formed from empires that have collapsed or retreated have many peoples in them yearning for integration with peoples in neighboring states. This is normal and understandable. After all, who does not want to be joined to their brethren and to make common purpose with them? However, Kenya rejects such a yearning from being pursued by force. We must complete our recovery from the embers of dead empires in a way that does not plunge us back into new forms of domination and oppression.

Words to build a new future by.

“Brimos” conta a história de várias famílias sírio-libanesas que produziram descendentes que se tornaram nomes relevantes na política brasileira, de Temer e Maluf a Haddad e Boulos.

Uma leitura leve. Contém um bom background da realidade dos sírio-libaneses que chegaram ao Brasil no fim do século 19 e início do 20, com foco primário no Líbano. Escrito de forma acessível para quem não conhece nada deste universo, e ainda assim agradável para quem o conhece. Muitas das histórias são parecidas, mas ao mesmo tempo cada uma delas parte de diferentes realidades no Líbano e traçam histórias de vida no Brasil por gerações que não por acaso resultam em trajetórias políticas tão diferentes. Um livro que meu falecido pai gostaria de ter lido.