The Week #14

by


  • It rained all week from Typhoon #14. Thankfully it did a U-turn as it got close to Japan and the winds never picked up.

  • We've started planning a small trip to Moomin Valley Park next month. It's only an hour and a bit by car from our house. It's the only Moomin park outside of Finland. It will be my first time to Saitama prefecture and first time leaving the Yokohama/Shonan area since February. Looking forward to it.

  • Nils gave a thought provoking talk that tries to answer the question:


Is it ethical to invest time into learning and using technologies from companies that pay little or no taxes?

Though I tend to naturally prefer community based tech (python, django, vue.js) compared to corporate open-source tech (swift, react etc..) I hadn't much considered the ethics. The gist is that taxes benefit society as a whole, so we can have collective goods like roads and schools. Also as these huge companies don't pay their taxes, it allows them to amass vast fortunes for an unfair advantage over smaller companies that do pay their taxes. This advantage puts these smaller companies out of business, reducing choice and the total number of good well paying jobs.

In terms of software when these large companies make these open source projects - what actually happens? People (non-employees) spend their time/free time learning and using their tech, improving their tech, and further entrenching the large corporation's advantage.

Rather than learning an evergreen skill, like JavaScript, and improving JavaScript for everyone people spend their free-time working for corporations like Facebook on projects like React by filing issues, fixing bugs, making components for, writing blog posts about and improving the image of the company - for free.

It seems so backwards, doesn't it?