Stop Building F@*^$%ing Platforms
Today, I was informed by one of my colleagues of the sunsetting of a version of PubPub, a product by knowledge futures. Now, I am willing to admit that I am not the most experienced of developers or librarians. But I do have more experience than most librarians in the business world. When an update to a technical product includes mentions of “Executive Director” and “Heads of Growth and Innovation”, when marketing corpo-speak dominates over technical discussion, trouble is sure to follow.
At it’s core, research/memory institutions simply deliver content to users, whether in meat- or cyber-space. The internet and technology has advanced to the point where delivering text, images, and video are practically free (notwithstanding the searing burn cost of advertising on my retinas). Why must we insist on creating and using and sunsetting these platforms over and over and over again? We saw it with BePress and now we are experiencing it again with PubPub. When will librarians finally learn their lesson? When will we realize that all we are doing is serving HTML files over HTTP? That we don’t need animations or slick UI flows? That, really, what will “delight” our “customers” the most is just fucking giving them whatever they clicked on?
KnowledgeFutures? More like NoFutures amirite?
Because I’m Young Arrogant and Hate Everything You Stand For
In my experience, librarians, and the people who work for and in libraries, are far too meek to demand a change in this world. We talk endlessly in pointless, email-clogging peer groups and listservs and coalitions and federations all the other pointless venues for endless diatribes. How about, instead of having each university spin-up their own terrible version of a publication on some godforsaken, overbuilt, overengineered, masturbatory exercise that I am embarrassed to call “software,” we think a bit differently? Can these coalitions and federations actually, you know, coalesce and federate?
Sidebar: Can we, as universities, just build a publishing company? You know, everyone throws in, say, X% of their library’s collections budget, in return they get an entire catalog of articles, books, textbooks, etc? Is that really so hard?
Elsevier was founded in 1880. It is still going strong today, perhaps stronger than ever. The librarians have relegated themselves into a pathetic fetal position of mere acceptance of the status quo. These librarians are happy with mere publishing alternatives. The worst part of this is, that even when these librarians attempt to resist, they rely on their steady drip-feeding of corpo-shit. One may think that because an organization is non-profit and their core technology is open-source, that they may be safe. They are not. We have already seen many organizations kill of hosting of certain platforms that libraries rely on.
This is the importance of software sovereignty.
I will never allow another organization, be it non-profit, for-profit, anarchic-communist, or otherwise, to control my software, especially my software that thousands rely on to read.
Software Sovereignty
My definition of software sovereignty, at its’ core, is the ownership of the software runtime. If you cannot ssh into the server (virtual or bare metal) that is running your software, is it really your software? Of course in the age of cloud computing, no sane IT department would allow me to open ports to external traffic within 1,000 feet of the university. Compromises, unfortunately, do need to be made occasionally. Ideally, though, if you are not actually deploying and maintaining the software, the software is not really yours, now is it?