Geopolitical boundaries reduce the pool of people and therefore talent.
For an example in politics, larger expanding unions have typically dominated the world.
Roman Empire, Ottoman Empire, British Empire, arguable an "American Empire" spring to mind.
Isolationism typically causes the failure of these unions, cf. modern history "Brexit", USSR, North Korea etc.
The same holds for open source projects or any social endeavour.
Sadly it seems people are unwilling to put aside base tribalism in pursuit of a greater gain because of the fear that Johnny Foreigner may somehow better you by taking your work, isolating it and build on it, so you do it first.
This fear is not without justification, isolation can be the start of power transfer and how empires start (USA splitting from the British Empire for example, or the EU/NATO becoming larger, arguably Russia could be attempting this now by changing world order).
This policy now extends to our tech, including open source.
The only way to stop this that I can see is if the fear of loss from isolationism is greater (cf. the international space station, for Russia not having the ability to do cheap space research, for the US not be able to bring astronauts home or take up cargo cheap).
So that begs the question, how do you stop politics interfering in open source projects, how do you make the fear of loss of partnership outweigh the risk from Johnny Foreigner of stealing it?
Certainly geopolitical boundaries reduce the pool of people. This has good and bad effects. A major aspect of open source software though is that it ensures that these boundaries can be crossed by labor but not necessarily by capital. I.e. anyone can contribute but sanctions, laws, etc. are more effective at preventing businesses from accessing these markets. This represents a sort of bottom unity that's really powerful.
That is required is a global leadership perspective. One thing I fought for heavily in the PostgreSQL community was to try to have the Code of Conduct Committee be geopolitically and culturally diverse. I would say that any time you can have a geopolitically diverse leadership team, you can figure out how to avoid interference by building a positive leadership culture.
Comments
Geopolitical boundaries reduce the pool of people and therefore talent.
For an example in politics, larger expanding unions have typically dominated the world.
Roman Empire, Ottoman Empire, British Empire, arguable an "American Empire" spring to mind.
Isolationism typically causes the failure of these unions, cf. modern history "Brexit", USSR, North Korea etc.
The same holds for open source projects or any social endeavour.
Sadly it seems people are unwilling to put aside base tribalism in pursuit of a greater gain because of the fear that Johnny Foreigner may somehow better you by taking your work, isolating it and build on it, so you do it first. This fear is not without justification, isolation can be the start of power transfer and how empires start (USA splitting from the British Empire for example, or the EU/NATO becoming larger, arguably Russia could be attempting this now by changing world order). This policy now extends to our tech, including open source.
The only way to stop this that I can see is if the fear of loss from isolationism is greater (cf. the international space station, for Russia not having the ability to do cheap space research, for the US not be able to bring astronauts home or take up cargo cheap).
So that begs the question, how do you stop politics interfering in open source projects, how do you make the fear of loss of partnership outweigh the risk from Johnny Foreigner of stealing it?
Certainly geopolitical boundaries reduce the pool of people. This has good and bad effects. A major aspect of open source software though is that it ensures that these boundaries can be crossed by labor but not necessarily by capital. I.e. anyone can contribute but sanctions, laws, etc. are more effective at preventing businesses from accessing these markets. This represents a sort of bottom unity that's really powerful.
That is required is a global leadership perspective. One thing I fought for heavily in the PostgreSQL community was to try to have the Code of Conduct Committee be geopolitically and culturally diverse. I would say that any time you can have a geopolitically diverse leadership team, you can figure out how to avoid interference by building a positive leadership culture.