The Care of Software: Ethics and Ecosystems
summary
Argues that maintaining software ecosystems by groups matters more than individual artifact creation and maps projects to common pool resources using Ostromlike design principles — boundaries, monitoring, enforcement, collective choice, conflict resolution — with concrete examples: NPM supply chain, license switches like Apache 2 to Business Source, impossibility of easily forking the Linux kernel. Emphasises maintenance as active work — maintenance is work — not heroic repair, notes the first 80%/second 80% of projects and offers practical artifacts (book links and a cyberrating sticker site).
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chapters (15)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:08Why software care matters
- 3:39Maintenance over creation
- 6:55Why people dislike the current tech system
- 8:19Software as common pool
- 11:06Ostrom’s sustainability principles
- 13:14Ethical boundaries in open source
- 16:01Conflict resolution in projects
- 19:33Burnout in tech communities
- 22:28Maintenance as ethical work
- 26:23Repair vs maintenance
- 31:23Time, entropy, and change
- 33:57Is tech still fun?
- 35:44Joy versus collective good
- 37:30Future of software care
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