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Bradley M. Kuhn

Bradley M. Kuhn at

I've written a blog post, *The Trade-offs of Unpaid Free Software Labor, which is a response to Ashe Dryden's The Ethics of Unpaid Labor and the OSS Community.

As an added bonus, I noted on IRC to @paulv that I couldn't read Dryden's Disqus comments without installing proprietary Javascript on my computer. He tells me that I'm "not missing much unless you like dudebros telling you how the wage gap isn't real".

Reading the word "gap" made me think of "rap", and I imagined they were composing a song called the Brogrammer's Delight, which includes the lyrics:

I do mean to brag

I do mean to boast

I'm fucking awesome on GitHub with the code I post.

enyst, Scorpio20, lnxwalt@microca.st, Evan Prodromou and 2 others likes this.

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Brad, thank you for this post. I especially appreciated your point about cooption.

Sumana Harihareswara [on Mastodon] at 2013-11-16T17:05:12Z

dhh spells his (last) last name "Hansson".

Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠) at 2013-11-21T01:26:07Z

X11R5 likes this.

I'm currently in the job-hunting process for a new geographical area, and everyone does ask for my github account, but I'm happy to see (I don't have anything useful there) that they seem to make it just another data point and not a "gate".

The main hiring decision is made through "homework assignment", discussion around the results and good old interviews. One potential employer uses pair-programming-as-interview like Dryden suggests.

It is disturbing indeed that work on free software is used as a gateway into non-free work. I think if I am going to find a job working on free software I am going to have to create it myself. But then I first need to find the spare time to work on free software, which, as anyone can see (ha!) on my github, gitorious and gitlab accounts, I do not currently have.

Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠) at 2013-11-21T09:53:02Z

@Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠) That's also problematic in that they assume everybody has got everything on github. For example I've got most of my code on gitorious or elsewhere. (I only use github if I collaborate on projects that already use it.)

sazius old account at 2013-11-21T10:02:49Z