At PGConf India, I watched Bruce Momjian's excellent talk Future Postgres Challenges. This talk discusses technical, technological, and project-related challenges Postgres has faced and continues to face. This immediately lead me to ask a question about efforts at geopolitical disentanglement and how we should try to avoid them in the Postgres community. While this question immediately gets interpreted through the filter of the ongoing war in Ukraine, it is far broader, as the US has been trying to disentangle itself from China and efforts there are ongoing. The problems, however, are not new.
When we as a community had decided to have a code of conduct, there was a lot of concern that the code of conduct would be used in politically motivated ways, in particular regarding culture war topics. I wrote a piece describing some of the issues which I also gave geopolitical importance to at that time. Culture war topics, I reasoned, are necessarily cultural, and hence trying to push one group's cultural ideas on the world through an open source project would be very harmful.
I wrote that piece in early 2016, before the Liberal International Order began to visibly fall apart with votes for Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. But the piece remains relevant because the dangers of allowing our community to be torn apart by current geopolitics are, if anything, even worse than they are in the culture war space.
If, as some would like, we were to shun community members and contributors who are resident in the "wrong" countries, or if we were to treat military contracts to American and Russian or Chinese governments differently, then we would risk the possibility of a fork forming around geopolitical lines. Nothing good will come out of that for anyone. And so the task ahead is to make sure that we continue making sure our community is culturally and geopolitically inclusive.
I expect that we will face a lot of pressure in coming years to bifurcate the community due to differing geopolitical perspectives, but such could well be fatal for Postgres as a project. Let's not let that happen.
Edit: I am moderating the comments as follows: What is on topic is a discussion about what is good for the project and community. Arguments about what is good for community that incidentally argue geopolitics are acceptable. Efforts at arguing geopolitics untethered from that question will get removed. I am trying to cultivate constructive discussion on a topic of community importance and sometimes this means pulling weeds (by which I mean deleting comments that detract from that).
Also all conversations need to be in the spirit of discussing what is right, not who is right. If you wonder why your comment got deleted, that's why.
It's pity to observe the bifurcation. We have the code of conduct and I glad we have fully technical discussions in mailing lists, but it's impossible to prevent personal attitude to the political situation. I feel nostalgic for good old time, when we gathered together and talked about anything, but not politic. Recently I talked with Bruce and every time we talk about politics :( I believe, that community should stay independent, free and open, it may be soon the only way to communicate for simple people. We should fight ourselves for that, code of conduct alone will not helps.
ReplyDeleteI think people unfortunately often feel compelled to talk about politics because everyone is feeling insecure at the state of the world. That same insecurity brought about this blog post, for example. And of course it is somewhat unavoidable that the community becomes dragged into it.
DeleteI think it is similarly important as you say for people to be able to get together and talk about things other than the problems of the day. Food, drink, culture, music, philosophy, even religion. We need time to just be human with eachother.
I agree with you -- the community needs to remain independent, open, and inclusive. and yes, that's something we have to decide to build and defend that.
Just to clarify -- talking about things like food, drink, culture, music etc is what we need to do more of :-)
DeleteI went back to read your post from 2016. I have a lot of comments and questions about it, but that train had left the station, so I would like to focus on the topics you mention here. You say that it's "not about the war in Ukraine" but about "efforts at geopolitical disentanglement" and about using the code of conduct "in politically motivated ways." Did you mean something specific here? I wrote a very long comment, but then I decided I should not assume what you meant if it was not explicitly said :), so I deleted it :). I think it's wrong to say dismissively, "it's all politics," as if politics have nothing to do with the real world. Let's name the evil explicitly.
ReplyDeleteEfforts at geopolitical disentanglement began in the US in 2017 after Donald Trump took office. The primary target was China. The issue is that the place of Western powers in the world is falling, and the great Asian powers seem to be rising (not only China but also India, and to a lesser extent Indonesia and Russia). The goal initially was to reduce trade interdependencies with China.
DeleteObviously the war has directed a lot of these towards Russia too. However, what is at issue is Western efforts to maintain domination over the entire world, and I don't think you can separate concerns over that from the rhetoric that this is about the survival of the Western-dominated "rules-based" international order (though the rules never seem to apply in the same way to Western countries than to those in the Global South).
The 2016 article put things in a similar framing -- the efforts by some in some Western countries to remake the entire world in their own image is something that would wreak havoc with any effort at international cooperation. Different countries have different governmental and family institutions, for example, and that should be celebrated rather than condemned if we are to be able to share the world (or even an open source project) together.
I agree with you that dismissing big issues as "it's all politics" is bad, but we should remain humble and note that those who disagree often see a perspective that we ourselves might miss, and that therefore in collaborating on common causes and making room to be human and discuss normal topics with eachother is a precondition to being able to discuss politics in a mutually respectful way.
And naming evil is fine as long as you are prepared to accept and receive such as much as you might wish to dish it out.
Also if you want to comment on the 2016 piece, feel free. We can discuss that piece there too.
DeleteQuick question before going further: it it's OK to name an evil, why my second comment was deleted? Once again, I have a hypothesis why, but I do not want to assume (and obviously, you have a right to delete anything in your blog, that's your space)
DeleteThe comment was off topic. The topic here is the thesis that it is necessary for the community to be inclusive of different geopolitical opinions. You are welcome to make the case that the community needs to take a hard line over these topics. But anything needs to be in the context of what is good for the community and argued in the spirit of determining what is right rather than who is right.
DeleteAs a side comment, even if it wasn't off topic, putting words in the mouths of people in conversations you weren't there for is not going to fly here.
The conclusion here: ignorance of the russian agression is good for the project and community.
ReplyDeleteThe problem is once you play that game, the vast majority of the world which has been victimized by American aggression will join in too, and that will be bad.
DeleteConsider that Iraq refused to vote for the UN resolutions condemning. While their abstention statement condemned the invasion, they stated they abstained because of the US's wars of aggression against them (which they stated are continuing to this day). Or consider Indonesia which suffered US-sponsored genocide allegedly in the name of stopping Communism (though declassified documents show the US government knew they were helping genocide plain and simple). To many Indonesians, the ascent of a right-wing government that did away with cultural pluralism and began persecuting ethnic minorities (and eradicating minority languages) looks exactly like what the US did to them (and the US did do it to Indonesia, as we know from declassified documents).
If we allow the community to split in this way it will be the Anglosphere plus the EU and maybe a couple minor protectorates vs the whole rest of the world. And if the Western branch refuses to take Russian contributions, then the worldwide fork would beat the Western fork in every way. I don't think we want that. Do you?
Classic whataboutism. How does it excuse russian missiles on our cities, massacres of Bucha, Isium, Mariupol? Is russian contribution worth killing thousands people?
DeleteI think what you are really trying to achieve here Chris, is to detach our human nature from our functional nature.
ReplyDeleteFunctionally, we are all engineers and professionals, who contribute to building complex systems that benefit themselves and the economy.
But you want to ignore the fact that we are real human beings. We are prone to death and suffering and personal relationships. We have families and people we love.
Now imagine having a conversation between Ukrainian and a Russian professional on new partitioning functionality. You want Ukrainians or any other nation to treat each other as professionals while ignoring the fact that Russians want, are ready and already delivering a tremendous amount of suffering to Ukrainians. They want them to cease to exist.
A database is a program, hardware. It has no feeling and no consciousness. But humans do. And, as you might have noticed, humanity is trying to make machines human-like, not humans machine-like.
I think that meaningful cooperation and inclusivity are possible only when we agree on basic fundamental values that all humans share. People should do no harm to other people. Meaningful cooperation is possible if representatives of the Russian Federation will openly condemn their government's action and withdraw from it.
(If you accept that it goes both ways, I am safe. I condemn US aggression and don't take part in federal contracts in any direct way. But would you demand the same as we consider TDE and the like?)
DeleteYou indeed have a very different experience from mine. Because three of my family members are dead because of German soldiers and three are dead because of Russian soldiers.
DeleteMy experience is: sitting in the basement during the new year eve, hearing russing missiles flying around, a few days with no water supply, heating and electricity. My colleagues are dying on the eastern front and in the middle of the country due to the shellings. Tell me more about russian victory as a necessary evil.
DeleteOleg Bartunov, who is speaking about bifurcation and a "political sutiation", is a direct supported of Crimea annexation and a russian war against my country. Let's have him honored of his code and support of genocide.
To both of you, how do you think Iraqis should react to American developers with federal and even military contracts? Or Indonesians?
DeleteWe have communities in both places too, right? Should they demand reparations etc to share a community with American devs?