Be wary of either group selling them as such.
If there is anything that poses a risk to the company, interferes with an employees ability to serve the company, or in any way reduces productivity... there will be no difference between canonical and oracle or even canonical and McDonalds.
The difference between your experience working at these companies is largely window dressing on the same corporate employer/employee model.
Again, this is like saying that if you push a person hard enough they will commit violence which immediately implies that all people are violent criminals. It’s simply not how that works, and equating all current and past behavior to what someone is capable of is silly.
Customers, employees, partners etc are all means to one end, and one only - making someone rich
Robbery and murder have no upsides to a society. Organized labor to create something bigger than a single person can build is foundation of society. You can argue which system of organization is better (government owns and dictates everything like communism, corporations and government own and some specific categories of things and dictate what’s in their purview like capitalism, the royalty and nobility own and dictate everything like monarchy, or no organized labor exists like anarchy). But the reality is that we as a species tend to organize into tribes and work in groups and whether you call those tribes/groups corporations, government work forces, peasantry, guilds is just about what trade offs you want to make.
I will be really impressed if you can show a proof that a corporation is like murder.
Also why do we even give credence to ideas such as good corporate “citizenship”? Thank you for not destroying the economy or societal fabric..? Way to be a good for profit entity that probably still isn’t raising wages or helping with the homeless crisis..? There should be strong laws and regulations that bind companies and jail their execs if they step out of line. We shouldn’t depend so heavily on so called good corporate “citizenship”.
I didn’t vote for these executives, their boards, or their investors. This isn’t what democracy looks like.
Look at someplace like Costco- highly profitable, pays well above average for the sector, employee and community friendly policies... which would all go in the trash if Sams Club starting eating their lunch and their margins disappeared.
As fro democracy there's no reason you should have any say in how these people exercise their freedoms under the law, beyond your say in government and the law. If you have a problem with anything they do, then that's a matter for the law and regulation, applied equally to everyone. An idealistic view I accept, but it's what we should be aiming for.
Right up to the moment where there isn't.
Some companies have great values, a great culture, an inspiring mission and they'll be relatively consistent in maintaining these things for quite extended periods of time: years, sometimes even decades. That's really easy to do during the good times: when you're hitting your numbers and all the trendlines are pointing upwards.
However, when things get more difficult - when there's a downturn, competitors move in, or the market simply moves on - that equation changes a lot. Sooner or later under those circumstances every business has to start making hard calls that will make it very clear to all involved that it is not a family.
We can all point to examples of businesses that have gone out of their way to look after their employees during the pandemic. But even they can't do so indefinitely (hopefully they won't have to try if the vaccination programmes work as well as we all hope). Sooner or later the values of a business will become subservient to commercial reality even if that doesn't happen to our values as individuals.
I am not saying businesses should have a carte blanche to do what they want. Far from it. But in the sense that some corporations tend to behave better than others, just like some individual people tend to behave better than others, we should recognize that it is better to push all to behave better than to get rid of all of them on the grounds that the worst ones are beyond redemption.
No, but its a helpful fiction as far as it makes everyone more convivial and agreeable. It forms a kind of shared illusion, not unlike the kayfabe of professional wrestling.
For the uninitiated, B-Corps "must receive a minimum score from an assessment of 'social and environmental performance', [and] integrate B Corp commitments to stakeholders into company governing documents".
Patagonia, for example[1][2], seems to be a trailblazer in being transparent about and actively improving their business in terms of logistics (monitoring "the cost of materials that have the potential to be Fair Trade Certified against the volume of materials that are purchased in a Fiscal Year"), corporate culture ("[encourage] work-life balance, as well as a focus on an individual’s physical and mental health"), end products (their "criteria for the best product rests on function, repairability, and, foremost, durability"), and so on.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_Corporation_(certification)
[1] https://bcorporation.net/directory/patagonia-inc
[2] https://www.patagonia.com/stories/benefit-corporation-update...
Unless you work for the family business ;)
Not even sure about those. Quite a lot of charities and non-profits set up to fix a problem end up perpetuating it because it is a nice comfortable job.
I mean one of the richest families in NL have their money in a bank that is part of a charity.
https://www.fastcompany.com/3035734/ikea-is-a-nonprofit-and-...
Essentially, Ikea is profitable because it utilizes a tax-avoidance strategy involving the use of a non-profit and so your comment is in my opinion basically true and they are "cheating" a bit. A pretty slick cheat, though.
Also, thank you for shining a light on this as I was ignorant of the whole thing.
- corporate-driven open source was never about user/developer freedom
- companies have marketing departments and know how to do astroturfing
- any project that follows corporate decisions is not community-driven, even if the contributors are volunteers
Undermining would be if RedHat did things to actively sabotage CentOS, spread untrue FUD about it, file lawsuits, etc.
You can weaken through direct attack, withdraw of assistance, or you can even strategically offer assistance to weaken (identify largely unknown harmful processes and help them grow), amongst an array of other strategies, direct and indirect.
The grey area is if you've been a bystander to action and refuse to act one way or another because intent is the only information you have and you can't (fairly) gauge on that alone. This isn't one of those cases, this is a clear case of withdraw of active assistence which undermined CentOS. Business processes often work in reverse of what is explained. It's not likely Red Hat made a decision and then informed CentOS there would be consequences. It's far far more likely Red Hat looked for decisions that had the consequence they desired, chose one, and then informed CentOS that wasn't their intent.
These sorts of games of misdirection of intent and responsibility are played by businesses and sociopaths all the time. Decisions like this are highly strategic and implications are discussed throughly, meanwhile the narrative is crafted to then look benign and non-strategic.
Businesses aren't your friends, repeat it with me, no matter how much propoganda they regularly spew out. Sometimes their goals may be temporarily aligned with yours in which case you can leverage their resources but never forget their goals can shift to be misaligned with yours at any point, making them a partial or direct enemy of your goals.
A business exists to make money and wealth for someone or some people. If that's not you, then they're not there to help you. I should point out that there are classes of businesses that do exist somewhat as an exception, certain charities and non-profits, but those aren't representative of the vast majority. Even they often aren't necessarily there to help you per se.