Your framing seems somehow backwards. Based on the other article[0] Nate and David bought out the business from Blue Systems. Jonathan (previously employed by Blue) proposes a co-op model, the new owners say “no thanks, we’re good”. Jonathan is surprised at this, storms out, detonating all the bridges on the way.

[0] https://pointieststick.com/2025/03/10/personal-and-professio...

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jkaplowitz 2 days ago | parent [-]

My framing seems backwards because I’m commenting on what Nate wrote, not on what Jonathan wrote. As you and I have both said, with the way the world works now Nate is within his rights not to want to found a cooperative, and Jonathan is within his rights to be surprised that none of his colleagues care about this like he does.

My point is simply this: Nate shouldn’t pretend that the model he’s proposing is or ever will become the kind of thing Jonathan is advocating for, because it’s not and will not, but I think Nate is pretending that.

From what Jonathan wrote, I also don’t think he intended to storm out. I think he intended to advocate for something, likely with enough frustration and emotion that others who disagreed with him noticed the intensity of his feelings, and they decided to exclude him from further discussions to avoid drama rather than ever engaging with him to give their firm final decision in a calm but explicit way. They weren’t willing to give him a clear final no and instead ostracized him as part of their implicitly stated no.

To be clear, I agree with your implication that Jonathan likely didn’t handle this in the way that would be best for his professional career going forward, insofar as he may not have been calm and diplomatic in his private advocacy and then went quite public with the level of venting we just read. But Nate’s response didn’t make him look good either; it felt as disingenuous as Jonathan’s earnest blog post may have been interpersonally unwise.

Personally I prefer earnest but interpersonally unwise over disingenuous, since it’s easier to fix with constructive criticism and emotional support. But I know a lot of investors and employers don’t feel that way.

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toyg 2 days ago | parent [-]

I think Jonathan was disappointed because he honestly thought he was among like-minded friends, people he'd known and worked with for so long; he clearly didn't expect to be rebuffed so hard.

I've been in similar situations, and it's hard to stay professional in those cases. The feeling of personal betrayal is significant. Add to this that most old-school Linux hackers like him are often motivated by striving for social justice, and somewhat expect everyone who works with them to fundamentally wish the same things. Discovering that long-term collaborators actually wish to be regular techbros, must sting.

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jkaplowitz 2 days ago | parent [-]

Yeah, a lot of different types of people get involved in this ecosystem, not only the stereotypical primarily altruistically motivated old-school hacker. This is especially true for the for-profit sector rather than among the purely volunteer part of the community.

That said, only some of them would be tech bro wannabes. Others might not want to try to rock the boat in this awful economy, in the sense of not wanting the career consequences of having been part of a failed attempt to form a cooperative when the company ends up capitalist in the end, or simply might be skeptical that a cooperative would succeed well enough to meet their genuine financial needs.

I am a Debian developer myself, though quite inactive for the last 6 or so years due to life circumstances. Plenty of people even in that world end up working for the man, in such forms as Google or Dropbox or the like, even if they’d rather not. Life is expensive and the world is capitalist with bills to pay.

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sho_hn a day ago | parent [-]

I used to work for Blue Systems for about 7 years, including a turn as its CTO, until 2019. I was not party to the Techpaladin transition in any way and have no special knowledge on that, but I did work with many of the people who remain there now and recruited quite a few of them from the commmunity.

I just want to say that none of that team are "techbros" or in it for the money. I was a volunteer, entirely unpaid KDE contributor for another 7 years before BS came along, and many of the other contractors and employees were similarly long-time contributors already. BS as well operated for a long time without a specific profit motive.

I was the person who very initially set up the Valve project that TP now continues to work on, and as a team we simply took to the idea of working with Valve because it meant having a solid customer who was interested in doing foundational work upstream to improve KDE software, which is what we all wanted to do the most. Valve's user audience - gamers who take their computers seriously and love using them - overlaps KDE's in spirit in many ways, Valve's engineers absolutely know their stuff and ask for the right things, and it all made a lot of mission sense immediately.

This is all very much still done by oldschool hackers who will keep the lights on probably till the end of their productive careers.

	▲	jkaplowitz a day ago \| parent [-]
		Good to know! To be clear, when I said “only some would be tech bro wannabes”, I was commenting on the general pattern and not the specific incident or people. I didn’t mean that assertion to imply anything about any of the particular individuals or companies involved in this story. In other words, I meant “only some of the people in the industry who react to situations like this the way Jonathan’s peers seem to have according to his blog post would be tech bro wannabes”. That may very well not be true for anyone at Blue Systems / Techpaladin, and indeed my point was that it would be true for “only some” such people in the industry in general and definitely not true for all of them. The only reason I even addressed the possibility of the “techbro” mindset at all is because it was mentioned by the person I was replying to; it wouldn’t have otherwise been something I would have thought to mention in this context. I do have quite a high general opinion of the ethics of KDE hackers as well as the technical side of Valve. (I have no strong opinion either positive or negative on the business side of Valve, though I do appreciate their kindness in sharing Steam keys for their products with Debian developers back when they were basing SteamOS on Debian as well as allowing Debian to distribute Steam in its non-free section.)