Quitting Academia When Its IT Systems Are Dominated by Clowns Who Outsource
ABOUT 4 weeks ago Dr. Andy Farnell published "Clown Computing". He wrote it on his own with some input/feedback/advice from others. We reprinted with permission from him and he said we had inspired his piece.
Dr. Farnell quit his job for very similar reasons to the ones that led to my resignation in 2022. I know others who did the same, usually for the same or very similar reasons.
The piece from Dr. Farnell is packed with a lot of seemingly minor but very important details, for instance he says "Volkswagen, Boeing and Fujitsu lie about their products" (proprietary) and this results in actual deaths.
"A common theme not addressed in the post," an associate noted, "maybe on purpose, is the decommodification of Linux or tivoization of sorts that Microsoft had dreamed about and still aims for. Clown computing is central to that because it locks the OS deep under a layer of ever-changing proprietary cruft rather than continued access via commodity tools such as SSH and the normal Core Utilities."
"I wonder if the educator-turned-clown who was discarded in petty revenge in "The Blue Angel" is relevant in Andy's post." "Der blaue Engel" (German)
I'm very eager to revisit the subject in the coming days because, like Andy, I used to work in a university (2001-2012). Over time things changed and I observed with concern what was happening. Sometimes I wrote about that. It seems like a common trajectory. █