About Processing

Rina Chen’s living notebook on digital craft and design.

Overview

The modern FLOSS ecosystem is often co-opted by corporations that exploit unpaid labor for proprietary gain. Processing offers a radical alternative by focusing on software literacy and community-led funding, transforming code from a professional skill into a tool for personal and political autonomy.

Context

This matters to the AI Commons conversation because as AI becomes the new “proprietary black box,” we need the Processing ethos more than ever. To ensure a fair AI future, we must prioritize tools that are transparent, community-governed, and designed to turn “users” into “creators” who understand the underlying mechanics of the models they use.

Main Argument

The Extraction Trap: Standard Open Source has been “softened” into a corporate training ground, where volunteer labor is redirected into building closed-source products.
Autonomy through Education: Processing’s success lies in its refusal to just “train workers”; it seeks to “liberate creators” by making the tools of production accessible to those outside the traditional tech pipeline.

Conundrum of Contributing to FLOSS

https://www.ashedryden.com/blog/the-ethics-of-unpaid-labor-and-the-oss-community

Open source originally broke us free from the shackles of proprietary software which forced us to “pay to play” and gave us little in the way of choices for customization. Without realizing it, we’ve ended up in a similar scenario where we are now paying for the development of software that large companies financially benefit from with little cost to them.

People who are contributing their unpaid and underpaid labor are investing their time into companies that are profiting greatly and giving little back in terms of financial support.

Essentially a free labour. People who can have time and money to contribute should realize their privilege knowing their contribution would benefit many individuals and companies around the globe.

However, what should I do if I am struggling financially already, how can I still work towards this cause without further sentiment of sacrifice?

History

Free Software movement has been partially taken over by commercial interests. One example of this is the rise of Open Source as a label: as a softened, business-friendly version of Free Software that shifts attention away from the movement’s original political and ethical goals.

Another form of cooption is that proprietary software companies have adopted the development practices that originally emerged in the Free Software world:

distributed version control workflows
peer review and collaborative development
open bug tracking
rapid release cycles
community-driven project organization

These practices used to be distinctive features of Free Software. Now they are widely used in companies that build closed, non-public, or secret software.

Because of this, employers often ask job candidates whether they know these workflows. But the purpose is not to support software freedom. Instead, the employer wants to hire people trained in Free Software methods and redirect those same skills toward building proprietary products, thereby reinforcing a system that goes against the original ideals of Free Software.

When I was in graduate school, one of the reasons I keenly wanted to be a core contributor to Free Software was not to just get paid for any software development, but specifically to gain employment writing software that would be Free Software.

Originally, contributing was a way to strengthen and sustain the Free Software ecosystem itself. Now, companies take advantage of the talent grown in that ecosystem but direct it toward proprietary development instead, undermining the movement’s original values.

Are we f$cked up?

I personally feel like it’s a pretty fucked up system and I was at my bottom when Linux Foundation demanded that I need to have my company to pay for my sandbox project if I want to contribute to the foundation. There are so many hurdles for it to happen.

What if I’m a part-time/contract worker?
What if my company is not willing to?
What if my company has no capacity to?

It’s like jumping out of a corrosive little pond into another and finding out the two are actually sharing the same source, CAPITALISM.

What is left is a exclusive, small group of people, who have the privilege to work in a big corporation, full time, with a decent pay, a male, having a wife raising children at home, and having some fun and good things to do in the foundation. That’s what I observed in 2025’s [[Linux Foundation Japan RUG]]].

[[Linux Foundation Japan RUG#Infrastructure Runs on Effort and Scarcity]]

And in the face of capitalism, I feel there are limited things an individual can do, and maybe more things a company can do, and even more things when it comes to a government, a country, and a global initiative. What I’m suggesting, is not that individuals should not try to imagine an alternative path, but that it might be helpful to demarcate what level of discussion we are having.

Things that might help

There are many things companies can do:

https://medium.com/@shanley/managing-against-the-machine-f6ccd5a6c197

Despite this, the disproportionate access that managers have to power and resources makes management a fertile site for transformative action and social consciousness within the tech industry.

Such as allowing employees to work on FLOSS that the company depends on during the work hours.

As an individual, choose copyleft

https://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2013/11/13/unpaid-tradeoff.html

Strong copyleft design, however, deals specifically with the problems inherent in uncompensated volunteer labor. By avoiding the possibility of proprietary derivatives, copyleft ensures that volunteer contributions do have, for lack of a better term, some strings attached: the requirement that even big and powerful companies that use the code treat the lowly volunteer contributor as a true equal.

Companies have resources that allows them to quickly capitalize on improvements to Free Software contributed by volunteers, and thus the volunteers are always at an economic disadvantage. Requiring that the companies share improvements with the community ensures that the volunteers’ labor don’t go entirely uncompensated: at the very least, the volunteer contributor has equal access to all improvements.

This phenomenon is in my opinion an argument for why there is less risk and more opportunity for contributors to copylefted codebases. Copyleft allows for some level of opportunity to the volunteer contributor that doesn’t necessarily exist with non-copylefted codebases (i.e., the contributor is assured equal access to later improvements), and certainly doesn’t exist with proprietary software.

As a non-profit organization, fundraise

https://medium.com/processing-foundation/processing-foundation-funding-update-94cddb25a3d9

The majority of the donations in 2021 came from artists donating cryptocurrency to the Processing Foundation. Large donations were directed from Erick Calderon, Tyler Hobbs, Casey Reas, Michael Connolly, TAKAWO Shunsuke, Joshua Davis, Shvembldr, Aluan Wang, Monica Rizzolli, Matt DesLauriers, Joonas Toivenen, Jason Ting, and Lia. Donations were also made in other ways from Jared Tarbell, Dmitri Cherniak, Frederik Vanhoutte, and other anonymous donors. Many artists contributed to the Processing 20th Anniversary fundraiser through Hic et Nunc in August 2021, making it our most successful fundraiser to date. We also received many generous donations during our annual fundraiser in December. These individuals have allowed the Foundation’s work to become sustainable for the first time, and have enabled all of the changes we’re announcing through this letter.

and expand the talent base

Even if a single person cannot borne too much, a mountain of people can share the burden, together the experience might even make it feel like worthwhile.

https://www.decolonizingwealth.com/programs/reparative-philanthropy https://www.wearebgc.org/volunteer

An alternative to exclusivity: open, beginner-friendly, modifiable software and philosophy of the Processing

Instead of teaching students how to use software, we thought it was just as important to teach them how to create software.

https://medium.com/processing-foundation/a-modern-prometheus-59aed94abe85

Technology is not enough. Consider the technology as a tool which, in itself, could do nothing. Treat the technology as something that everyone on the team could learn, understand, and explore freely.

— Red Burns

https://itp.nyu.edu/adjacent/issue-3/ml5-friendly-open-source-machine-learning-library-for-the-web/

to empower people of all interests and backgrounds to learn how to program and make creative work with code, especially those who might not otherwise have access to these tools and resources.

With Processing, an artist can invent her own tools rather than relying on those created and maintained by others.

the real work begins now as artists, educators, and beginning coders use the library in education and practice. What is not clear? What is missing from the documentation? Where do things seem too much like magic? Too complicated? The best way to develop a library for beginners is to work with the library with beginners.

This ethos is particularly vital as we move into the era of Machine Learning.

Without access to and understanding of the machine learning models, underlying data, and outputs driving the software, how can we meaningfully engage, question and propose alternatives?

The Processing Foundation’s 2021 fundraising success—driven by the very artists who use the tools—proves that a community-funded model is possible. When we “build a mountain” of small contributors, the weight of maintenance doesn’t fall on a few exhausted volunteers. It becomes a shared labor of love that sustains a commons rather than a corporate asset.

References

Ostrom, Elinor. Governing the Commons : The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge [England] ; Cambridge University Press, 1991.