'The Power of Ritual in Prehistory: Secret Societies and Origins of Social Complexity' by Brian Hayden is a super interesting read on the origin of secret societies. Apparently there has always been a dynamic in communities that whenever there is a production surplus (according to the author happens in 'transegalitarian societies'), there tends to be a very small number of individuals that feel entitled to the surplus so they start to create multiple secret society startups with rituals and initiation practices often involving a high initiation cost to eventually centralize power (and publicly punish skeptics when possible).
Another characteristic about secret societies is that actually they need to be very public (to get new members), and what is a secret instead is the reason why the society exists, that part is not revealed unless becoming part of the group.
'Discriminating Data' by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is a really interesting read about the impact and influence of the eugenic origins of statistics to new fields like network and data science too. Highly recommended.
These type of interpretations were actually one of the concerns within the Free Software movement when the Open Source terminology started to appear:
"Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software"
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....
Open Source terminology, how it was coined, was exactly to not imply that it was 'Free' in any sense, so things like BSL actually practice Open Source in the original sense.
Did not mean that BSL was good, just that when you mean that something is 'real open source' you are most likely referring to the ideals of the Free Software movement in terms of what that movement meant by something being 'free'. Open Source mostly means that the source code is available and collaborative development is happening in public.
From the article I linked for example, your stance is more akin to the second one:
- A pure open source enthusiast, one that is not at all influenced by the ideals of free software, will say, “I am surprised you were able to make the program work so well without using our development model, but you did. How can I get a copy?” This attitude will reward schemes that take away our freedom, leading to its loss.
- The free software activist will say, “Your program is very attractive, but I value my freedom more. So I reject your program. I will get my work done some other way, and support a project to develop a free replacement.” If we value our freedom, we can act to maintain and defend it.
This is actually one of my main concerns with CUE and something I'd like the community overall to keep in mind. There is a high chance in my opinion that CUE ends up being adopted as a silver bullet for configuration just for being cargo culted as something that is from Google and the drive for dependence by open source users sometimes, sort of similar to what happened with Kubernetes. That modules and package management in CUE are modeled after what Go did is also questionable IMO but makes sense since the project is Go based.
CUE is a good tool for validation and has its uses, but Dhall has some really neat innovations that make it an exciting project so worth looking at both at least and compare first.
Another characteristic about secret societies is that actually they need to be very public (to get new members), and what is a secret instead is the reason why the society exists, that part is not revealed unless becoming part of the group.