Linus’ thread: (CW: bigotry and racism in the comments) https://social.kernel.org/notice/AWSXomDbvdxKgOxVAm (you need to scroll down, i can’t seem to link to the comment in the screenshot)
I can relate to the “how the fuck is being a concerned human being extreme/poltical?” energy in the post hard.
Hate is mainstream politics now, sadly. So yes, not hating is political as well.
Yes - if you don’t hate hate then you are to be hated.
That’s what “being political” means. Otherwise you’d be apathetic, cynical and not concerned about anything.
@paaviloinen @eighty And even being apolitical is a political stance
Political? For everyone outside of America that’s just common sense.
In Canada it’s starting to become “political” since our morons are egged on by the morons down south.
It’s so exhausting, they treat it like a sport, it’s not about making anyone’s lives better it’s all just about their team winning
It’s people creating their own victories because they’re lacking their own.
Love your username, btw!
Hello I’m a trans person from the UK here to tell you this is sadly not the case at all.
Outside the US this no longer has to be political, is probably more what it really is.
Well, unfortunately we have more than our share of the brainwashed here…
Politics used to be something people engaged in. Now politics is the core to a lot of people’s identities, which means disagreement or debate is perceived as a personal attack and people will embrace a tremendous amount of cognitive dissonance to avoid being wrong.
Average US American : “Outsider America… You mean, the Moon?”
The entire middle east has entered the chat
Most of Asia enters the chat with abysmal LGBTQ+ rights.
All of human civilizations outside this recent small blip in history in the developed western world.
Aye, I wonder if cavemen cared what some minority in the tribe might be doing or just shrugged their shoulders about it. Is it human nature to find it hard to accept? Oh weren’t the Romans ok with it, that was a while ago.
I despite this “trend” of considering just simple opinions and basic statements as “political”. It’s been watered down and turned into a meaningless tag.
Linus gives exactly zero fucks about saying exactly what’s on his mind. And it’s almost always massively based. He’s always been great about that, we don’t deserve such a great mind.
Remember the time with the anti vaxxer, man was firing with all cylinders
Seriously, we are super blessed to have him.
FOSS is an active political statement!
Was just coming here to say that. The entire Ethos of Open Source is basically the people owning the digital means of production. So some people really not grasp that?
So some people really not grasp that?
Actually, yes, the original FOSS movement had more right-libertarian roots than anything to the left, although nowadays some might see it as “common ground”.
The politics of folks like RMS (personal issues aside) were far above average, but the Free Software Movement was very steeped in liberalism from its onset, and that explains many of of its present shortcomings. Its biggest failing was to believe that Free Software would ultimately win on its merits. In the early days this was understandable, when free software was often playing catch-up to replicate the functionality of established commercial offerings. When the GNU project was just a C compiler you could install on proprietary UNIX systems to dick around with.
Today though, Free Software is more often than not superior to commercially available offerings, with the exception of some niche industrial segments. But still, Free Software adoption by end users remains incredibly marginal. No matter how many merits Free Software stacks in its favor, the “Year of Linux on the Desktop” never comes. We are still drowning in proprietary iOS and Android phones. The overwhelming majority of PCs still ship with Windows. All of it deliberately engineered to become E-waste in a couple of years.
Folks, this won’t change unless we take over the factories where these PCs and phones are manufactured.
Hmmm. Ad machine maybe. For profit has bigger advertisement budgets than donation based.
Ideology runs this way unfortunately
Sadly, there’s an entire generation of libertarian anti-GPL “open source” developers that think the preservation of free software goes too far.
… What? I may be dumb. I don’t see how libertarianism is compatible with being anti FOSS.
The idea is that for code to truly be free, you should be able to make it proprietary. If you can’t do that, then it isn’t really free. That’s how I understand the idea anyway
But that’s not being anti, just accepting the possibility of it. Like i consider myself a libertarian and if you wanna make it close source, ok, I may dislike it but I won’t regulate against it. But being anti would imply I would go out of my way to censor your ability to do close source.
It’s a GPL license thing. If you make a derivative work of GPL code, you’re NOT free to do what you want with it. This is where the 'anti come from.
Ah. Well I’m pro theft so just use it and close it if you want and pray for the best! Hide the evidence to not get sued.
There are two parts to this. On one side, you have the “please follow the GPL if you’re using GPL code” – which is really just asking someone to honor a contract, more or less.
Then you have people like RMS, who believe that there should not be such a thing as proprietary software. They don’t care if you aren’t using the GPL – no software should be proprietary, period.
This fact eludes some folks.
“Wait, FOSS is political?”
“Always has been.”
I don’t see how his, very reasonable, views makes Linux itself (more?) political. What is the point of this post?
The man can say what he wants and it’s nothing to do with Linux. And, his gun stance seems fair to me. I think he is an intelligent man, and I think he’s allowed to say his thoughts without some lame arse trying to tie his ideals to the OS. Move on, nothing to see here.
This is exactly what I was thinking as well. Why is it so hard for folks to separate what someone creates from the creator? If we found out the person who created, say, the bandaid, was a militant Nazi homophobe who advocated for marriage at the age of 6, should we feel guilty every time we need to cover a cut or scrape?
Personally, I don’t know much at all about Linus, what he prefers for breakfast, whether he wears slippers in the house or goes barefoot, and so on. He could staunchly advocate that my country do away with its present form of government and declare him dictator for life for all I care.
I like Linux. I use Linux. It gets the job done. End of story.
Giving a medical example for comparison is spot-on since a lot of our knowledge about human body actually comes from experiments done by nazis :)
you do realize that linux has very political basing in it, right? do you realize that politics is a structure of governance and hence everything the authority on linux has to say will eventually, if not automatically, affect the project?
I don’t think the title is good, but I do think it’s notable to some extent. With people having weird, shitty opinions, it’s nice to see someone who is relatively famous in the tech community for having somewhat sane opinions and being vocal about it.
In my experience, the Linux community has got its own bunch of free speech weirdos who would reject some of these political points (especially the trans position), so I do think in that context it is kind of important.
Otoh, his Akkoma instance should block poa.st. It is Noble of him to argue, but probably it won’t accomplish much when he takes bait.
For someone out of the loop, what’s the deal with poa.st? I followed the link and it says its for shitposters which… doesn’t sound good… but could mean a few different things.
Imagine a bunch of wannabe 4channers got their own mastodon instance.
That’s poa.st
Although to be technically correct, they use Soapbox instead of Mastodon.
I’ve seen people on other sites malding about how this proves linux and the GPL are communist. I suppose it’s important to know just what those people are melting down about this week.
Surely that already happened in the Code of Conduct drama a few years back? Or the “Linus is rude and difficult to work with” callout even before that?
@ElectronSoup @juergen @bobslaede I feel like the FOSS community has a lot of different types, but the two that stand out to me the most are the Eric Raymond right-libertarian (“I just want to say the n word without repercussions”) and the Richard Stallman vague leftist (minus the creepy shit).
Obviously they are anarcho-syndicalist jeeze.
Gloating? Complaining? I thought the FOSS community has matured past “creator’s views = views of everyone who uses their creation”, honestly. And isn’t Linus supporting the Democratic party already well known?
Well, there was drama here yesterday about Lemmy’s creator and maintainer being a tankie or whatever and one person trying to say “Lemmy bad” because of that.
This post doesn’t seem to be here by coincidence.
This post doesn’t seem to be here by coincidence.
As the person who posted the original post: i don’t like/trust tankies and them being tankies is one of the reason i deleted my lemmy.ml account.
My impression is that Linus also doesn’t speak in his post about tankies, but instead i think the word “communist” is equal to some general leftist.
But i kind of agree, that this post can be seen as “in support of tankies”. hmm.
my impression is, furthermoore: because the more tankie politics is on lemmygrad.ml, an instance which is easily blocked, it is not that bad / could be worse. I kind of hope instances like beehaw.org have the most users someday, because they are really awesome i think
First, not every communist is a tankie, second, yes, Linus is not talking about being a literal communist, but about the “everyone to the left of Trump is a communist” meaning of the word.
Third, what I was saying is that this post about the political views of the creator of a huge FOSS project is very well timed after yesterday’s discussion about Lemmy’s creator.
Could you maybe link that debate for me? I can’t find it.
I just want lemmygrad defederated. I geniuinely thought the whole instance is satire but holy hell
beehaw.org is a great instance which defederates from lemmygrad, i think :)
It is, see: https://beehaw.org/instances
lemmy.ml probably won’t because it’s kind of the de-facto default instance where the devs can communicate to everyone. You’re best bet is to create an account on an instance that blocks lemmygrad (like Beehaw that was mentioned, i’m sure others do as well)
of course all topics have to do with politics, this is America
Linus has always been political and principled, I mean he chose the GPL for a reason! Glad to see him state all of this outright though, it only makes me respect him more.
I could have sworn I saw him saying years and years ago that he probably wouldn’t go GPL if he went back and did it over. I thought it was strange at the time.
THE LINUX KERNEL HAS A FEDIVERSE INSTANCE??? :D
And it’s not a mastodon instance either … instead they’re using pleroma.
no, it’s a fork of pleroma called akkoma
Oh right … my bad. I know about akkoma, for some reason I thought they were using pleroma. Thanks.
And it’s not a mastodon instance either … pleroma.
I half agree with his gun regulation stance. While ideally there would be more caution given to who owns guns that is unfortunately not the world americans have been living in the last 80 years or so. The fascists have guns, lots of them, and I’m not giving mine up while they have them.
Everything else he said is 100% based.
Well, yeah, fascists having guns is a “randomly giving guns to any moron with a pulse” problem.
When you’re in power, the fascists are the “morons with a pulse” who don’t get guns, but when they’re in power, YOU’RE the moron with a pulse who loses your ability to defend yourself. The point is to remove the ability of the authorities to decide who gets the right to own weapons, because it can easily be turned against you. Besides, morons obtain weapons illegally all the time. Firearms ownership is illegal in my country (except for licensed use like hunting) but we still have problems with gun violence because of weapons trafficking.
Yeah the gun law regulators generally ignore the fact that everyone and their grandma already has guns. And those with guns are not willing to do trade in programs.
I’d like to see better psych eval and requiring to re-license every so often. That should start steering the country in the right direction. Of course I don’t see this happening any time soon.
The US has no chance of passing anything around licensing of firearms in the short term. We can only hope that Gen Z votes all the gun nuts out of office.
Not much of that matters if you can’t get 2/3 of the states to get in line with your re-write and we can’t get 2/3 of the people to agree on anything. Also, there is a wide swath of opinion between what you call “gun nuts” and what other people call “common sense laws.” Very few people are arguing that “any moron with a pulse” should have a gun.
They can vote against the ammosexuals all they want. Many politicians get money from firearms companies, though, on both sides of the fence, and they all know which side their bread is buttered on.
I do think it is funny that there is significant overlap between the ACAB crowd and those that would want to disarm (or at least heavily restrict) the average Joe so only police have access to modern firearms
I think fascists is going too far… they’re crazy and dumb, that’s it.
They attempted a violent coup. They’re crazy, dumb, and dangerous
Nah, they’re fascists. Maybe not every republican, but a solid 70% or so of them. And a decent chunk of democrats too.
I agree with you 100%.
Holy shit a based Linus is not what I expected to see today. Makes me prefer Linux even more than I already did.
What would you use for a synonym for based? I keep seeing that used. I always thought it was just some alt-right meme bullshit, but I’m learning I was wrong. I still don’t get the use. My mind always thinks “based on what?”
“Based” is typically used to describe someone who says/does something without caring if they’ll be judged for it. Most commonly, it’s shorthand for “That’s a controversial opinion and you are bold for saying it, but I agree with you.” It turns the previous sentence into an adjective, which is a little weird but it makes sense eventually.
So if I had to choose a single word as a synonym, I would say “Bold”.
Bold, all right, yes. That works for me. It’s really been hurting my head reading “based” and not being able to make sense of it. Thank you! Seriously.
Based is fine, words can be reclaimed.
OK, but what does it mean? What is a synonym that makes sense?
Yeah idunno, based can mean completely different things context-wise
What would you use for a synonym for based?
W
Linus is stellar example of “good is not nice.”
He will rake you over the coals because he cares about quality and expects better from everyone.
Good can be nice. This is just him personally and shouldn’t be seen as a guideline on how to be good.
I agree! Most good people are nice, it is complemntary after all.
At the same time, without getting trite, being nice does not make people automatically good, and is often a performance to get away with vile shit.
To paraphrase another idiom, people who are easily offended should be offended more often. People often dismiss others because they are not “nice” AKA not submissive or servile to their opinions or demands. Oh, this person is “mean” so I get to talk shit about them or ignore them.
Yeah, not every good person is a good role model, one can always act better than the people they admire.
Hard fisagree. Linux isn’t political. Everyone has an opinion, it’s obvious Linus would too. But I am pretty happy that his opinion is one I personally agree with. Linux can be uaed by anyone though, and nothing stops far right activists (terrorists) from making a distro, which would still be Linux. There’s a heavily religious distro too, but that doesn’t make Linux as a whole religious.
Does that really make it totally apolitical though?. Like obviously it’s not inherently attached to a wide reaching political ideology, but it still is political in the same way that any free software is kind of political.
IMO the GPL and similar licences are inherently political, and Linus very intentionally chose to release the Linux kernel under the GPL licence rather than under BSD or a proprietary licence.
The very concept of free software and open contribution is political. That as a thing doesn’t necessarily exist within every political framework or culture. But that’s the nature of politics, ultimately in some way basically everything can have a political framing, and since politics are essentially “opinions on the way things should be” it’s ultimately inescapable.
Everything can have a political framing, but that’s not the same as saying that everything is political.
Only “opinions on the way things should be” are political, and not everything is an opinion.
Linux is not an opinion, even if you can have an opinion about the role of Linux in society, or about the intent in its creation. You can even say the creation of Linux might have been politically motivated, or that its license was designed with a political purpose (like all licenses are, including the most restrictive and non-free), but that’s not the same as saying that Linux on itself is political.
Personally I disagree but that’s ok, we can’t all see it the same way :)
I don’t think we get to use cold reason to determine if something is political or not, just like a dictionary doesn’t control the meaning of a word, nor does a small group of ants decide what the colony does next. If Linus came out as a right wing extremist, it wouldn’t matter how apolitical the linux source code is, people would decide to distance themselves from him and everything he represents. Something is political the moment a society perceives it as relevant to their politics.
There’s a heavily religious distro too, but that doesn’t make Linux as a whole religious.
More than one! There’s Ubuntu Christian Edition (if I had to guess, that’s probably the most popular one), Computers4Christians, there used to be Jesux (using the Christian Software Public License), Jewbuntu, Bodhi Linux, and (jokingly, but real) Kubuntu Satanic Edition at the very least.
And, while not Linux, I have to mention TempleOS, the open source Christian OS designed by a schizophrenic who claims it was written to God’s specifications. It was written in HolyC and was just so out of place in 2005 when it was released.
None of this matters in the context of your comment. I just wanted to throw it out there because I find the whole thing fascinating.
IIRC templeos is not open source. But I didn’t know there were more
I had to go look it up to make sure I was remembering right. Wikipedia says it was released as public domain under the open source model.
The whole thing would be incredibly hilarious if it weren’t for mental illness, much like my life.
That’s interesting, I thought the reason why it can’t be messed with and improved for daily use is that it’s closed source and therefore can’t be updated. But guess I was wrong fair enough.
Maybe because he’s not “American” and comes from a country with regulations like the rest of the world, and people care when they vote to make things work.
And like most of the rest of the world, there are more than two political parties, and is not a drama show.
He has American citizenship and lives in America, he’s talking about America here. And I promise you that other countries, yes even those in the magical fantasy land of Europe, also have lots of political drama despite having more than two parties in the government (They tend to form alliances based on left/right and split into two blocks anyway).
I know, im from Europe.
The drama is not compared to USA, we don’t vote on celebrities.In my country we even have a party for the animals and climate, só when USA still trying to vote for basic rights, we already ahead and vote for animal rights and more climate change.
Yeah no, this “America Bad and backwards 3rd world country while us Europeans are so enlightened” circlejerk isn’t constructive either. The American political system is terrible but a lot of European countries, mine included, are copying their “celebrity drama show” attitude towards politics because of extreme American cultural influence. We shouldn’t deny our own problems.
Laughs in 1930s
Sounds like Germany.
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Linux and everything FOSS (and not only open source) IS political. It’s a clear ethical choice and it impact everyone who use the software. The entire FOSS movement IS political
Yep, and that’s what brought me to FOSS and that makes it so necessary. Not its allegedly technological superiority.
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A russian here, can confirm that nothing prevents me from using Linux. Had no idea I’m a boogey man though
I’d say this is the good thing about FOSS, even Iranian people can use it despite the US embargo. No one person nor a country should have the power to ban stuff from others.
Nothing, really. I’ve been daily driving Linux for years, couldn’t be happier. ;)
I still agree that Linux and FOSS in general is political, honestly. Not because I want to say “what isn’t political?”, but because a lot of things about Linux and FOSS stand for privacy, freedom, transparency, responsibility, accountability, voluntary effort that benefits others (it can benefit you as well, though), etc. - all of these things seem to me like a piece of political discussion at least to some degree.
The most important point about this, though, is the fact that being political does not necessarily mean that Linux or FOSS has to enforce some kind of opinion among its users or community or around its discussion. You’re right in saying it’s just a technology, but it doesn’t mean that using Linux or FOSS isn’t a political decision - even (or especially) if your sole reason to run Linux is money.
I used to get really pissed at people who considered everything to be political, but these days, I think I agree, because everything you like or don’t like about your life (including the tech you use) is influenced by politics, so you do discuss it one way or the other in most conversations. Especially tech, though.
Agree. Political really means having to do with how people consider things in the world (should) work, be it technological, cultural, economical, etc. It’s not simply restricted to being associated to a political party/ideology.
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Red Star OS in a nutshell
Read your reply
IS political. It’s a clear ethical choice and it impact everyone who use the software.
NOT
IS trans political. It’s a trans clear ethical choice trans and it trans impact trans everyone who trans use the trans software.
at no time does linux talk about trans rights, linus does.
While this isn’t specifically about “trans rights”, it does seem to indicate that linux may have an opinion on the subject.
The Linux Foundation is not the Linux kernel, though.
Yes, because the kernel is a piece of software. It can’t have political opinions, yet.
The linux kernel isn’t sentient wtf
Can any person be not based?
This is one of the reasons why I respect him so much.
One great thing about about software is you don’t have to agree with or care about what the creators thoughts and beliefs are, software is at the end of the day just software.
Doesn’t get any less political than that.
I create software by myself and disagree. First it’s very political where and for whom I choose to develop software. Second, software is always made for a purpose and the purpose can be indeed (and is) very often linked to political or social cause. E.g. a software which only purpose is to harm people, say for controlling mass destruction weapons is in my point of view a very political software
software is always made for a purpose and the purpose can be indeed (and is) very often linked to political or social cause
Its not though, typically software exists to serve a basic function at its core, and it could be used or contributed to by anyone for any number of things.
You are thinking of software as if it exists in a vacuum. Software that is libre is a political statement. Software that is proprietary is also a political statement. Lemmy choosing to be decentralized/federated/interoperable is also a conscious political decision just as Apple chose to create its own proprietary ecosystem instead of caring about interoperability.
You can grow potatoes for political reasons too. Everything a human being does might be politically motivated, but that doesn’t mean potatoes are political.
Anyone can take that same software, that was created as a particular political statement, and use it for the completelly opposite political reasons to make a completelly different political statement. Just the same way as many have used songs in contexts that are completelly politically opposite to what the original author of the song intended.
In the end, the only thing that’s political is the goal/purpose/motivation of an action, not the result of the action. No piece of software/hardware/thing is political when you dettach the artist from the art and just see it for what it is, regardless of what the author might have wanted you to see it as.
That’s true. It’s the human element that creates the political attribute.
I disagree. Of course it’s political to some degree. It might not really make a difference whatever a software’s authors stance on gun control is as it’s not directly related to the software. But of course the political beliefs of a person might influence the product itself when it’s more related like for example the licensing. FOSS software enables the user of a software to effectively maintain ownership of their own device which is 100% a political thing.
FOSS software enables the user of a software to effectively maintain ownership of their own device which is 100% a political thing.
That’s an entirely different domain of politics in my mind, my point was there’s no reason to focus on what divides you from the creator when 9 times out of 10 the software itself is unrelated and contributed to by thousands that all have differing opinions on the same topic.
No need to try and find issues where there aren’t any.
One great thing about about software is you don’t have to agree with or care about what the creators thoughts and beliefs are, software is at the end of the day just software.
It really isn’t though - no-one dared touch ReiserFS after the creator became a wife-murderer even though it, supposedly at the time, it was quite the piece of advanced code.
Was referring more to people trying to politicize software and push them into political movements they’re unrelated to. Open software is at is core free and as such anyone with any political leaning could use it or contribute to it and no one would know, and no one should care.
Now, what one considers free is political. You cannot decouple reality from politics, and the free software movement is just one very specific example how political this really is. It’s also these communities that generate politival movements that you may see as unrelated to the pieces of software in question.
Free software is, at its core, about the users having control over their own use of the software - the software isn’t controlled by some owner and licensed by the users, but instead all users have equal ability to understand and use the software. If you consider communism to be political, then free software is political, because free software is communism in its purest form.
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It being quite the piece of advanced code might have been a big factor in why no-one dared touch it once the creator himself essentially shut down maintenance for the whole thing as he was trying to pay for his legal fees.
He’s called Hans Reiser 🙂
Fixed
