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)
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.
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.
This fact eludes some folks.
“Wait, FOSS is political?”
“Always has been.”
Political? For everyone outside of America that’s just common sense.
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?”
In Canada it’s starting to become “political” since our morons are egged on by the morons down south.
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.
Outside the US this no longer has to be political, is probably more what it really is.
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.
no, it’s a fork of pleroma called akkoma
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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.
Hell yeah. I love watching this man take a stance.
I’m also happy to discover social.kernel.org instance!!!
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.
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
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.
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 agree with you 100%.
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.
Linus is just such a treat. Love the guy.
… and his segue to the sponsor - Jackery.
In my experience, people who explicitly state to be apolitical or demant non politicality happen to have worldviews which only in the best of cases fall under the label controversial.
On the flip side when I encounter this offline it’s someone who’s so disillusioned they can’t even bother to figure out how to describe themselves politically (and I don’t blame them). Not to invalidate what you’re saying because I’ve noticed it as well, but to give some hope that some of the kids are alright
You are right, there are people who just gave up. But they sadly don’t comment most of the time.
There’s probably a good amount of literal kids on these networks who are just too young to understand/like politics. And suddenly see their idols get into stuff they don’t understand. It’d be interesting to figure out ratio of kids to adults who dislike people/media/companies “going political”
Intriguing argument, you got there.
Not sure if sarcasm or not. But I’m also not saying the kids are the majority - I just remember going to shady websites when I was 12. The internet felt safer back then but what kid is going to be stopped by “are you at least 13?” prompt. Imagining kids going to your_least_favorite_instance also seems petty bad.
no sarcasm
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 :)
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.
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average based Linus take.
Linus delivering the well-deserved beatdown as always.
Now with 300% more diplomacy!
“Commies? In MY computer?” More likely than you think.
BSD, Lunix, Debian and Mandrake are all versions of an illegal hacker operation system, invented by a Soviet computer hacker named Linyos Torovoltos, before the Russians lost the Cold War. It is based on a program called " xenix", which was written by Microsoft for the US government. These programs are used by hackers to break into other people’s computer systems to steal credit card numbers. They may also be used to break into people’s stereos to steal their music, using the “mp3” program. Torovoltos is a notorious hacker, responsible for writing many hacker programs, such as “telnet”, which is used by hackers to connect to machines on the internet without using a telephone.
I believe our best american hacker “4Chan” is our best bet against this Torovolts guy.
It makes me very happy to hear Linus say this
This is one of the reasons why I respect him so much.
