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)
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.
Average US American : “Outsider America… You mean, the Moon?”
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.
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.
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.
Outside the US this no longer has to be political, is probably more what it really is.
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.
That’s what “being political” means. Otherwise you’d be apathetic, cynical and not concerned about anything.
This is one of the reasons why I respect him so much.
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.
Yeah idunno, based can mean completely different things context-wise
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.
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.
lol i read gun regulation as pro-gun.
glad to be proven wrong :)
Did you know that linux kernel source code was leaked to the public? Go see for yourself how political it is!
/s
Removed by mod
Honestly I don’t understand this kind of argument. Linux is political: compare it to its alternatives, look at the license it’s released under, and so on. Lemmy is the same way. Lemmy even has a section in the manual about how it’s fundamentally political: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/users/07-history-of-lemmy.html
The motivations for creating open source software can be political, but the product itself is apolitical. Programming code is pure logic and has no opinions.
I don’t even really believe that software licenses are inherently political. All they do is permit/restrict specific rights to attribute, use, modify, reproduce, distribute, etc. the code. The only real political position I could see against software licenses is one that doesn’t believe in protecting intellectual property rights. So if we’re going that far, I will tacitly agree that software licenses could potentially be considered political, but not in a very meaningful sense IMHO.
Programming code is pure logic and has no opinions.
Can you explain to me how, for example, Stuxnet is apolitical?
All they do is permit/restrict specific rights to attribute, use, modify, reproduce, distribute, etc. the code.
Can you explain how these restrictions/permissions are apolitical?
Stuxnet itself doesn’t care whose centrifuges it destroys (in fact it doesn’t care or have an awareness that it’s destroying anything at all), it does what it’s programmed to do and is deployed to do by people with political goals. It’s not the same thing as Stuxnet itself being political.
I did say that I could conceive of one way that software licenses could be considered somewhat political if one’s politics reject the validity of intellectual property. But then again, the software licenses are also not the code itself. If one doesn’t believe in the concept of intellectual property, one is free to accept whatever risk is involved with breaking the license and using it anyway. The software doesn’t care who’s running it.
I know this is all somewhat pedantic, but I pretty firmly believe no software is inherently political. At least maybe not until we have a computer system that achieves some form of sentience and its operating instructions are subject to its own will.
Stuxnet itself doesn’t care whose centrifuges it destroys (in fact it doesn’t care or have an awareness that it’s destroying anything at all), it does what it’s programmed to do and is deployed to do by people with political goals. It’s not the same thing as Stuxnet itself being political.
This was actually pretty thought-provoking, so thanks for that. It seems like your argument is founded on the idea that non-sentient entities are incapable of being politically charged. In a vacuum where no sentient entities exist to charge them politically, this is trivially true. However, we don’t live in such a vacuum. As such, one must take into consideration that a subset[1] of people do consider a subset[1:1] of non-sentient entities to be inherently politically charged, and since one can’t know who considers what to be politically charged, one must treat all non-sentient entities as (at least potentially) politically charged. Of course, one may choose to ignore that subset[1:2] of people (which itself is a politically charged decision) but that doesn’t change the fact that any given non-sentient entity could be considered politically charged.
I did say that I could conceive of one way that software licenses could be considered somewhat political if one’s politics reject the validity of intellectual property. But then again, the software licenses are also not the code itself. If one doesn’t believe in the concept of intellectual property, one is free to accept whatever risk is involved with breaking the license and using it anyway. The software doesn’t care who’s running it.
Sorry, it seems you’ve repeated yourself rather than addressing the specific point I had asked for elaboration on. Would you mind trying again?
I didn’t repeat myself on the second point. Either one’s politics endorse intellectual property rights, which include the rights of an individual or organization to permit/limit any or all of those specific facets I mentioned previously according to their preference or one does not believe intellectual property rights exist. That’s the only meaningful way I can conceive of software licenses being a political concept, but I’m welcome to hear your take.
I don’t even really believe that software licenses are inherently political.
Lol. I don’t think you know what political means.
I’m actually perfectly in agreement with both of those statements 🤷
Dang. I wish I could see what this said.
It was something like this,
Surely people who argue that Linux isn’t politically charged because its creator is politically charged will also argue that Lemmy isn’t politically charged even though its creators are, right? Right?
except it was written in a way that was more annoying to read.
Edit: I’m assuming reposting the content is fine since the modlog showed that this user was banned and had their messages removed for reasons unrelated to this particular comment.
After being disappointed by Steve, Linus lifted my spirits.
You should only support gun regulation if it applies to cops as well.
I think you’re getting downvoted by both police supporters and police abolitionists lol
Agreed. They are not above the law, they simply enforce it. If you allow one group of people arbitrary monopoly on violence, then you have an imbalanced system.
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.
… 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.
This fact eludes some folks.
“Wait, FOSS is political?”
“Always has been.”
I’ve never been made happier by one of his rants.
This is one of the many reasons I look up to this man.
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.
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.
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.
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.
