Linus Torvalds -- Creator of Linux -- defends gun regulation, woke communists, womens rights AND trans rights. Linux is political!
Linus Torvalds -- Creator of Linux -- defends gun regulation, woke communists, womens rights AND trans rights. Linux is political!
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)
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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.
historically speaking, when you consider its domestication by indigenous people in South America, its appropriation by Spanish colonizers, its resistance to looting by marauding armies compared to grain crops, and the freaking Irish potato famine, I think it becomes quite clear that the potato is a politically relevant crop and could reasonably be considered political.
The existance of potatoes in western diet might be politically motivated (just like every food, not just potatoes), but that's not the same as saying that potatoes are political.
Also, even if the potato had never been involved in any of that and had been always peacefully and respectfully used... wouldn't that history also be political? Why would violent conflict be more of a "political" thing, when non-violence is as much of a political movement?
you are out here acting like something being political is a high bar when it really isn't.
EVERY food meets that same criteria. So of course the bar is not high under that categorization.
The problem is that calling a physical object "political" just because it can be placed in a political framework makes no sense, because then everything is "political" at that point, thus making the term pretty meaningless.
It would be like saying "potatos are emotional" just because it's possible for someone somewhere to get emotional about a potato.
What's political are human opinions, intentions and actions. Not a chunk of metal, nor the root of a plant.
Would you seriously say that food is NOT political? With famines being a major driver of social unrest and mass death? With government power being highly linked from ancient times to the distribution and taxation of grain crops? With its impacts on public health and chronic diseases? With the many land reforms throughout history? With the freaking Food and Drug Administration and the Farm Bill and the US Department of Agriculture and the presidential candidates at the Iowa State Fair eating corn dogs as rustically as they can muster? With the existence of the vegan movement? I could easily go on but I think it's pretty clear that you at the very least picked a bad example of something that's not political.
it's not more of a political thing, therefore they would both be political. although I'm not convinced that a crop that's strictly nonviolent would even exist
Exactly. If you use that criteria to categorize physical things (instead of human intentions/goals), then you'll find everything is political, and thus that classification would be totally useless.
Even numbers and mathematics would be political by that criteria... even regions of space we haven't visited would be. It's trivial to find a political frame from which to see anything, all you need is to have an opinion about how it has affected / can affect humanity. So that criteria makes it a pretty useless term.
Physical objects aren't any more "political" than they are "emotional". Are potatoes also emotional?
Potatoes are commonly described as a comfort food so I think it would be fair to describe them as emotional, although it would be a bit of an odd way to word it.
Yea, also every form of food. Even mathematics can ellicit emotions. Everything can be emotional when you apply that same sort of odd logic.
When you apply human properties to things and want to see things under humanity's framework... then everything is human.. potatoes are human too then. This is just an odd antropo-centric way to describe objects, which doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
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.
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