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.
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, so when USA still trying to vote for basic rights, we already ahead and vote for animal rights and more climate change.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't know if you joke or not, but thinking finnish = communist is too far away from any truth. I lived and still live in an ex-communist country and let me tell you: nothing Linus says or does is communist in any way. Socialist? Maybe! But that's a different discussion.
He's not Finnish, he's a Swede from Finland. Please attribute the nationality correctly.
He's not defending communists. He just points out that 'woke' is a word used in a spiritual context, which doesn't make sense with communism. The header of this thread is a clickbait. Read the article again.
EDIT: He's actually a Swedish-speaking Finnish guy, mea culpa.
When the only thing that continues to work on you ad-filled web site is the captcha, I’m not interested in supporting your journalism any more.
Protip: You can crash self-driving cars by purposefully misclicking during Captcha checks when they ask you to identify what is a bicycle, a car, a pedestrian, etc. Keep misclicking, your are poisoning the AI with each misclick. Just stay safe on the sidewalk.
I'm sorry what? And by that I mean what the hell is wrong with you and the people that think it's a good idea? If it works that way and enough people did that then it would be intentionally endangering people's lives.
Well yes, it has been discussed a lot. But also, copyleft and other open source licenses are political in that they prevent capitalist exploitation to a degree.
Every human opinion is essentially "political" in some way, and is even interpreted differently be country? But open source software as a technology should not be taking any stance for or against gender, guns, rights, race, etc...