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.
That’s what “being political” means. Otherwise you’d be apathetic, cynical and not concerned about anything.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Ideology runs this way unfortunately
This fact eludes some folks.
“Wait, FOSS is political?”
“Always has been.”
Woman right to choose, fair enough. Regulated guns, absolutely. The less guns the better. Gay people stuff, I couldn’t care less. Check.
The man said it as it should be said.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’ve never been made happier by one of his rants.
Well said!
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 :)
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?
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
I just want lemmygrad defederated. I geniuinely thought the whole instance is satire but holy hell
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
social.kernel.org : one should migrate to lemmy :°
Holy fuck, I love that guy even more now. I didn’t know that was possible.
Common Linus W.
