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What is the point of open source if it doesn’t protect individuals from the control of corps and non-democratic countries? What’s the damn point of open source
by tpkee 2y ago
What is the point of open source if it doesn’t protect individuals from the control of corps and non-democratic countries? What’s the damn point of open source if law enforcers can just hijack the project?
I don’t care about the Russians shenanigans but I’m dumbfounded by the lack of transparency, the obvious racism, from Linus.
- bigfatkitten 2y agoYou don't get to operate in a legal vacuum just because you're writing software.
- tpkee 2y agoThen what is the point of free software? By existing within the law mechanism it is on itself pointless: it is free labor companies tolerate because it suits their interests and it is for now allowed because we don’t live in a dictatorship, but it is easily hijackable and, as Linus proves, there is not even a need to actually write malicious code. I wonder what would you think projects like signal, but the FOSS community too, should do if the “chat control” law actually passed in Europe. EDIT: if, as you say it doesn’t exist in a legal vacuum, then FOSS is worthless and, I reiterate, just free labor for corporations
- Arainach 2y agoThe point is software which is free for anyone to inspect and build upon. That's it. It doesn't have to have geopolitical significance, and geopolitical events don't change the overall benefits.
- tpkee 2y agoFOSS is inherently political, it stands for softwares both free, per your definition, and free as in people’s freedom. If now any political entity large enough to pull its weight can hijack an entire project, then FOSS is pointless and the people contributing to these projects are just doing some good ol’ work for free, with no benefits for nobody but corporations. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/floss-and-foss.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/floss-and-foss.en.html
- bigfatkitten 2y agoNot at all, and here's a personal example. I submit patches to projects operated by companies all the time, and I generally don't care who runs the project (whether it's a company or a hobbyist). I do this only because it benefits me directly. It probably helps other people too, but they're not my problem. The company making money is also not my problem. I fix a bug or add a feature, which I was going to do anyway. I get that change merged upstream. I can then happily use my Linux distribution's packages (or some other downstream dependency) without wasting monstrous amounts of time replacing those packages with my own locally maintained version.
- lifthrasiir 2y agoThe only point of open source is that you are still free to inspect, use and possibly fork everything and start anew. The concept you actually want is open governance, which is much more vague and less established. I guess this incident clearly demonstrates that Linux is less openly governed than what people assumed, but also it doesn't change anything about being open source. (We are even not very sure whether open governance is necessarily good in general!) Also, at least try to say that you do care about "the Russians shenanigans" (but you can also don't support the incident as well), because it's also a highly political matter and inducing any useless emotion is just as bad as Linus' reply.
- tpkee 2y agoI supposed it was clear that I was referring to FOSS, in hindsight it wasn’t clear at all. > Russian shenanigans I do care about the conflict and hope for a swift victory by Ukraine, but in this instance it could have been anyone really. It doesn’t matter these people are Russians: Linus, to comply with “legal requirements”, threw out maintainers without giving an actual reason. If he is so eager to comply with legal requirements now, I wonder what he — he or any other software maintainer — would do were the “legal requirements” be for an unjust cause; countries shouldn’t dictate who can and cannot work for FOSS projects. And on the matter of “we are the good guys, nothing can go wrong”: In EU politicians tried to make cryptography useless again, and while I don’t believe the law will pass I can’t help but wonder if FOSS maintainers, just like Linus, will happily comply.
- lifthrasiir 2y agoMy answer doesn't change for F/OSS, which has been widely mistaken to subsume open governance. Their underlying motivation does differ: the free software movement is concerned about user's freedom with respect to softwares and viral licenses were just means to that freedom, while the open source software movement cares more about the collaboration in the development phase but doesn't dictate the exact nature of collaboration, which the term "open governance" seeks to clarify. While my point might be already a lost cause (sigh), I believe this distinction is very important because we don't know how to do open governance in general. We have a relatively strong case for F/OSS licensing mainly because it was easy to follow and therefore spreaded like fire. But every sizable project trying open governance is different from each other. In this regard: > countries shouldn’t dictate who can and cannot work for FOSS projects. This statement is irrelevant because it was the maintainers' decision to decide "who can and cannot work" for the Linux kernel. It's just your ideal---and honestly speaking, also my ideal---, and most real world F/OSS projects suffer from at least one issue against that ideal. We can't talk about how to achieve or move closer to the ideal without the correct understanding of terminology and situation, which your comment did (and still) miss. For example, the correct starting point would be this: why did many large projects have to create legal entities in some jurisdiction?
- gn4d 2y ago[flagged]