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> Not every open source project exists to solve geopolitical problems, and not every contributor arrives with a policy agenda. FOSDEM has always thrived on its

• wiz21c 9mo ago
  with AI we have entered capitalistic computing, where it's the scale of computing that makes it political (before, it was a clever idea that brought the political thing, like MP3, encryption, etc.). As it is massive scale (think 2GWatt data centers), I'm afraid the poor little FOSS guy won't be able to be as relevant as before. It's not David against Goliath anymore, it's FOSS against billions of zombies. I happen to be one of these FOSS guys though and as you do, I think it's better to stay off to keep my mental health; else it makes me feel powerless. How sad: 20 years ago I thought the fight was possible.
  • positron26 9mo ago
    [flagged]
  • voldemolt 9mo ago
    [dead]
  • iso1631 9mo ago
    The change was the rise of "cloud", with saas, paas and even iaas. The world no longer ran software they controlled (even if it were proprietary you still controlled windows NT and Office 95) on hardware they owned.
• Teever 9mo ago
  Your comment reads to me like it will derail the conversation about FOSDEM into one about (American) politics and HN's policy regarding political stories. Was that your intention?
• isodev 9mo ago
  While tools and software itself is not political, the people behind it are. eg. When CEOs and founders and project leads leverage their audience for politics, then their tools are absolutely a political choice. Be it DHH’s latest fasho ramblings or every time you do ‘swift build’ - Tim Cook takes a selfie with a sex offender. But let’s refocus on FOSDEM and the mission of libre software to allow us to exist without “corporate oversight” or to just build, with tools made by other humans.
  • AlexeyBrin 9mo ago
    > When CEOs and founders and project leads leverage their audience for politics, then their tools are absolutely a political choice. Be it DHH’s latest fasho ramblings or every time you do ‘swift build’ - Tim Cook takes a selfie with a sex offender. I don't follow. Are you implying that by using Ruby on Rails or Omarchy one is fasho aligned ? Or that people that use Swift somehow support sex offenders ?
    • mordnis 9mo ago
      Sure sounds that way.
    • isodev 9mo ago
      More like... when they use their platforms to promote whatever, you helping those platforms move forward is essentially helping them push the whatever forward. I don't get why is this so hard to understand. Unfortunately, we've gotten to a place where picking a tool is also an expression of your support for the politics of the people/corps behind it.
  • GreenDolphinSys 9mo ago
    I don't think your examples are comparable. DHH is (/was?) the face of ruby on rails and basecamp, whereas Cook is just the latest person at the helm of a tremendously large (personnel-wise) company someone else built. There are only 2 relevant phone types to consider, and please don't tell me Google/Samsung are morally superior to Apple. Even for ruby on rails, hundreds (thousands ?) of people have been contributing to it. It's not really "owned" by DHH anymore, and it's 21 years old, well before these rants. And not to compare badness, but DHH is ranting publicly on his blog about the projected % of white people in Norway in 2096 and quoting white supremacists in his lamentation about the UK not being more white. Blaming the increasingly totalitarian actions the UK has been taking on immigrants and not the literal lawmakers setting those policies is certainly an opinion to hold. It's a whole lot more in your face. I do agree about Omarchy linux though- that's still very closely associated with DHH and I'm not touching that with a 39.5ft pole, let alone before getting into technical issues. I was honestly pretty disappointed to see the typical dev personalities online cover Omarchy linux despite the crap DHH has been spewing on his blog.
• ksec 9mo ago
  >It’s not just the FOSS scene but there is an increasing crowd (mostly on the internet) of “everything is political”. Judging from HN we are pass that already. Absolute Peak of it was 2014 - 2017. But I guess this is a new trend especially in EUR.
  • positron26 9mo ago
    The trend is global and inherent to online psychological coupling and self-selection bias. The longer we go without healthy information spaces, the more the population will regress. There does however seem to be a "free/libre" vs open source rift along the Atlantic ridge, and it is being wedged apart by the US government flirting with a return to isolationism mixed with bullying and self-enforced credible threat geopolitics. It is really counter-productive for Europeans to think American OSS people are monolithic with US tech giants and the US federal government. Nonetheless, pluralism is good, and innovation will win, so I suppose it's just another hairpin in the game.
• teekert 9mo ago
  I for one am getting pretty sick of it. FOSS is by nature apolitical, pre-competitive and for me has always been an intellectual exercise. This is the only way it can power Chinese clouds, Azure, AWS and GCP, and the many EU sovereign systems we're going to see. To me it's a place to find kind people who are enthusiastic about tech, like me. Now I find myself judged when using Nix, genAI, Blockchain, Omarchy (and by extension even Framework), Podcasting 2.0 related things, Centos Stream... It doesn't end. So many people that divide the world in good/bad, them/us. I'm tuning out tbh. (as an aside, I wish I could have some indication of how polarized the voting here on HN is ;))
  • microtonal 9mo ago
    I think that’s a very idealistic view of FOSS that is detached from reality. In the late 90s and early 00s we were fighting the crypto wars, making DeCSS illegal, DMCA, EUCD. There was a lot of infighting between free software and open source proponents. Many FSF campaigns were very political. I got bashed by some other FOSS people I knew in ~2006 for using and contributing to CentOS because it was Red Hat-based (evil empire or whatever). The difference is that social media is amplifying things a lot more and there is a culture of destroying people in public (made easier by social media amplification). It’s really the same issue as outside FOSS, social media creates stronger bubbles, more extremes, more grifters, and more amplification of crap.
  • direwolf20 9mo ago
    What is your definition of politics?
    • teekert 9mo ago
      It's about governance of society, about how decisions concerning society are being made. About what processes we adhere to. About agreeing to follow those process together, instead of resorting to primitive things like violence.
      • direwolf20 9mo ago
        then FOSS is political. It's about processes we adhere to and how decisions are made. Microsoft makes a decision to ban the ICC from Windows and has a process for this. Linux has a different process where they can't make that decision because it's impossible.
• GreenDolphinSys 9mo ago
  The entire idea of F/OSS itself is political, and was very radical. We're just accustomed to it now, so it's not "political", in other words, it's not "controversial". Perhaps F/OSS is -more- political than other spaces because we organize around projects? Here, and on Reddit, we see the fallout of drama all the time in various F/OSS communities over disagreeing over policies. That's... politics. Unless you happen to live alone and interact with no one, basically every single interaction is undergirded by policies determined by humans. Politics. A computer/phone being built that is purchasable for legal tender, charged by electricity being fed into our homes, where we can send packets in the air, underground and across the world, doesn't happen by magic. It's literally the result of politics. "Detaching oneself" really just means "not paying attention to politics". And it's a free world to do so, especially for mental health reasons. It's definitely not healthy to be tapped into news/current events all the time and I have to take breaks myself. But for some people, they can't really detach when their literal existence is deemed "political". This is what people refer to when they say it's privileged to detach. Side Note: criticism of "detaching" is not referring to things like detaching for mental health. Internet trolls aside, that's a strawman argument. What it's referring to is the kind of people who say "oh, I'm just apolitical" or "tech is apolitical, it's just code", when really the status quo is in their favor and they have zero need to ever think about political issues. They would certainly not be "apolitical" if they were being banned from entering public bathrooms or being banned from contributing to F/OSS projects on the basis of their skin color!
  • dijit 9mo ago
    I grew up poor enough that my classmates called me "Tramp". Hand-me-downs so threadbare they could pass for actual rubbish, couldn't afford deodorant or adequate dental hygiene; the works. The 10-year-old £5 computer that barely wheezed into life was my escape into a world that genuinely didn't care about any of that. On the internet (1hr per day, courtesy of the local library), I was just the words on the screen. Nobody knew I was poor. Nobody knew I was weird-looking. Nobody knew anything except whether my code worked and whether my arguments made sense. That pseudonymity wasn't a limitation of the technology... it was the most liberating feature I'd ever experienced. When people say "everything is political" and "detaching is privilege", I feel like they're describing a completely different internet to the one that saved me. The privilege wasn't being able to ignore politics- the privilege was finally finding a space where the hierarchies that had crushed me in the physical world simply didn't exist. Bringing identity and real-world political causes into these spaces doesn't make them more inclusive- it recreates the very social hierarchies we'd escaped. When you insist I must care about your cause, acknowledge your identity, or pledge allegiance to your political framework just to contribute code or discuss technology, you're making the space less meritocratic, not more. The early internet let us be judged solely on the merit of our ideas. That was radical. That was revolutionary. For some of us, that was the only place we'd ever experienced actual equality of opportunity. When you demand these spaces become "politically aware", what I hear is: "your refuge wasn't good enough, and now you need to care about my problems too." But this was the one place where I didn't have to perform social status, where I didn't have to prove I belonged based on anything other than what I knew and what I could build. I'm not saying the world's problems don't matter. I'm saying there used to be spaces where we could focus on intellectual puzzles and technical problems without importing every societal conflict. And frankly, for those of us who were outcasts in the physical world, losing that feels like losing the only place we ever truly belonged.
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• protocolture 9mo ago
  By politics, do you mean politics. Because of course OSS has always been political. Generally people afraid of politics are using the term as an empty space for some form of specific politics they want to run away from. In which case, why not just say what you mean.