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Boycotting FOSS projects in the wake of the "buy canadian/european" movement makes no sense (lemmy.blahaj.zone)

submitted 20 hours ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I've seen many threads suggesting products but they often don't mention FOSS projects, which should always be preferred to corporate software. With FOSS you are already boycotting capitalism, on either side. Free and Open Source ignores borders and shouldn't be categorized in nationalist terms, no matter where some of the maintainers happen to live.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

I mean, open source projects can be started or based in the US. But that doesn’t mean it’s an American project; it’s just that the people who started it happened to be American.

I guess if we had to point to a specific American OSS, maybe Tor would qualify? It was initially developed by the CIA, so that may qualify it as US OSS. But it has since taken on a life of its own and the CIA doesn’t have any hand in active development anymore… So it’s still hard to say that even “being made by the literal US government” qualifies an OSS project as “American”.

It’s sort of a Ship of Theseus situation. At what point in the development process do we consider it a non-American project?