hagar

I guess it can be simple like that when you are the maintainer. It is definetly not as simple when there are many of them. Of course you can run it like that and many do, but the whole mentality is pretty limited.

My statement is not that you have to do whatever anyone asks in your project that you maintain. My statement is that a community that contributes towards a project has a say in it. You might want to ignore it, handle it BDFL-style, politely and cynically decline, whatever.

Not really about what is the absolute correct answer. Our values are clearly different. More like what I believe works best in the long term.

I think the easy answer to that is "because it is not as trivial as forking a small app that could run off of a git repo", it's a whole operating system involving a lot of infrastructure and a huge community around it. It might get forked, but people fight probably because they see value in what exists and would rather try and advocate for whatever direction they believe is best. Those who would disagree are not very different, just passive.

An even more trivial alternative is settling for "whatever the founder wants" and seeing the ability to fork as the final justification for this mentality. This is a lot less work, but also can amount to doing nothing, even if shitty decisions are being made. Even if that is your stance, you will have to fight for it. The alternative is everyone just sit idly and pretend not to have opinions. I'd much rather embrace the chaos that comes with collaboration and let it find proper processes to manifest.

I understand that and it is indeed a good thing to publicly license your work rather than keep that to yourself. Still, no matter how virtuous one's actions are, that does not mean the people who come to deposit their time and work for a project should accept everything that person does simply because they started it.

People are entitled to argue about the project they participate in, and that is even more true for open source software, where the contributions of the community eventually become much greater than any single human can accomplish. I really do not understand this mentality of "this person created it, therefore if you don't like any of their decision suck it up or go make your own fork", it is very narrow and a horrible way to conduct anything, really anything, much less a collaborative project.

I'd just like to remind the passing reader that creating an open source project does not entitle you to do whatever you want and tell people to "make their own thing" if they don't like it. Open source projects are the result of a massive collaborative effort and the resulting work is the product of a whole community laboring to make it happen. Signed: someone with a major mental illness.

What makes you think ("identity") politics are unrelated to software development? Software development is deeply entrenched in politics. It's just that, just as in most topics that don't have politics as their main thing, a lot of people would rather pretend it's not.

Any community of people presupposes politics. If it doesn't show, most likely it's a very narrow or homogeneous group of people, which involves excluding/shunning others to defend this narrowness. So that has its own sort of problem too.

What are "our" societies? I live in one dominated by fundamentalist Christians.

That would be true if such "society" was ruled according to the scientific method. I agree with your premise, what I'm trying to point out is that those who actually make the calls can and will often act on emotions, and use the emotions of the population against it. They have no regard for our emotions being different. It' s not "we" who try to separate emotions, it's those we are in power of making that separation, and they separate not according to the scientific method but according to socio-economical interest.

What's the problem with emotions though? Do you believe emotion can be easily separated from most statements? Isn't one of the main problems with tech in our times that it's manipulating emotions? A sense of invasion that prompts a need for privacy does not involve emotion? A sense of justice for user freedom does not involve emotion? Emotions are pervasive and subtle, this trend of preferring the emotionless option over the one that shows emotion weirds me. Someone who feels targeted by a homophobe feeling 'emotional' about it seems more than valid to me, and calling it emotional in a dismissive way is like saying that emotion is not valid/important.

It's not that there are no side effects. There are. But none of them in large numbers of people, only a few people presented such side effects in millions vaccinated.

The problem is how the information spreads, making the conspiracy-prone to extrapolate "vaccine A caused side effects X and Y on Z number of people" into "all vaccines cause/will cause widespread deadly side effects".

Also, any piracy website will do basically anything for money because they can't monetize with conventional methods, so they can do many such desperate/unscrupulous stuff at times

(edit: not sure about this, if it was paid by someone, as it doesn't seem to link anywhere)

oh, i don't mind it being here for discussion at all, it just seems so disingenuous to me, because it raises issues but then ends up protecting the worst intentions/agents. so this reaching and its effects are so dubious... i mean, who would "opt in" to having their data freely added to a company or government database for whatever purpose??

somewhat strange, coming from a website with 13 trackers. it's also unsettling to me how they speak of the "customer" and how "big tech" is collecting people's data for advertising, making it seem like the worst possible scenario is that a few ad companies get to show more personalized ads. meanwhile government, corporations and random companies all hoard this data for social engineering predictive models and attempts to manipulate behavior, elections, engagement... getting us to click on ads is just the basics from 20 years ago.

thank you for the detailed comment. i didn't see disroot being mentioned. do you have any comments on it?