Comment by throwayay4929
4 days ago
Imaging where the world would be if Firefox, when it came out, went deep on the Iraq war? Or if RMS got involved in, I don't know, the Lewinsky affair in the 1990s, and made it a core part of the FSF?
We'd all be using WinXP SE and IE6.
"The personal is political" is a truly toxic idea that's been corroding nice things since it's inception.
> We'd all be using WinXP SE and IE6.
the reason we have linux is because a bunch of geeks took a stand. i understand that you can't fight every battle, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't fight any battles.
you're making a rationalization because taking a stand is usually inconvenient, and you don't want to be inconvenienced by anything.
Supposing you know someone's motivation as if you have access to their psyche is a very unproductive way to participate in a discussion.
The reason we have a Linux is because a bunch of geeks took a stand on an issue they cared about and _focused on_. We wouldn't have Linux if the project also took on matters like teenage pregnancy, surveillance, and gerrymandering.
That's a very good point. What if codeberg decides tomorrow that they got weary of all worldly affairs, and from then on will only host dev tools?
Yet those same Linux geeks have now decided not to take a "stand" against AI, but rather embrace it. Twenty years ago when the Afghanistan and Iraqi wars raged on, did they oppose working with the military contractors at Red Hat or the NSA? No, they focused on the mission.
Using RMS as an example of "how to not be political" is uh... interesting.
> Using RMS as an example of "how to not be political" is uh... interesting.
He's known for staying focused on one single issue, which is important for personal reasons unrelated to group affiliations.
When even RMS seems like a more level headed political actor, you know you've gone off the deep end.
Haha, "RMS has more level-headed politics than Codeberg taking a position against LLMs" is a fun take.
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RMS headed a political organization, and kept his political campaigning to things directly related to the politics that his organization represented.
The people who were angry at RMS's "politics" were always actually mad at the concept of Free Software in general, and the fact that RMS thinks that software that is not Free is bad software (and does not think you are an exception.) He wasn't banging on about trans rights or Muslamic invasions, but people being enslaved by machines run by the powerful.
Doesn't mean that he didn't have opinions, he just knew why people cared what he thought. When he ventured a bad (but common) opinion about sleeping with teenagers, it opened a hole that his enemies drove a truck through. It's also notable that he did this to defend his friend Minsky; people often compromise their professionalism over personal relationships and interests.
> Doesn't mean that he didn't have opinions
Strong agree. He has millions of opinions, all nicely catalogued on his personal website. He even has an RSS feed: https://stallman.org/rss/rss.xml if you're keen to know what he thinks about this or that US politics issue.
But he didn't abuse his control of the FSF to pursue his own politics, he kept the organisation strictly focused on software freedom. It's at risk of being completely irrelevant if tries to expand beyond its niche of software freedom.
The ethics of AI, code generation, and hosted software would be within the FSF's remit, though I think the policies of any specific code hosting site wouldn't be.
Taking a stand against LLMs certainly seems pretty related to the politics of the FOSS movement.
Wasn't it because he said it was okay to breed 16 year old girls or something?
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"nice things" you mean upholding the harm of the status quo by not criticizing it
So youre proposing that everyone should always be criticizing every unjust thing in the world or else they're upholding the status quo?
By that silly logic I guess codeberg is supporting the uyghur genocide because they don't mention it.
No, I mean that voicing opinions in specialist spaces is rarely seen as bothersome when they uphold the status quo, but the minute they don't they're "making it political"
Edit: casual sinophobia BTW
Until proven otherwise, Codeberg's operations have nothing to do with the uyghur genocide though.
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Rather using self-hosted Gitea, software developed by a for-profit Chinese company, is actually supporting the uyghur genocide. Shame on you.
But do people look at installing a formulae in brew and wonder "what's their position on Uyghur oppression in Western China?" Like, wow, jxl is pretty neat, but they don't have a position on Palestine so I don't know if I should leverage the JPEG XL format?
Insanity. IMO. Keep that stuff at home.
Well if I had to install something and knew their authors were in favor of genocides, I would look elsewhere.
> they don't have a position on Palestine so I don't know if I should leverage the JPEG XL format?
This is a strawman. You go from "they are in favor of something horrible, should I use them?" to "they haven't expressed a position on stuff, should I use them?".
Firefox is an interesting choice as a company that wasn’t affected by identity politics given how Brendan Eich left the company
Early Firefox was the example. Looking at Firefox's market share decline since Eich got replaced reinforces the point though.