Linus’ thread: (CW: bigotry and racism in the comments) https://social.kernel.org/notice/AWSXomDbvdxKgOxVAm (you need to scroll down, i can’t seem to link to the comment in the screenshot)
I can relate to the “how the fuck is being a concerned human being extreme/poltical?” energy in the post hard.
Hate is mainstream politics now, sadly. So yes, not hating is political as well.
Yes - if you don’t hate hate then you are to be hated.
That’s what “being political” means. Otherwise you’d be apathetic, cynical and not concerned about anything.
Political? For everyone outside of America that’s just common sense.
In Canada it’s starting to become “political” since our morons are egged on by the morons down south.
It’s so exhausting, they treat it like a sport, it’s not about making anyone’s lives better it’s all just about their team winning
It’s people creating their own victories because they’re lacking their own.
Love your username, btw!
Hello I’m a trans person from the UK here to tell you this is sadly not the case at all.
Outside the US this no longer has to be political, is probably more what it really is.
Well, unfortunately we have more than our share of the brainwashed here…
Politics used to be something people engaged in. Now politics is the core to a lot of people’s identities, which means disagreement or debate is perceived as a personal attack and people will embrace a tremendous amount of cognitive dissonance to avoid being wrong.
I despite this “trend” of considering just simple opinions and basic statements as “political”. It’s been watered down and turned into a meaningless tag.
Average US American : “Outsider America… You mean, the Moon?”
The entire middle east has entered the chat
Most of Asia enters the chat with abysmal LGBTQ+ rights.
All of human civilizations outside this recent small blip in history in the developed western world.
Aye, I wonder if cavemen cared what some minority in the tribe might be doing or just shrugged their shoulders about it. Is it human nature to find it hard to accept? Oh weren’t the Romans ok with it, that was a while ago.
FOSS is an active political statement!
Was just coming here to say that. The entire Ethos of Open Source is basically the people owning the digital means of production. So some people really not grasp that?
So some people really not grasp that?
Actually, yes, the original FOSS movement had more right-libertarian roots than anything to the left, although nowadays some might see it as “common ground”.
The politics of folks like RMS (personal issues aside) were far above average, but the Free Software Movement was very steeped in liberalism from its onset, and that explains many of of its present shortcomings. Its biggest failing was to believe that Free Software would ultimately win on its merits. In the early days this was understandable, when free software was often playing catch-up to replicate the functionality of established commercial offerings. When the GNU project was just a C compiler you could install on proprietary UNIX systems to dick around with.
Today though, Free Software is more often than not superior to commercially available offerings, with the exception of some niche industrial segments. But still, Free Software adoption by end users remains incredibly marginal. No matter how many merits Free Software stacks in its favor, the “Year of Linux on the Desktop” never comes. We are still drowning in proprietary iOS and Android phones. The overwhelming majority of PCs still ship with Windows. All of it deliberately engineered to become E-waste in a couple of years.
Folks, this won’t change unless we take over the factories where these PCs and phones are manufactured.
Hmmm. Ad machine maybe. For profit has bigger advertisement budgets than donation based.
Ideology runs this way unfortunately
Sadly, there’s an entire generation of libertarian anti-GPL “open source” developers that think the preservation of free software goes too far.
… What? I may be dumb. I don’t see how libertarianism is compatible with being anti FOSS.
The idea is that for code to truly be free, you should be able to make it proprietary. If you can’t do that, then it isn’t really free. That’s how I understand the idea anyway
But that’s not being anti, just accepting the possibility of it. Like i consider myself a libertarian and if you wanna make it close source, ok, I may dislike it but I won’t regulate against it. But being anti would imply I would go out of my way to censor your ability to do close source.
It’s a GPL license thing. If you make a derivative work of GPL code, you’re NOT free to do what you want with it. This is where the 'anti come from.
There are two parts to this. On one side, you have the “please follow the GPL if you’re using GPL code” – which is really just asking someone to honor a contract, more or less.
Then you have people like RMS, who believe that there should not be such a thing as proprietary software. They don’t care if you aren’t using the GPL – no software should be proprietary, period.
Ah. Well I’m pro theft so just use it and close it if you want and pray for the best! Hide the evidence to not get sued.
This fact eludes some folks.
“Wait, FOSS is political?”
“Always has been.”
Linus gives exactly zero fucks about saying exactly what’s on his mind. And it’s almost always massively based. He’s always been great about that, we don’t deserve such a great mind.
Remember the time with the anti vaxxer, man was firing with all cylinders
Seriously, we are super blessed to have him.
Linus has always been political and principled, I mean he chose the GPL for a reason! Glad to see him state all of this outright though, it only makes me respect him more.
I could have sworn I saw him saying years and years ago that he probably wouldn’t go GPL if he went back and did it over. I thought it was strange at the time.
Holy shit a based Linus is not what I expected to see today. Makes me prefer Linux even more than I already did.
What would you use for a synonym for based? I keep seeing that used. I always thought it was just some alt-right meme bullshit, but I’m learning I was wrong. I still don’t get the use. My mind always thinks “based on what?”
“Based” is typically used to describe someone who says/does something without caring if they’ll be judged for it. Most commonly, it’s shorthand for “That’s a controversial opinion and you are bold for saying it, but I agree with you.” It turns the previous sentence into an adjective, which is a little weird but it makes sense eventually.
So if I had to choose a single word as a synonym, I would say “Bold”.
Bold, all right, yes. That works for me. It’s really been hurting my head reading “based” and not being able to make sense of it. Thank you! Seriously.
Yeah idunno, based can mean completely different things context-wise
Hard fisagree. Linux isn’t political. Everyone has an opinion, it’s obvious Linus would too. But I am pretty happy that his opinion is one I personally agree with. Linux can be uaed by anyone though, and nothing stops far right activists (terrorists) from making a distro, which would still be Linux. There’s a heavily religious distro too, but that doesn’t make Linux as a whole religious.
Does that really make it totally apolitical though?. Like obviously it’s not inherently attached to a wide reaching political ideology, but it still is political in the same way that any free software is kind of political.
IMO the GPL and similar licences are inherently political, and Linus very intentionally chose to release the Linux kernel under the GPL licence rather than under BSD or a proprietary licence.
The very concept of free software and open contribution is political. That as a thing doesn’t necessarily exist within every political framework or culture. But that’s the nature of politics, ultimately in some way basically everything can have a political framing, and since politics are essentially “opinions on the way things should be” it’s ultimately inescapable.
Everything can have a political framing, but that’s not the same as saying that everything is political.
Only “opinions on the way things should be” are political, and not everything is an opinion.
Linux is not an opinion, even if you can have an opinion about the role of Linux in society, or about the intent in its creation. You can even say the creation of Linux might have been politically motivated, or that its license was designed with a political purpose (like all licenses are, including the most restrictive and non-free), but that’s not the same as saying that Linux on itself is political.
Personally I disagree but that’s ok, we can’t all see it the same way :)
I don’t think we get to use cold reason to determine if something is political or not, just like a dictionary doesn’t control the meaning of a word, nor does a small group of ants decide what the colony does next. If Linus came out as a right wing extremist, it wouldn’t matter how apolitical the linux source code is, people would decide to distance themselves from him and everything he represents. Something is political the moment a society perceives it as relevant to their politics.
There’s a heavily religious distro too, but that doesn’t make Linux as a whole religious.
More than one! There’s Ubuntu Christian Edition (if I had to guess, that’s probably the most popular one), Computers4Christians, there used to be Jesux (using the Christian Software Public License), Jewbuntu, Bodhi Linux, and (jokingly, but real) Kubuntu Satanic Edition at the very least.
And, while not Linux, I have to mention TempleOS, the open source Christian OS designed by a schizophrenic who claims it was written to God’s specifications. It was written in HolyC and was just so out of place in 2005 when it was released.
None of this matters in the context of your comment. I just wanted to throw it out there because I find the whole thing fascinating.
IIRC templeos is not open source. But I didn’t know there were more
I had to go look it up to make sure I was remembering right. Wikipedia says it was released as public domain under the open source model.
The whole thing would be incredibly hilarious if it weren’t for mental illness, much like my life.
That’s interesting, I thought the reason why it can’t be messed with and improved for daily use is that it’s closed source and therefore can’t be updated. But guess I was wrong fair enough.
deleted by creator
average based Linus take.
Linus is stellar example of “good is not nice.”
He will rake you over the coals because he cares about quality and expects better from everyone.
Good can be nice. This is just him personally and shouldn’t be seen as a guideline on how to be good.
I agree! Most good people are nice, it is complemntary after all.
At the same time, without getting trite, being nice does not make people automatically good, and is often a performance to get away with vile shit.
To paraphrase another idiom, people who are easily offended should be offended more often. People often dismiss others because they are not “nice” AKA not submissive or servile to their opinions or demands. Oh, this person is “mean” so I get to talk shit about them or ignore them.
Yeah, not every good person is a good role model, one can always act better than the people they admire.
I half agree with his gun regulation stance. While ideally there would be more caution given to who owns guns that is unfortunately not the world americans have been living in the last 80 years or so. The fascists have guns, lots of them, and I’m not giving mine up while they have them.
Everything else he said is 100% based.
Well, yeah, fascists having guns is a “randomly giving guns to any moron with a pulse” problem.
When you’re in power, the fascists are the “morons with a pulse” who don’t get guns, but when they’re in power, YOU’RE the moron with a pulse who loses your ability to defend yourself. The point is to remove the ability of the authorities to decide who gets the right to own weapons, because it can easily be turned against you. Besides, morons obtain weapons illegally all the time. Firearms ownership is illegal in my country (except for licensed use like hunting) but we still have problems with gun violence because of weapons trafficking.
I do think it is funny that there is significant overlap between the ACAB crowd and those that would want to disarm (or at least heavily restrict) the average Joe so only police have access to modern firearms
Yeah the gun law regulators generally ignore the fact that everyone and their grandma already has guns. And those with guns are not willing to do trade in programs.
I’d like to see better psych eval and requiring to re-license every so often. That should start steering the country in the right direction. Of course I don’t see this happening any time soon.
The US has no chance of passing anything around licensing of firearms in the short term. We can only hope that Gen Z votes all the gun nuts out of office.
They can vote against the ammosexuals all they want. Many politicians get money from firearms companies, though, on both sides of the fence, and they all know which side their bread is buttered on.
Not much of that matters if you can’t get 2/3 of the states to get in line with your re-write and we can’t get 2/3 of the people to agree on anything. Also, there is a wide swath of opinion between what you call “gun nuts” and what other people call “common sense laws.” Very few people are arguing that “any moron with a pulse” should have a gun.
I agree with you 100%.
I think fascists is going too far… they’re crazy and dumb, that’s it.
They attempted a violent coup. They’re crazy, dumb, and dangerous
Nah, they’re fascists. Maybe not every republican, but a solid 70% or so of them. And a decent chunk of democrats too.
This is one of the reasons why I respect him so much.
Linus delivering the well-deserved beatdown as always.
Now with 300% more diplomacy!
deleted by creator
“Commies? In MY computer?” More likely than you think.
BSD, Lunix, Debian and Mandrake are all versions of an illegal hacker operation system, invented by a Soviet computer hacker named Linyos Torovoltos, before the Russians lost the Cold War. It is based on a program called " xenix", which was written by Microsoft for the US government. These programs are used by hackers to break into other people’s computer systems to steal credit card numbers. They may also be used to break into people’s stereos to steal their music, using the “mp3” program. Torovoltos is a notorious hacker, responsible for writing many hacker programs, such as “telnet”, which is used by hackers to connect to machines on the internet without using a telephone.
I believe our best american hacker “4Chan” is our best bet against this Torovolts guy.
You should only support gun regulation if it applies to cops as well.
Agreed. They are not above the law, they simply enforce it. If you allow one group of people arbitrary monopoly on violence, then you have an imbalanced system.
I think you’re getting downvoted by both police supporters and police abolitionists lol