SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
In our increasingly politicized world, it has become popular to chant "all software is political." Software builds the systems that free or constrain us, the thinking goes, and so we should withhold it from bad people. This is the thinking that has led Microsoft employees and others to decry contracts tech companies have with ICE (US Department of Homeland Security Immigration and Customs Enforcement), insisting that their software only be sold to people they like.
[...] Over the years we as an open source community have experimented with all sorts of stupid ideas, like efforts to block anyone from using code for commercial purposes unless they pay. Each time, we've realized that as good a goal as it is for developers to get paid, for example, the destruction caused by closing off the code to uses we don't like ends up ruining the foundations upon which open source rests.
This is dramatically more important, however, when it comes to attempts to politicize open source software.
As developer Chris Cordle stated, "Nobody wins" and the "whole idea [undergirding open source] dies" ... "if an author arbitrarily picks and chooses who can and can't use it based on whoever Twittersphere is mad at this week." It doesn't matter if there is tremendous cause for that anger. Open source dies when it becomes politicized.
Source: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/why-politicizing-open-source-is-a-terrible-idea/
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 12 2018, @08:38PM (2 children)
nothing good comes from engaging in politics.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday September 12 2018, @10:24PM (1 child)
Politics is the system by which we get things done without killing each other, paraphrasing Heinlein. (Podkayne of Mars IIRC)
Open source licenses are *already* political. Freedom is politics. How else?
This sig for rent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 13 2018, @04:59AM
In fact, saying that nothing good comes of politics is just a strategy of the alt-right to forward their extreme rightist positions, whether flat out white male supremacy, or rabid mad-dog libertarianism, as if they were not politics. But, they are. So, there. I am going to ram politics down your fucking throat, you deplorable AC! Stand, and Deliver, you scumfaced son of a Republican Senator! Come back here, you cowardly underside of a dead sheep floating in the storm surge of Florence! Hold still, you cretin of low status and questionable hygiene! Matt Heimbuck died for your sins. Ted Cruz is your fault. ESR is the spawn of your ignorance, and you still do not see it? Oh, how can it be, AC, that you are so "neutral", when everyone, and I do mean "everyone", knows where you will come down. Fucking Nazi. Bruce Perens syncophant!