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Why Politicizing Open Source is a Terrible Idea

posted by chromas on Wednesday September 12 2018, @03:41PM   Printer-friendly
from the No-sir,-I-don't-like-it dept.

MrPlow writes:

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/

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by insanumingenium on Wednesday September 12 2018, @10:57PM (1 child)

    by insanumingenium (4824) on Wednesday September 12 2018, @10:57PM (#733891) Journal

    While we are at it, is there a compelling argument for using the word deplatforming as opposed to just calling a spade a spade and leaving it at censorship?

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  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 12 2018, @11:43PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 12 2018, @11:43PM (#733905)

    Yes because it's a very specific form of censorship. [marcuse.org]

    Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left. As to the scope of this tolerance and intolerance: ... it would extend to the stage of action as well as of discussion and propaganda, of deed as well as of word.

    Withdrawal of tolerance from regressive movements before they can become active; intolerance even toward thought, opinion, and word, and finally, intolerance in the opposite direction, that is, toward the self-styled conservatives, to the political Right--these anti-democratic notions respond to the actual development of the democratic society which has destroyed the basis for universal tolerance.

    Marcuse knew that falsely attacking conservatives and liberals as "fascists" was what brought actual fascists to power. This scrappy essay was as inexcusable when first written as it remains now, disguising authoritarianism as tolerance and hoping nobody would notice. Marxist in denial [quadrant.org.au] he was not.