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Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

You pretty much summarise what is wrong with the title.

It is not "Protestware" that harms open source. It is politics and ideology harms open source.

And the rate things are going may be Open Source will not only be split between permissive and copyleft, but progressive and libreRight.

Edit: Now I remember Douglas Crockford's "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil." license. I wonder if there are still any open source that uses it.

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> It is politics and ideology harms open source.

The movement towards free and open source software was created in no small part do to activists with a very strong ideology. Open source would not exist to the same extent without the ideology espoused by the FSF. The problem is that abandoning a key tenant of the free software movement, neutrality towards different uses (part of freedom 0 of the free software definition), does far more harm than good and contravenes FLOSS ideology.

> The movement towards free and open source software was created in no small part do to activists with a very strong ideology

They did have a strong ideology and they worked towards building the world they wished to see. Not by breaking existing things to virtue signal their support for "the current thing"

And then all of the effort spent on "building the world they wished to see" gets used to also build a world that goes against everything they wished, against their ideology. Due to openness of their efforts they also don't have an option on influencing that, unlike commercial products who can simply stop doing business with precise companies/people/territories. What if the very idea of open source gets used against itself? What would you advise those people to do? Shut up about "the current thing"?

Yeah, but that means the problem is in fact protestware and not "ideology" in some vague sense.

yeah it's kind of ironic to call for "no politics" in a movement that is essentially based in digital anarchism.

Thanks. Brilliant response I will save ( or Steal it ) it next time the conversation comes up.... which is increasingly common in Open Source.

> The movement towards free and open source software was created in no small part do to activists with a very strong ideology.

This is true, and an argument that keeps getting repeated, but isn't the same issue. The politics of open source software are about software. How it's made and how it's used.

The modern push is about injecting outside ideology into software (and everywhere else). Bringing geo, gender, and racial politics into software is a whole lot different than software politics in software.

Either you or I misread GP, because I don't see any disagreement. GP points out that FLOSS movement was and is inclusive by design, while this modern development is exclusive by design against people who disagree with the person's opinions.

Yep, not disagreeing with them at all on their overall point. I just see this "FLOSS is inherently political" line floated a lot, and wanted to point out that it's a false equivalence. I probably could have made that clearer.

That's exactly what I would write here. FLOSS is basically a political movement against the software industry since 1960...

"protestware" is just malware. The punchline is: do you understand your supply chain? Can you audit your software? Do you have security controls for potentially hostile packages?

This is nothing new: this is a problem which has always existed.

you can't really escape politics and ideology. What you can do, is to not be petty with your public contributions. As the parent example states, while somebody /could/ embed malware into their software that targets Texans, this falls under the pre-existing social doctrine of a "dick move". These things exist on a scale from "exclude government/corporate entities from your software license" to "try to fuck up random people's hard drives" and vary widely in terms of validity.

I think the main problem is that we are increasingly operating with different definitions of "dick move."

To many people, the idea that a small business owner would have their store burned to the ground because someone else in their town (or on the other side of their country) did something bad, is a massive dick move. Yet, this happened numerous times during the summer of BLM in 2020 and it was widely defended with things like, "everything is political" and "not to take a side is to take a side" and "you're either with us or you're against us" and "mostly peaceful protests." There was even a famous "looting is reparations" in articles and at least one book called "In Defense of Looting."

If anybody is defending burning down small businesses as part of BLM, I can promise you they're in the vast minority.

It isn't ideology, it's malware for political purposes.

https://xkcd.com/605/

No, at the rate things are going, OSS will not be as you describe.

Thanks for the perspective and the laugh. It's very easy to see a trend that isn't there in an aberration.

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