I'm in Texas. A LOT of Californians disagree with some of the laws that Texas has passed. How long will it be until my hard drive gets reformatted by some protestor in San Francisco who localizes my IP address?
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.
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.
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"
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.
This is nothing new: this is a problem which has always existed.
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."
No, at the rate things are going, OSS will not be as you describe.
IP-based geolocation is garbage but there aren't many Russian/Belarusian-attributed IPs in the US so the intersection of those with people using node-ipc was empty, and the US Government couldn't be pressured to investigate/enforce.
NodeJS' culture is very much "move fast and break things", and "all software is political". Look at the TSC drama. Leftpad.js.
This isn't an ecosystem that you want to build and maintain a product on.
I mean a framework or library with a global audience shouldn't push american politics. Vue, React, Preact, Nodejs, Ember (had a whole page and made documentation unavailable for some time), Go lang, ExpressJS (still has the banner up), Typescript, a lot of python projects etc etc. The list can be made very long.
I try to avoid any framework and library that pushes political agendas onto their sites because that signals what type of people are in charge of them. They must think that their political views are so important it must infiltrate every aspect of life even if the thing has nothing to do with it. Unfortunately, there is such a large amount of them doing this it's practically impossible to avoid it.
The funny thing is, now when Russia has invaded Ukraine there is no banners on the same websites so it's obvious some lives matters more than others in their views..
pretty sure they made sense to quite a few people outside the US:
https://tribunemag.co.uk/2020/06/frances-black-lives-matter-...
https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2020/06/22/...
The UK as an example had something like 6 people killed that year when protests arrived. Most of which wasn't black if I remember correctly. Do you really think it's comparable to the issues that exists in the US?
My critique is still valid tho, doesn't ukrainian lives matter? Why are there no banners for them?
Supporting one issue publicly does not mean you think it's more important than every issue you don't support publicly.
That was literally the whole thing of "inclusive language" right? It wasn't about what the words actually mean, just how people felt about them. If they felt the word was discriminatory, then it should be fixed.
If you're going to throw up banners on every JS site for one cause and not another, you're saying very loudly you don't care as much about the other. You, under the logic of "discriminatory language" even be engaging in discrimination.
There is a big difference with war and people being systematically killed and a potential unjust legal system. War is obviously many times worse in every aspect and I think it's hilarious on what these people publicly support and what they don't.
It's hypocritical, unfair which makes it a big irony since that was what the BLM movement was all about (unfair treatment).
It isn't limited to JS frameworks. I remember seeing banners on Kubernetes docs too.
It's the arrogant attitude that "if you aren't for me, then you're against me". That their views are so righteous, that the only people who could possibly object are bad actors.
I think you're showing your hand, I am arguing for treating everyone the same and that the people in charge of these sites appears to care more about American lives than Ukrainian ones.
If you're gonna have banners, then having them for ukraine is an obvious choice for me. OR.. maybe you could decide not to involve politics into tech with a global audience at all and skip all this bullshit.
I’ve never worked a place that would auto-magically roll out things like windows or chrome updates without having them vetted first. If you can’t trust those, then you certainly can’t trust some random NPM package, and if your organisation doesn’t have a strategy for how you handle something that unsafe then you really need to step up your professionalism.
I personally consider NPM packages to be sort or nice, in the very cynical way, that the community tends to beta test updates for you much faster than with any other dependency system.
The trite ways to say it (ie: "we live in a society" or "actions have consequences") don't really capture the full complexity of human interaction but do somewhat describe the notion that everything you do as an individual affects and is affected by everything everyone else does. Being "political" really means just believing that those effects are too significant to ignore.
Political action is shaping my environment to my desire. Via compromise or war perhaps. What is your definition of it that it applies to everything?
I saw this as a JS developer who scarily runs npm installs multiple times a day.
The NodeJS community somehow tends to attract the worst kind of people.
Download all dependencies and freeze them, fork the dependencies and groom your fork or have dependantbot or depfu managing your dependencies for you and keep a delay between merging the PRs, have manual review, etc..
You shouldn't be pulling stuff from internet and pushing to production without take a look into that anyway...
But, in at least one case—the peacenotwar module in the node-ipc package—an update sabotages npm developers with code intended to wipe data stored in Russia and Belarus. In a March 16 blog post on the malicious code, Liran Tal at Snyk said, “This security incident involves destructive acts of corrupting files on disk by one maintainer and their attempts to hide and restate that deliberate sabotage in different forms.”
This has nothing to do with pace of development, or even the political views of the developers. It has to do with inserting what is essentially malware into open source packages that affect users based on geo-location.
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.” - C.S. Lewis
Thankfully the field of software development has stagnated to the point that there really hasn't been any significant improvements to actual non-web software in about 15 years, so I'm looking forward to the brand new world with a stack of ancient machines, a bunch of boxes of capacitors, and a few hard drives' worth of abandonware, because frankly, fuck that noise THE AMISH WERE RIGHT.
Either way, I can't see anybody putting "must add a BLM banner to their website" to the licensing conditions of their FOSS code.
Anybody who legitimately makes a "liberals only" stand in their license will get forked and their usage will drop off.
Being silent about shitty behavior is the same as condoning it, don't you know? Just because you don't like the playbook doesn't mean it doesn't work.
>Anybody who legitimately makes a "liberals only" stand in their license will get forked and their usage will drop off.
Considering that the developer just pulled a "no russians" stand with their software...
my point is that it doesn't matter. Condemn or not, regardless you can still fork earlier versions. Materially, it's not a threat to you.
> Considering that the developer just pulled a "no russians" stand with their software...
Yeah and look at how much shit they're catching for it. People are forking and freezing earlier versions, he's getting raked through the coals, etc. Is this really the outcome conservatives are afraid of?
Kind of crappy whataboutism there don't you think? What if I'm a VPN user and my hard drive was wiped?
>Conservatives
What does this have to do with conservatives?
Yeah it obviously sucks to be a victim of this behaviour, but the developer is being roundly condemned by everybody. I thought you were worried about this type of behaviour being encouraged by progressives?
> What does this have to do with conservatives?
Just a guess, it's usually conservatives that hand-wring this much about "woke" people.
> Why do you have to be beholden 3rd party developers and the pace they work at?
You don't "have to", you only are beholden to them if you use their software.
My point is analogy is not a valid tool of criticism when talking about policies, because their inputs and outcomes are not simple bool -> bool functions.
Would you be satisfied with 1000000 years on average as the answer?
Yeah, I can do some things some people can't, but I can't do some people can. You can make a reasonable argument that everything is politics, but it is slippery slope, because tomorrow I might find myself with files deleted, because I did not read fine print with vegan inclinations of the developer and his stance on this subject.
It can bad really fast. It is already bad. Previously dumb pipes are being coerced to be 'smarter' and it is breaking the basic foundations of society. It is a privilege to live in a society. I think it would help if some naive activist did not undermine its foundations.