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Comment by lorealpnis | Hacker News Reader

Could you provide explanation on why GNU is polarizing?

GNU are pretty hard libertarians. I think libertarianism has become a lot less fashionable during the 2010s, and many people I think started to see it as actively deranged over the last 5 years or so, with more moderate liberal ideas of free speech and responsibility to others around you being more mainstream now.

GNU are also very hard on principals. Again, I think society started leaning quite a bit more pragmatic over the past 10 years.

In the tech industry you can see this trend for example GCC to LLVM, LibreOffice to just using Google Docs, GPL to MIT, etc.

Interesting. GNU to me has always seemed socialist if anything. It requires sharing derived code for free.

MIT by contrast lets you do whatever you want, and that seems more like the libertarian approach to me.

> It requires sharing derived code for free.

It requires you share the code with your users/the people you distributed derived works to for no additional cost. You can still charge money for the software, but you can't charge an additional fee for access to the code. You also give them the right to share it how they seem fit, so they could share it (the code, not necessarily trademarked things like names or artwork/assets) for free, share derived software including the code for a free or a fee, or not share any derived work at all.

You can read more here: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html

Both "socialist" and "libertarian" have definitions that not just changes within a country, but basically every country has its own understanding of the terms (just like what people in the US would consider "far-left" is basically "center" politics in many places in Europe).

Labeling something "socialist" or "libertarian" in a diverse place like HN probably harms more than it does good, as everyone will read it differently and have different takeways.

To use entirely different terminology, I think people are just way more laissez-faire about software issues these days. Realistically, most software runs as a service now, and people are generally I think more happy to be more pragmatic rather than idealistic. I think GNU was generally aligned to the mainstream 'tech hacker' outlook in 2002, but it isn't in 2022.

The resistance to surveillance, the kind of 'prepping' mentality of running everything yourself, never using third-party services, and sticking with older working ideas over trying new things, those are much more libertarian than socialist, going off literal definitions of individual liberty over collective society.

> sticking with older working ideas over trying new things

Socialism had plenty of that going around, sticking with older working ideas.[1][2] But I hear you.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trabant_601

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAZ-3102

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/third-party-ideas.en.html

"The Free Software Movement does not endorse Libertarianism".

If you write a list of philosophical ideas that are relevant to you that mentions libertarianism more than other philosophies, and you find that you have to explicitly say you don't endorse libertarianism, then that's a good indication that many people see you as a libertarian.

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