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Comment by porphyra | Hacker News Reader

I really like their software concept, I saw the link you posted in the past and it disturbs me. I wish they would address the elephant in the room.

Also there is this (see below) with a pic of a past US president. That along with what you posted seems to me they are doubling down. Too much of a coincidence to me.

https://suckless.org/conferences/2019/

> Also there is this (see below) with a pic of a past US president.

While I don't like suckless for various reasons, this seems to be a coincidence because the presenter used images of multiple US presidents, not just one in the thumbnail. You can verify it by the actual video linked from the thumbnail.

Yeah but someone decided to use that thumbnail.

This is a valid take and I actually took efforts to locate the position of the thumbnail in the video (their server is somehow slow to reach from my country, so...). It's around 14:50 and right before the Q&A.

I'm not very sure if a better (in terms of avoiding controversy) thumbnail is possible; the presentation is about a video "editor" and the only visually meaningful frames are photos of two presidents and a mix of them, so picking any of them would be problematic. To be honest why do you use those photos in the presentation after all? I do get that organizers have zero consideration about inappropriate presentations, and that's one of the reasons I don't like suckless in general.

The presenter is Mattias Andrée and is allegedly an active Neo Nazi in Stockholm according to a public post from Swedish Antifa in Swedish (use Google Translate). Posting from a throwaway for obvious reasons.

This being said, he is the only Neo Nazi I know of in the Suckless community and I know of more than a handful of Anarchists. So my takeaway has always been that maybe they attract extremists more than that they have some sort of weird Nazi bent and appeal.

My personal stance is that the software is fine and that using it is fine. The community lacks a spokesperson to defend itself due to its fairly decentralized nature. So there is really no they that you can ask for a statement. Frankly the fact that these accusations surface all the time is beginning to border on being slanderous as I am sure other communities have their hidden Nazis as well.

Suckless seem to genuinely believe in older ideals of "code speaks" and "keep politics out" when you look at their behavior. Given how incredibly marginal their influence and user base is, do we really need to go over them with a fine comb or can we perhaps safely leave them alone?

So the "relationship between suckless and nazism" is:

- They picked an edgy name for an email server

- They went on a torchlit hike [0] once

- One of their members has dumb/conservative opinions on history (and vaccines too [1], unfortunately)

Is that it? Is there anything of substance?

LibreSSL's logo is a fish dressed like Che Guevara. FOSS is thick with adoration of communism and its murderous dictators. Plenty of developers who didn't live under communism have hammer-and-sickle Unicode in their Twitter bios. I don't like it, but I choose to ignore it. I don't begrudge Germans who are mad about the bombing of Dresden. I don't need to agree with the total cosmology of every individual FOSS maintainer, and so long as this standard is applied inconsistently I oppose it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gro%C3%9Fer_Zapfenstreich

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/11/linus_torvalds_vaccin...

> One of their members has dumb/conservative opinions on history (and vaccines too [1], unfortunately)

Not sure if that vaccine stuff has any serious connection to suckless? I can see a few mailing list posts in a quick check, but no commits.

Suckless doesn't really have "members" anyway, it's just random people occasionally working on some code and occasionally a few people get together. Overall, it's not even very active.

Guess what, if you do a survey off all GNOME, Linux kernel, GNU, HN commenters, etc. you will find some people with unsavoury opinions. Does that mean all of GNOME are now Nazis? Or all of HN?

It's a single quasseldroid developer who started and keeps harping on about this as nauseam. For some reason, people keep taking it at face value. It has exactly the same intellectual and moral value as all that "no no, the Democrats and leftists are the REAL Nazis!!!" nonsense.

I appreciate WWII era german guns and their military inventions, whilst still condemn Nazism.

Separate art from the artist. Social justice warriors from anyside need to be shammed because all they do is take justice out of the hands of the legal justice system that we all agreed and put limits on, into their own hands and entirely based on subjectivist emotions and not much objectivity.

Hate Nazi lunatics? Go ahead and pass an amendment to the constitution that Nazi symbols are prohibited speech. That's democracy.

I loathe the post-modern social justice of any kind, from any person, from any side.

You can blend communism under democratic socialism without falling down to the side of Stalinism. Heck, even Jugoslavia was pretty open for the Marxist standards. They had media and computers from both sides of the Iron Courtain. Legally.

You can't do the same with nazism. What could the Germans do, plan another shoa for Jews under a democratic referendum?

They could segregate Jews into ghettos by democratic referendum.

Not without clashing with zillions of national and international laws against that.

Probably, but why wouldn't it count as democratic nazism?

Per the linked twitter thread:

"Each one individually — sure, I can excuse that. All at once, though? That's not a coincidence anymore, that's a pattern."

https://twitter.com/kuschku/status/1450942799529091073

(also, with "adoration of communism and its murderous dictators" you belie your own biases and agenda. Just because SOME asshole dictators were ostensibly heads of communist states, doesn't automagically translate to "lol communism bad amirite". but you knew that already.)

Eurocommunism for example, it clashed against Stalinism fore sure.

Communism in prewar Europe was often explicitly Stalinist, such as the original "antifa":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifaschistische_Aktion

>Under the leadership of Ernst Thälmann, the KPD became a Stalinist party that was fiercely loyal to the Soviet government. Since 1928, the KPD was largely controlled and funded by the Soviet government through the Comintern.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Civil_War#Republicans_...

>It is important to note that there was infighting between the Republican factions, and that the Communists following Stalinism declared the POUM, the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification, (an anti-Stalinist communist party) to be an illegal organization, along with the Anarchists. The Stalinists betrayed and committed mass atrocities on the other Republican factions, such as torture and mass executions. George Orwell would record this in his Homage to Catalonia as well as write Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm to criticize Stalinism.

None of this is relevant to FOSS. I'd rather leave politics out whenever possible. So long as Suckless isn't worse than what's been alleged, I'm OK letting them slide.

I'm Basque (here politic debates were on every TV channel) and my family was sided with the CNT. Please, don´t lecture me on bullshit I know better than you by a huge margin.

Also, as I said, you know nil on Eurocommunism, which opposed Stalinism.

I didn't realize "Eurocommunism" was a proper noun referring to a more recent time period, and not a general reference to communism in Europe. I had never heard it before. My apologies.

It was a distinct ideology closer to a social democracy than a totalitarian dictatorship. Jugoslavia still was a dictatorship, but it they didn't collapse down Jugo under ethnic wars, today it would be something like China but far more open and progressive. State Communism, yes, but without hurting personal freedoms.

Thanks for sticking around and explaining despite my error. Had no idea this movement even existed. The Wikipedia article was quite interesting.

Classic line.

> I don't need to agree with the total cosmology of every individual FOSS maintainer.

Well, sure. But since we're here, talking about neonazis, and we disagree with neonazism (right, deepdiver?), I'll pass on their software.

Let me rephrase it.

I wont politically check every author of every software i use, but since the internet randomly revealed to me this group of neonazis write that software, I won't use it.

I think the point is they they're not neonazis. I don't want to support neonazis in anyway, including using their software.

That said I've used their tools and I'm not a fan. It's far to minimalistic for me.

>Well, sure. But since we're here, talking about neonazis

You're begging the question. They're edgy conservatives, clearly. Neo-Nazis? Show me. I object to a blinkered political hypersensitivity that permits on the one hand violent, authoritarian tendencies if you're far enough left, and bans on the other hand anyone right of Bill Clinton. I think it's unhealthy for the FOSS community and tech as a whole.

>and we disagree with neonazism (right, deepdiver?)

And we don't beat our wives. Right, gtsop?

> They're edgy conservatives, clearly. Neo-Nazis? Show me

Everything was in the links, no need to re-iterate.

> And we don't beat our wives. Right, gtsop?

I don't, can't speak for others. Dodging a question with another one won't cut it though. Seems like it's extremely hard for you to even suggest neonazism is remotely bad. First you see nothing of substance to suckless' activity and then you make references of the far left to somehow balance out the existence of neonazis. I wonder what your arguments would be was it not for the for the far left existing.

Your posturing as commissar, judge, and high inquisitor is as comical as it is repulsive. It is exactly why I commented in the first place, and a type of bad behavior I will always push against. Demonstrating that it is possible to disagree with and even ignore rhetoric like yours is important to the health of an open society.

I have to give it to you, your tactics are great. You keep reframing the conversation to plant a convinient enemy against you, gifting your arguments a false sense of ethical superiority. E.g: you frame me as a commissar while you talk of an healthy open society (making it look like you have the moral high ground), however i never possed as a commissar and the only instance of your "open society" talk was when you renamed "hitler's house name" to "edgy" and saw nothing wrong.

Disagreeing and conversing is a necessity to humankind. You say my rhetoric is bad, I say yours is, let history decide.

Nazi symbols are not prohibited speech, at least in the US. All game.

Even ACLU defended KKK's right to speech in the 90's.

I don't align with their ideology just as I don't align with a million other ideologies. I want to protect their right to speech though.

Thank you for sharing this. I was not aware of this connection.

It is a shame - some of their software is really good.

Agreed, thanks for posting. I had been interested in exploring some of their software, but will absolutely look for alternatives now.

Very sad and sometimes confusing to see how the spirit of free/libre software is completely lost on some people.

Cool, so just use their software without donating to the group if you think they're somehow promoting Nazi efforts. Or do you suggest people don't use their software? Do you think if a million people install dwm it'll resurrect Hitler or something?

There's no relation. Period.

Except for all of the extremely obvious evidence given by the grandparents link?

This includes: using Hitler's residence as a hostname, a torchlight walk during a conference (fairly soon after Charlottesville), official dev talk about "cultural Marxism," itself a dog-whistle catchphrase literally invented by the Nazis.

> a torchlight walk during a conference (fairly soon after Charlottesville)

So what? I've done dozens of those over the years, for a variety of reasons, including celebrating ... the end of the Nazi occupation in my own country.

Of all the alleged "Nazi connections" this is the most idiotic and narcissistic one. Yes, it's exceedingly narcissistic and toxic to expect everyone to pay attention to the latest American sensitivities over minor things that are common and innocent in other cultures. Not everyone needs to pay attention to your American bullshit.

> using Hitler's residence as a hostname

Whatever can be said about the others, this one is not true.

One person on the mailing list (FRIGN), who is not "officially" part of suckless afaik (but I could be wrong), had the hostname wolfsschanze in his mail headers. I myself have been subscribed to the suckless ML for many years and checked, and the only messages with this term were sent by him.

Also, FRIGN was the one who made the 'cultural marxism' comment too. He seems to be the common fixture in all these issues.

Talking about cultural marxism makes you a nazi now?

Jeez the bar is really low. We're going to have to heavily revise WW2 to just be a giant Nazi civil war.

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